Byron Bay Spirits Distillery: honey liqueur, a tasting room on the Estate

What it is

A distillery producing gin, vodka and liqueur built around local honey, along with a limoncello and a coffee liqueur. It distils on a farm at Tyagarah and pours in a tasting room on the Arts and Industry Estate, which is the split most small distilleries end up with: the production needs space, the selling needs somewhere people can park.

The range is sweeter and more liqueur-led than the other two in the register, which tend towards dry gin and whisky. It is also the one whose bottles you are most likely to see behind a bar in the shire.

Three distilleries, and two of them share a street

For a shire this size, three is a lot, and they do not compete so much as occupy different afternoons. Two of them are on the Arts and Industry Estate, the light-industrial block about fifteen minutes inland: this one and Lord Byron. Cape Byron is a drive into the hinterland, on a macadamia farm, and works as a destination and not a stop.

None of the three is on the beach, for the same reason the roastery is not. Two of them are not even in town, which is the more useful thing to know before you plan the afternoon: the Estate is a drive or a long walk, and there is no beachfront on the way to it.

Honey is the thread through the range and it is a local ingredient and not a flavour note, which is the part that distinguishes this from a gin brand that could be based anywhere. It also makes the products sweeter than the dry-gin house style two of the other distilleries work in, so a tasting here is a different afternoon, not a comparison.

Distilled at Tyagarah, poured on the Estate

The split between a production site out at Tyagarah and a tasting room on the Estate is the standard shape for a small distillery, and it explains why the address you visit is not where anything is made.

It also puts this in the group of Byron businesses whose product travels further than their room does. You are more likely to meet the bottles behind a bar in the shire than to meet the still, and the tasting room functions as the shopfront for a range that is mostly sold elsewhere.

Known by the bottle, not by the room

It appears in none of the 30 guides surveyed, and its trading status rests on a directory listing. For a producer whose bottles turn up behind bars across the shire that is an odd gap, and it is the clearest illustration on this site of what those guides measure: rooms a visitor sits down in, not the businesses supplying them.

A distillery is a manufacturer with a counter attached. The guides were written about counters, and there was very little of one here when most of them were written. The product travelled first.

What else is close

From the register. Street rows need a confirmed address (49 of 67).

At Byron Arts & Industry Estate	100 Mile Table, Bun Coffee, Lord Byron Distillery
Nearest other cluster	Belongil, 4.9 km — Azure Bar and Grill, Belongil Bistro, FEU, Kiosk, North Byron Hotel, Treehouse

Where it appears in this guide

Byron Bay Spirits Distillery is listed on bars, and in the full register with the month its status was last confirmed.