Gin has had a rebirth recently. The ‘Ginaissance’, some say, has promoted the rediscovery of classic expressions along with the advancement of new ones. Our goal at Last Best Distilling has always been to expand the frontier of spirits and its’ trends, both weird and wonderful.

Traditionally we have kept this exploration close to our heart, inviting our customers on the journey within our four walls. The time is now to welcome more. We look forward to your company.

Series 2020.01 is our inaugural launch of the program consisting of three gins: Afterglow, Savage Love, and Fortunella. We’ll be launching new series’ 2-3 times per year.

Our gins are all distilled dry gins – this means NO sugar added – starting with a base spirit made from Western Canadian wheat.

We’re exploring the complex and intriguing world of botanicals. Like all gins, juniper berries are a key ingredient, and what actually makes gin, gin. Even the word gin is derived from from either the French genièvre or the Dutch jenever, which both mean juniper. However, juniper alone doesn’t define gin, it’s the combination of many botanicals that help to give each gin a “personality” beyond just juniper.

We source our botanicals from all over the world to make sure they’re the best quality ingredients we can get our hands on. In addition to juniper, these can vary from spices, to flowers, to citrus and are what make the flavours in each gin unique.

Developing our unique flavours is key to our process. Like making a perfect cup of tea, a steeping/maceration process helps to develop the flavour in our gins. We carefully measure out our botanicals and place them in our wheat base spirit for 12 to 24 hours, depending on the recipe. Once they finish the steep, they get boiled in the still pot and we collect the vapour. Another way we create our diverse flavours is through vapour infusion. Here we boil the alcohol to allow the vapour to pass through a basket holding chosen botanicals, extracting flavour before we collect it. We distill ALL botanicals at once rather than individually, allowing them to interact with each other chemically within the still, making new aroma compounds which leads to depth of flavour.

After distillation the gin is very strong, around 80% abv, so we need to water down and “proof” the gin to our desired bottling strength. This usually falls between 43% to 57% but never below 40% abv.

All of our gins are distilled in small batches at Last Best in our custom designed 500L copper still made exclusively for us.

To complete the process we hand package and label each bottle.