Margins can be tight for spirits producers, and making great liquid isn’t always enough to keep a distillery viable. Beyond experience-driven add-ons such as tours and tastings, some smaller, independent distilleries are expanding their retail offerings—for example, with kits for making cocktails at home, sampler sets, or premium, ready-to-serve cocktails that just need ice.
From the distilleries that are doing it, here are some insights on how it can work.
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Kitting out Consumers to Make Great Drinks
A fast pivot to offering gift sets wasn’t just an add-on for Reid’s Distillery in Toronto—it was a necessity.
Launched in May 2019 by three siblings and their father, they had to let the entire staff go when the pandemic hit. Their young company was in danger. “We were very confident that we would not be making it to one year of business,” says Calvin Reid, head distiller.
In the short term, delivering gin by car helped to keep bottles moving. That expanded into cocktail kits, virtual tastings, and corporate gift-giving packages.
“The cocktail kits were a vehicle,” Reid says, because they helped to move a lot more of their own products than would have been possible otherwise.
That part of the business grew and evolved. Today, the distillery’s location is a one-stop shop for anything you might need to create great gin cocktails. They sell vermouth and Campari, many flavors of Fever-Tree tonic, simple syrup, lemon juice, and dehydrated fruits that they make in-house.
Reid’s Distillery also packages a G&T exploration pack, with four miniature gins and suggested Fever-Tree pairings. There’s also the 12 Days of Gin Advent calendar, including a 50-milliliter serving of gin for each day with a link to a guided tasting. Plus, the distillery offers kits to make classic gin cocktails such as the negroni, bee’s knees, and French 75.
“If we want to encourage people to explore the world of gin, cocktails [are] the way to go about it,” Reid says. “We want to make that as easy as possible.”
Tin City Distillery’s Old Fashioned Cocktail Kit. Photo courtesy of Tin City Distillery
At Tin City Distillery, Mike Blash creates cocktail kits, including one for making an old fashioned. They come from a place of expertise: Before starting the distillery with his partners a decade ago, he spent more than 20 years tending bars in Orange County.
“My goal is to create the kit and provide everything a person would need to create at least a dozen cocktails,” Blash says.
Their old fashioned kit is the top seller, and it comes with a bottle of bourbon (or rye or brandy, if you prefer), a spoon, jigger, glass, instructions, a bag of dehydrated orange wheels, a jar of Angostura-infused sugar cubes, and a small jar of cherries—everything, basically, except the ice.
“Creating these kits is actually one of my favorite things to do at the distillery,” Blash says.
Partnering with Other Craft Producers
Hanson of Sonoma is a family-run distillery that makes vodka and whiskey in the heart of California’s wine country, and they partner with other local producers to create their cocktail kits.
The bloody Mary kit, for example, includes their habanero vodka with a bloody Mary mix from Sonoma Gourmet, a food company that’s also used Hanson’s vodka in a sauce. It’s a symbiotic relationship that can help these smaller producers gain local traction.
“For us, it was finding organic products and people [who] are just doing a good job,” says Alanna Hanson, the distillery’s marketing director. They also sell a vodka-and-chocolate pairing kit that features Kollar Chocolates, an artisanal chocolate shop in the Napa Valley.
“We look at our tasting room as an educational facility,” Hanson says. Making cocktails accessible and approachable is a priority. “We’ll give [guests] five different recipe cards, and we really push the kits as a way to give people all of the tools to leave the distillery … being able to make their favorite cocktail that they had that day.”
At Griffo Distillery in Petaluma, California, tasting room manager Kat Prescott says she looks for women-owned brands when selecting cocktail ingredients for the curated recipes.
FloraLuna Apothecary is a particular favorite. Also based in Petaluma, FloraLuna makes bitters and syrups—including a cherry-pistachio syrup that Prescott particularly loves in a Hemingway daquiri–inspired cocktail that the team named Haddie’s Revenge.
“Her syrups are really, really good and rich in flavor, but without being super-super sweet,” Prescott says.
Another favorite of hers is El Guapo, based in New Orleans. “They make a sweet-potato syrup, which sounds bizarre, but it’s delicious in an old fashioned,” she says.
Griffo has a seasonal cocktail program. Their spirits club offers members an allocation each quarter, and Prescott assembles combinations that allow recipients to make a few different cocktails. She says that it’s a great way to introduce people to high-quality ingredients that they can use in their home bars.
Helping to cultivate new cocktail enthusiasts is a passion for the team, she says. “Our whole bar staff gets really excited when people want to do it on their own.”
She adds that there’s also a big seasonal uptick for cocktail kits around the holidays.
Ready-Made Cocktails to Take Home
While canned, ready-to-drink cocktails have been filling up store shelves and gaining market share, some independent distilleries have instead focused on larger-format, higher-ABV, ready-to-serve concoctions—touted as ideal for sharing at parties or any occasion that calls for a high-quality cocktail, but without the fuss of making it from scratch.
Hanson of Sonoma packages pre-batched cocktails in such a format. Because they use fresh juices in many of them, the shelf life is about 60 to 90 days. They sell them online, too, but the pre-batched cocktails are particularly popular with distillery visitors. “When shipping … we do package it in a way that [the cocktail] stays cold,” Hanson says.
Photo courtesy of Keeper’s Heart Distillery.
In Minneapolis, Keeper’s Heart Distillery bottles a ready-to-serve old fashioned at 35 percent ABV. As the most popular drink at their bar, it was the obvious choice for their foray into the premium RTD market. “When we looked at what was selling the best in our lounge, it was the old fashioned, hands down,” says Kate Douglas, distiller at Keeper’s Heart. “And it’s a relatively easy product to make in bulk and then package.”
The team worked with their head bartender to make sure the finished product was as similar as possible to the version served in the brand’s whiskey lounge. The bottled version uses the same sugar and bitters as behind the bar, and the team refined the recipe slightly after an initial release, increasing the proof. “Once you have it on a rock, it’s going to dilute a little bit,” Douglas says. She adds that calculating the exact proof is more difficult for RTDs.
“When you start adding sugar and bitters, all of that can kind of obscure what the equipment can read,” Douglas says. “It’s a little extra work to make sure that everything is accurate, but it’s worth it.”
She recommends garnishing the old fashioned with a twist of orange. She adds that the product creates a sales opportunity when people visit the distillery—especially for people who are more likely to enjoy a cocktail than to drink neat bourbon at home. “My mom is one of those people,” she says.
Ready-to-serve drinks and kits are providing distillers with additional retail revenue that is a great boost year-round, but especially during the winter holidays.
“You can buy a product so many times, and it’s about how to re-engage those customers over and over in new and different ways,” Hanson says. “And get them to then share it!”
