Top 10 Distilleries in Singapore
Singapore is not a country that anyone associates with distilling heritage. The city-state imports essentially all of its base spirit — there is no agricultural hinterland producing grain, sugarcane, or fruit for fermentation at scale. What it does have is one of the world's most sophisticated cocktail and spirits cultures, driven by a wealthy, internationally mobile population, a dense concentration of world-class bars, and a longstanding tradition of importing the finest spirits from every producing region on Earth. Out of that culture, over the past decade, a small but genuinely interesting craft distilling movement has emerged.
Singapore's craft distillers work at the intersection of the city's multicultural culinary heritage and the global craft spirits movement. The botanicals they use reflect the spice trade roots that made Singapore wealthy in the first place — pepper, lemongrass, pandan, torch ginger, galangal — and their gins and rums are among the most distinctively tropical spirits produced anywhere in the world. The heat and humidity that make large-scale aging challenging also accelerate interaction between spirit and cask, producing whisky with more wood influence than Scottish equivalents at the same chronological age. Use the distillery map to locate these compact but impressive operations within Singapore's urban geography.
1. Brass Lion Distillery, Holland Road
Brass Lion is Singapore's best-known craft distillery and a pioneer of the local craft spirits movement, founded by Jamie Koh in 2018. Located in a shophouse on Holland Road, the distillery produces the Singapore Dry Gin, which uses pandan, torch ginger flower, and pomelo peel alongside standard gin botanicals to create a distinctly tropical expression. The torch ginger flower — bunga kantan in Malay, used widely in Singaporean and Malaysian cooking — adds a floral, almost rose-like quality that distinguishes the gin from any European equivalent. Brass Lion also produces a range of seasonal and limited expressions using botanicals sourced from Singapore's wet markets and from farms in the broader Southeast Asian region.
2. Tanglin Gin, Dempsey Hill
Named after the historic Tanglin Club area of central Singapore, Tanglin Gin has established itself as one of the city's most acclaimed gin producers with its Orchid Gin expression — a gin using Vanda Miss Joaquim, Singapore's national flower, as a key botanical alongside local spices and jasmine. The distillery operates from Dempsey Hill, a former British military barracks complex that has been converted into an upscale restaurant and retail destination. Tanglin's production uses a traditional copper pot still, and the botanical selection — which also includes black pepper, nutmeg, coriander, and citrus — reflects the historical spice trade character of the region. The gin has won multiple international awards and is stocked in premium bars across Asia.
3. The Straits Wine Company / Compendium Spirits
Compendium Spirits, the craft production arm associated with the Singapore spirits and wine trade, produces a range of small-batch spirits including gin and botanical spirits for the local market. The operation reflects the distributor-turned-producer model common in markets where importing expertise precedes local production capabilities — the people who understand what makes great spirits from around the world turn that knowledge toward local production. Compendium's botanical approach draws on Singapore's position at the crossroads of Southeast Asian food cultures, using ingredients from Indonesian, Malaysian, Chinese, and Indian culinary traditions alongside Western spirit-making techniques.
4. Proof & Company / Eight Leaves Distillery
Proof & Company is one of Asia's leading craft spirits distribution and consulting businesses, based in Singapore, and its Eight Leaves brand represents its foray into local production. Eight Leaves focuses on Asian-inspired spirits that draw on the botanical diversity of Southeast Asia — using ingredients like butterfly pea flower, kaffir lime, galangal, and lemongrass. The brand has positioned itself as an expression of specifically Southeast Asian terroir in spirit form, arguing that the region's extraordinary botanical diversity has barely been explored by distillers relative to its culinary applications. Proof & Company's deep connections across the Asian bar scene have given Eight Leaves distribution reach beyond what its production scale would normally support.
5. Copper & Craft Distillery, Keong Saik Road
Located in Singapore's Chinatown-adjacent Keong Saik neighbourhood, Copper & Craft is a micro-distillery that produces small batches of gin and liqueur using Chinese and Southeast Asian botanicals. The distillery's approach is explicitly informed by traditional Chinese medicine ingredient lists — ingredients like wolfberry (goji), chrysanthemum, and longan are used alongside more conventional gin botanicals. The resulting spirits occupy an interesting space between Western craft gin and traditional Asian botanical liqueurs, appealing to a cosmopolitan consumer base comfortable moving between these traditions. The distillery's physical space also functions as a cocktail bar, making it a natural destination for exploring the products in context.
6. Rum Lab Singapore
Singapore has a long historical connection to rum through its position as a British colonial port — Tiger Beer aside, Anchor Rum was one of the first locally produced spirits in colonial Singapore. Rum Lab is a contemporary revival of that tradition, producing sugarcane-based spirits using juice and molasses from the broader Southeast Asian region. The tropical climate is particularly well suited to rum production: fermentation is rapid, and maturation in ex-bourbon barrels proceeds at a pace accelerated by the heat. Rum Lab's expressions range from unaged white rum designed for cocktail use to short-aged expressions that show surprising wood influence from even a few months in cask under Singaporean temperatures.
7. Compendium / Heartwood Spirits
Heartwood Spirits is a Singapore-based operation that ages whisky and other spirits in small casks under tropical conditions to accelerate maturation. Rather than distilling from scratch, Heartwood sources new-make spirit from established distilleries and manages the maturation process in Singapore's climate. The approach is modelled on similar operations in India and Taiwan, where tropical aging has been shown to produce spirit with deep wood influence and rapidly developing complexity. Heartwood's aged expressions, typically spending two to four years in small ex-bourbon casks, have the colour and weight of whiskies twice their age by Scottish standards — a demonstration of how profoundly climate affects the maturation process.
8. Papa Doble Craft Spirits
Papa Doble is a Singapore craft spirits label focused on rum and rum-adjacent spirits, named after Ernest Hemingway's signature double daiquiri. The production uses molasses from Javanese sugar mills and ferments with multiple yeast strains to develop a range of congener profiles before blending. The resulting rum has a fuller ester character than most commercial molasses rums, reflecting a commitment to flavour-forward production rather than purity of distillation. The brand has found its primary market in Singapore's cocktail bar community, where the rich, complex character of the rum translates effectively into classics like the daiquiri, the mai tai, and the Singapore Sling's lesser-known rum variants.
9. The Old Man Singapore (Bar and Spirits)
The Old Man is primarily one of Asia's most celebrated cocktail bars, but its involvement in spirits production — through house-made infusions, macerations, and collaborative bottlings with local distilleries — makes it a significant part of the Singapore craft spirits ecosystem. The bar's house spirits program includes aged cocktail bases, clarified juices, and botanical distillates that blur the line between bartending craft and small-scale distilling. Several products developed by The Old Man's team have been commercialised through local distillery partnerships, making it an important bridge between Singapore's bar culture and its emerging spirits production scene.
10. Garden Slug / SG Botanicals
SG Botanicals is a Singapore operation focused on sourcing and processing local and regional botanicals for use by distillers, bartenders, and food producers — but it also produces its own range of botanical spirits using surplus ingredients. The project emerged from Singapore's urban farming and sustainability movement, using herbs and flowers grown in rooftop gardens, community plots, and controlled indoor growing environments across the city. The resulting botanical spirits — distillates of single ingredients like pandan, turmeric, or Sichuan pepper — are used both as standalone products and as building blocks for the custom gin blending experiences that Singapore's cocktail culture increasingly favours. It represents a uniquely urban, sustainable approach to the raw material question that every distiller must answer.