Winnipeg's craft distilleries: a guide to the city's gin, vodka, and whisky

Manitoba only opened the door to small-scale distilling in 2014, when the province loosened the rules that had kept spirits production to a handful of large producers. A decade on, Winnipeg has a small but genuine craft distilling scene, concentrated in two very different buildings on opposite sides of downtown: a 1903 heritage warehouse and an industrial unit in St. James. Both are open to visitors, not just retailers.

Patent 5 Distillery

Patent 5 occupies the Dominion Express building on Alexander Avenue in the Exchange District, built in 1903. When it started distilling gin and vodka, it brought whisky production back to downtown Winnipeg for the first time in 139 years, and it has since added rum and liqueurs to the lineup, several of which have picked up gold medals at spirits competitions. The tasting room keeps the building's old bones, with the tall arched windows and dark wood shelving visible in a tasting-room photo above.

The distillery offers tours with samples included, finishing in the tasting room where you can order cocktails made with the house spirits or buy bottles to take home. It sits an easy walk from the rest of the Exchange District's heritage warehouses, so a stop here folds naturally into an afternoon spent looking at the neighbourhood's architecture.

Capital K Distillery

Capital K is Manitoba's first family-owned craft spirits producer, distilling gin and vodka since 2016 out of a facility on Dublin Avenue in the St. James industrial area. Under the Made by Manitoba label it produces WPG Vodka, Tall Grass Spirits gin, and a line called Manitoba Moonshine, built around local grain. Tours run about half an hour and end in a tasting room where you can sample and buy; reservations are recommended rather than optional, since it operates on a working production floor rather than a retail storefront.

Shrugging Doctor Beverage Company

Shrugging Doctor is not a spirits distillery in the strict sense; it makes fruit wine, taking Manitoba-grown fruit and processing it by hand at its own facility. It is worth knowing about on the same trip, though, because it has built out a 100-seat restaurant and wine bar at its St. James location, serving flatbreads, panini, and charcuterie made from Manitoba ingredients alongside tastings. It makes a reasonable pairing with Capital K if you are already in St. James, since the two sit in the same part of the city without being the same kind of stop.

Planning a visit

All three of these operate as working production facilities first, so hours are tighter than a bar's and tours often need to be booked ahead, particularly at Capital K. Check each one's own site before heading out, since a tasting room's hours can shift with the season or with what is running on the production floor that day. None of them are an easy walk from each other. Patent 5 sits downtown in the Exchange District; Capital K and Shrugging Doctor are both in St. James, roughly a fifteen-minute drive from downtown, so this is a trip that works better by car or rideshare than on foot.