St Augustine Distillery

On a recent trip to St Augustine, my friends and I were really excited to learn about the St Augustine Distillery and had to check it out! We started our day off at San Sebastian Winery and then made our way over to the distillery which was only two blocks away.



We ended up walking in through the Ice Plant door which is the bar/restaurant attached to the distillery and made our way into the distillery gift shop. We will have to go back sometime and check out the Ice Plant but we were more interested in the distillery on this trip! There are free tours and tastings offered every 30 minutes until 5pm so we wandered around the gift shop until it was time to line up for the tour.



The Gift Shop

There are all sorts of mixers, bar tools, and of course their freshly made vodka and gin for sale! The whiskey and rum should be ready a little later this year. I loved the drink recipes on the blackboards on the walls for people not too sure about what to make!





I brought home a bottle of their signature vodka and can't wait to try it out with some of my favorite recipes!







The Tour

Your tour begins when you "clock-in" with your tour guide. Your clock-in slip becomes a souvenir when you're done with the tour and also has a part you can tear off and give to the guide to sign up for their email notifications.





After you clock-in, you move into a room that is covered in posters with information about Florida agriculture and the ingredients used to make the spirits. We got there a little late and the room was pretty full so it was difficult to read everything but the artifacts they had were still really cool to look at!











Our tour guide was extremely knowledgeable and kept things fun as we moved into the next room where we watched a short video about the farms the distillery gets their products from. This was not my favorite part as it got pretty hot in the room and we were squeezed in with a lot of other people but the video was very informative and it was cool to see how and where the whole process begins.



Next, you move into the room with all of the big vats to learn more about the production process. I'll save the details for when you take the tour yourself. ;)




There were racks on racks of whiskey barrels waiting for that magical day when they're ready to be bottled! I wanted to take one of those home but they didn't sell them in the gift shop for some reason... #fail



You move past the bottling room before making your way into the bar area for SAMPLES!!!



This was the best part of the tour...actually getting to try the product you've been learning about for the past 30 minutes! Our tour guide became our bartender and whipped up two of their specialty cocktails: The Florida Mule and New World Gin and Tonic



Both of the drinks were really tasty although the Florida Mule was my favorite. The New World Gin and Tonic was good as well but gin is not really my thing. We learned that there are laws that prohibit the sale of spirits directly through the distillery because of big name distributors and retailers. The government restricts it so much that you can only purchase two bottles per person per year!




The Distillery is open Mon-Sat 10am-6pm & Sun 11am-6pm and is located at
112 Riberia Street in historic Lincolnville, just south of King Street in downtown St. Augustine.