British Craft Spirits: The New Wave

Craft is one of the most used words in modern spirits, and one of the least defined. It has no legal definition in the UK, the EU or the United States. The term is unregulated in labelling and advertising, so any producer can print it on a bottle, whatever the scale behind it.

In practice, craft points to a set of expectations rather than a rule. It suggests independent ownership, small-scale production, hands-on methods and a distiller who stays close to the liquid. None of that is guaranteed by the word alone. A large company can use it, and a genuinely small producer can leave it off.

Some trade bodies have written their own standards. The American Craft Spirits Association ties the term to transparency about ingredients, distilling location and process. Others cap annual output at a set number of cases. These definitions are voluntary. In Britain, no such line is drawn in law, which is why the honest way to read craft is as a prompt to ask questions, not as a badge that answers them.

The ambiguity is not an accident. The industry has resisted a binding legal definition, on the grounds that any fixed line would exclude producers who work in good faith but sit on the wrong side of an arbitrary cut-off. That leaves the word doing marketing work as often as descriptive work. On a supermarket shelf, craft can signal a genuinely small operation, or a marketing department reaching for the same appeal. The label alone will not tell you which.

The modern British craft movement began with gin. For most of the twentieth century, distilling in Britain was the preserve of large houses. Small producers were effectively locked out, and London, once the centre of the gin trade, had no working copper pot gin distillery for generations.

That changed in 2009. Sipsmith opened in Hammersmith, west London, on 14 May that year, the first traditional copper pot distillery in the capital for close to 200 years. Its still, a 300-litre copper pot named Prudence, was a fraction of the size used by the established industry. The opening is widely treated as the starting point of the British craft gin revival.

What followed was a wave of new gin brands. Gin suited the moment. It needs no ageing, so a new distillery can sell its first bottles within weeks rather than years, and its botanical recipe gives a small producer room to make something recognisably its own. Within a decade, gin had gone from a tired category to the engine of a national distilling boom.

Sipsmith did not stay alone for long. Its opening proved that a small distillery could be licensed, funded and sold, and others followed the same path. The template was straightforward. Start with a copper pot still, build a London Dry style gin around a recognisable set of botanicals, and sell a sense of provenance alongside the liquid. Within a few years the number of British gin brands had multiplied, and gin had become the category that drew new distillers into the trade.

The change in the law explains how small distilleries became possible, but not why so many people chose to open one. Several forces met at once.

Drinkers were changing. Interest in where things came from, and a willingness to pay more for something made in small quantities, had already reshaped beer through the craft brewing movement, and coffee before it. Spirits were next, and gin was an easy first step. It offered variety, colour and a story that the large commodity brands did not.

The economics helped too. A gin distillery needs no ageing warehouse and no years of waiting, so a small team could start selling quickly and reinvest the proceeds. Equipment makers began building smaller stills to meet the demand. Supermarkets and bars, looking for something new to put in front of customers, gave the young brands shelf space. None of these on its own would have been enough. Together they turned a legal opening into a boom.

Trading up ran through all of it. Drinkers were buying less but spending more per bottle, moving from commodity spirits to smaller labels with a clearer origin. That shift rewarded exactly the kind of producer the new law had made possible. A small distillery could not compete on price with an industrial brand, but it could compete on provenance, character and the sense of buying something made by people rather than a plant.

Once small stills were viable, the numbers moved quickly. When the Wine and Spirit Trade Association began tracking distillery openings in 2010, it counted around 116 distilleries in the UK. By the middle of the last decade the total had more than doubled, and it kept climbing. In 2020, a record year, the UK added well over 100 distilleries in twelve months to pass 560.

Growth was fastest in England. English distilleries numbered in the low twenties in 2010 and rose into the hundreds over the following decade, and at one point England overtook Scotland in distillery count for the first time. By the mid-2020s, industry bodies counted more than 900 registered spirit producers across the UK.

The pace has not held at its peak. As domestic gin demand levelled off, some distilleries closed or were absorbed by larger firms, and the market entered a period of consolidation. The long arc still points one way. Britain has far more distilleries now than at any point in living memory, and the infrastructure that gin built has become the base for everything that came after.

Exports followed domestic demand. British gin in particular found buyers abroad, and it remained a substantial export earner for the UK even as the home market matured. The category that revived British distilling also became one of its most visible on the world stage.

Numbers alone do not tell the whole story. Behind the count sits a wide spread of scale, from single-room operations selling locally to established names with national distribution. The craft label stretches across all of them, which is part of why it resists a fixed definition. What they share is a starting point in the same small-still revival, not a common size or method.

Gin opened the door, but the craft movement did not stop there. The same small stills, and the skills built around them, have been turned to other categories. Rum has become one of the most active. British producers now number in the dozens, working in two broad ways that a separate guide, the British Rum Renaissance, sets out in full. Whisky has followed, with England building a distilling scene of its own that the guide on the rise of English whisky covers in detail. Some distillers have gone further still, making agave spirits, brandies from British fruit, and grain spirits that sit outside the established categories.

What links them is method rather than raw material. A distiller who learned to run a small pot still for gin can apply the same equipment and discipline to a rum wash or a malt spirit. The result is a British spirits scene that is broader than any single category, and one where new expressions appear faster than the rules can classify them.

The pattern repeats across categories. A distillery proves itself on a quick-return spirit like gin, then reinvests in something slower and more ambitious. Rum, whisky, agave spirits and fruit brandies have all grown out of that model. The raw materials differ, but the underlying move is the same, and it is why the British spirits shelf now holds categories that barely existed here fifteen years ago.

The craft wave is not evenly spread, and different parts of Britain have developed distinct characters. London remains a centre of gin, the category that started the revival, and has since added whisky and rum producers of its own. Scotland, long defined by whisky, has absorbed a large number of new gin distilleries while its malt tradition continues.

England's growth has been the most visible change. Distilling has spread into counties that had none for generations, reaching Norfolk, the Cotswolds, Cornwall and Cumbria among many others. Wales and Northern Ireland have both added distilleries as well, broadening a map that was once concentrated in a handful of regions.

Regional identity is becoming part of the appeal. Producers increasingly lean on local water, local botanicals or local grain, and on a sense of place that ties a spirit to where it is made. The trend is young, and no region yet carries the fixed reputation that Speyside holds for Scotch, but the outline of regional British styles is starting to form.

Scotland deserves its own note. Its whisky tradition never went away, and the country remains the anchor of British distilling by volume and reputation. What the craft wave added there was gin, and a generation of smaller producers working alongside the established malt distilleries. The rest of Britain was building a scene almost from nothing. Scotland was extending one that already ran deep.

Because craft is not a guaranteed term, the useful questions are practical ones. Where is the spirit actually made, and by whom. What is in it, and are the ingredients named. How is it produced and finished, and does the producer explain the process plainly. A brand confident in its answers tends to give them freely.

Transparency is the thread that runs through the honest end of the category. A producer that names its base spirit, its method and its place of production is inviting scrutiny, which is the opposite of what the marketing word craft does on its own.

Jerry Can Spirits sits within this new wave as one example among many. It is a veteran-founded British brand whose Expedition Spiced Rum is built on a Caribbean rum base and macerated in small batches by a British partner distillery, with 5% of profits going to military charities. It is one entry in a category that now runs to hundreds of producers, each asking to be judged on what it makes and how openly it says so.

The same questions apply whatever the category. A craft gin, rum or whisky is only as trustworthy as the answers behind it, and the producers worth returning to are the ones who give those answers without being pushed. Price is not the measure. Openness is.