How to Start Your Own Spirit Brand in South Africa

To launch a spirit brand here you need four things: a recipe, a licensed producer, packaging, and somewhere to sell it. Most people work with a contract distillery rather than building their own, so the distillery produces under its manufacturing licence and you own the brand. A realistic first commercial run is 800 bottles of 750ml, and from first conversation to stock in hand usually takes two to six months.

That is the whole thing in a paragraph. The detail is where it gets interesting, so here is how it actually works.

Step 1. Decide what you are selling

Before recipes, be clear about the business. A brand that exists to be poured in your own restaurant has completely different economics to one fighting for space in a bottle store. Three questions settle most of what follows.

Where will it be sold? On premise, retail, corporate gifting, or export. Who is it for, and at what price? A R250 gin and a R650 gin are different products with different bottles and different liquid inside. And how much can you honestly sell in year one? Be hard on yourself here. Most first timers overestimate by three to five times.

Skip this step and you will end up with 100+ beautiful bottles in a garage.

Step 2. Choose your spirit

Gin is the easiest place to start. No ageing, quick to develop, and you can differentiate it endlessly through botanicals. Vodka is simple to produce but hard to make distinctive. Rum and liqueurs sit somewhere in between. Whisky and brandy need years in oak, so new brands either start with something unaged or buy stock that is already matured.

One thing worth knowing early: the base spirit matters more than most people expect. Most South African gin is built on bought in neutral cane spirit. We distil our own base from wine five times over, then a sixth time with the botanicals for our gin, which is why it drinks soft at 43%. If you plan to charge a premium, the base is usually where that premium has to come from.

Step 3. Develop the recipe

This is where you need a qualified Master Distiller. We work on various laboratory stills in Strand, small enough to try things quickly and accurate enough that the result scales properly to a full batch.

A normal cycle runs like this. You give us a brief covering flavour direction, price point, market and any botanicals you want in there for personal or story reasons. We do two to four lab distillations and taste them with you. You sign off a recipe, documented well enough that it can be reproduced batch after batch. Then, if you want, we run a trial batch of under 200 bottles so you can test the market before committing.

That trial batch is the best money saving move available to a new brand. It costs a fraction of a full run and tells you whether people actually buy.

Step 4. Sort out the legal side

People avoid this part and they shouldn't. In broad terms:

Production happens under the distillery's manufacturing licence. If we produce for you, you don't need one of your own. Selling is a separate question and needs the right licence for how you sell, so a retail licence for a shop, an on consumption licence for a venue, and a National Distribution licence if you want to buy and resell to licenced venues. SARS excise applies to all alcohol produced in South Africa and belongs in your costing from day one, not as a surprise later. Labelling has to comply with local regulations covering ABV, volume, producer details, allergens and the mandatory responsible drinking messaging.

Requirements vary by country and by how you intend to trade, so check your specific case with the relevant authority. The practical takeaway is simple though. Production licensing is your distiller's problem. Selling licensing is yours.

Step 5. Build the brand

The liquid earns you repeat customers. The label earns you the first sale. You need a name that survives a trademark search, artwork that is legally compliant and still readable from a metre away on a busy shelf, a bottle and closure, and cartons if you are gifting or shipping.

This is where a lot of new brands stall, usually because they don't have a designer. Through our partner network we put clients in touch with label designers, web developers and brand strategists. The point of a one stop shop is that you aren't managing five suppliers who have never worked together.

Step 6. Production

The commercial minimum is 800 bottles of 750ml. That number isn't arbitrary. Below it, the fixed costs of a distillation run, bottling setup and labelling push your per bottle cost past the point where you can price competitively.

Your run happens on the same equipment that produces our own award winners: a 1000 litre custom Kothe copper potstill and a 200 litre gin still we designed ourselves. What you get back is finished, labelled, excise paid product, ready to sell.

Step 7. Cost it properly

We won't publish one number, because a 750ml gin at 40% in a standard bottle with a paper label costs far less than the same liquid in custom glass with screen printing. Build your own model on this structure instead.

The mistake we see most often is pricing backwards from a shelf price that sounds nice, without checking whether the retailer's and distributor's margins leave anything for you. Work forwards from cost, then sanity check the shelf price against real competitors.

Step 8. Launch, then reorder

Deliver, sell, learn, run it again. Second runs are quicker because the recipe, artwork and packaging are already settled. The brands that last are the ones that treat run one as a market test rather than a celebration.

How long it all takes

Packaging lead times delay launches far more often than distilling does. Start the bottle and label conversation early.

Five expensive mistakes

Skipping the trial batch. Eight hundred bottles of something nobody wants is a costly lesson.

Designing the label before confirming the bottle. Artwork is dimension specific and bottles go out of stock.

Leaving excise out of the costing. It turns a healthy margin into a thin one overnight.

Having no route to market. Line up at least one buyer, whether that is a bottle store, a venue or an online channel, before you produce.

Competing on price. You cannot out cheap the big producers. Compete on story, quality and specificity.

Why brands do this with us

We have been the distillery behind brands that went on to win Double Gold at the SA Craft Gin Awards and Gold and Platinum at Michelangelo. Some of them beat our own labels in the same competition, which is rather the point. Your brand gets the same still, the same master distillers and the same standards as ours.

The team is a father and son. FJ Blomendahl qualified as a Master Distiller in Berlin in 1985 and has spent more than 40 years at it across Europe and Africa. Benedikt Blomendahl is the youngest Master Distiller in the world (CIBD, 2024) and a chartered global management accountant, which means your recipe and your cost model can be discussed in the same meeting.

Ready to start? Tell us about your project. The enquiry takes two minutes and comes straight to us.