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Get your free copy02 February 2026, 07:00 AM
- Discover some of Wales’ best drinks brands – from wines and spirits to craft beer
There’s a magic to brewing, winemaking and distilling. How a few simple ingredients – be they hops, yeast, malts and spring water, grapes, or botanicals – can be utterly transformed by time, heat, pressure and a sprinkle of modern alchemy.
Wales is fast being put on the map by its drinks producers. Passionate, driven folk, harnessing the finest local ingredients and using them to create award-winning drinks of note that are being sought out by connoisseurs both in the UK and internationally.
Download Speciality Food’s free Celebrating Welsh Food & Drink 2026 publication, produced in collaboration with Food & Drink Wales, here, to learn more about the impact of Welsh drink on the national and world stage, and to discover brands that could bring newness and interest to your shelves, such as those featured below.
In 2013 Grey Trees was officially established as a micro-brewery by husband-and-wife team Raye and Tracey, breathing new life into an old industrial unit in Aberdare.
Ray has a huge passion for brewing, and his creativity has produced many award-winning brews which combine traditional methods with a modern twist and utilise a local Welsh water source.
The name Grey Trees comes from the English translation of the village where the first brew was made in Llwydcoed in Aberdare, South Wales.
There is a rich heritage of brewing beer in the Wrexham area, and when Richard and Liz Lever took over an established brewery located in the Dee Valley in 2017, they were passionate about the magic of creating small-batch beer using Welsh water.
There are three beers in the range: Eyton Gold, an award-winning golden session ale; Obsidian, a Welsh stout; and Green one, a single hopped Citra IPA, offering beer lovers a taste of Wales through traditional techniques and modern ingredients.
SA Brain & Company, known as Brains Brewery, is a historic and highly respected brewer based in Cardiff, Wales, founded in 1882 by Samuel Arthur Brain. Over the years, Brains has built a strong reputation rooted in Welsh heritage and community, brewing classics like Brains Bitter, Dark, Skull Attack (SA) and the Rev. James range.
Founded in 2011 by head brewer Phill Blanchard, Hafod Brewing Company has been crafting award-winning beers from its Mold brewery for 14 years. They have earned eight Great Taste Awards across the core range, including Sunrise Pale Ale, Landmark Bitter, Moel Famau Porter and Freestyle IPA.
Hive Mind Mead is a small-batch, family-run meadery based in South Wales, founded in 2018 by brothers Kit and Matt, with a lifelong love of bees, honey and the countryside around them.
They make their meads authentically using only 100% honey (often from their own hives) rather than sugar or wine bases to ensure a genuinely natural, minimally processed drink.
Blighty Booch Kombucha is a range of delicious, fermented tea bottled drinks made in Conwy, North Wales. Kombucha is rapidly gaining popularity with consumers eager to embrace the trend for probiotic and fermented foods.
Not all kombucha is created equal; Blighty Booch brews their kombucha traditionally, in small batches. It is a high-end product; unpasteurised, full of living probiotics and cleansing acids, and is vegan and organic.
Mydflower is pioneering a new category in sparkling wine: wild wine. They produce premium sparkling wines using wild foraged elderflowers and British berries, pure Welsh mountain spring water from the Brecon Beacons and Champagne yeast via the Charmat method.
Unlike traditional wines, Mydflower contain no grapes. Instead, the team ferments nature’s wild ingredients with the same precision and craftsmanship you’d expect from fine wine.
Still Wild is an award-winning micro-distillery based in the heart of Pembrokeshire National Park. Founded in 2020, the distillery was born from a simple realisation: the wild botanicals of Pembrokeshire – sea herbs, hedgerow flowers, bitter estuarine plants – held unique, largely forgotten flavours. James saw that the cold vacuum still he first used during his biochemistry studies at university could gently capture these delicate aromas in a way traditional distillation could not.
Still Wild began its journey with the launch of Wales’ first ever vermouth. The distillery now crafts small batches of premium Welsh vermouths, aperitifs, bitters and spirits. Every ingredient is hand-foraged from one of Wales’ most biodiverse landscapes, reflecting a deep belief in terroir – the idea that flavour tells the story of a place.
Cygnet is an award-winning luxury gin brand, proudly made in Wales and founded by internationally renowned mezzo-soprano Katherine Jenkins OBE and artist and social impact filmmaker Andrew Levitas.
Cygnet is crafted just six miles from Katherine’s childhood home in Neath. The distillery is located at Swansea’s historic Copperworks – a magnificent regeneration project. The business has literally returned copper to this site through their traditional copper pot stills, honouring Welsh industrial heritage whilst creating world-class spirits and local employment.
Gower Gin was established in 2017 by Sian and Andrew Brooks and was inspired by a night out in London where for the first time they made their own gin.
They are positioned as a premium brand that makes and sells spirits based on the flavours, places and stories of Gower, and all of their products are branded with their traditional stripes.
Gower Gin is proud to be a truly Welsh brand and has made an impact in the sector through celebrating Welsh culture and the Welsh language with bilingual labels on all their bottles and through foraging local Gower ingredients.
Nestled just outside Cardiff, Hensol Castle Distillery is South Wales’ first full-scale distillery, gin and rum school, visitor experience and contract bottling facility.
The team proudly produces a range of award-winning spirits, each one distilled with passion, precision and a dash of heritage.
The village of Abergwyngregyn is home to Aber Falls distillery and sits at the foot of the famous Aber Falls waterfall. Previously a slate works in the 19th Century, a margarine factory during the world wars, and more recently a drinks wholesaler depot, the building has been lovingly restored and refurbished, providing the ideal place to create spirits and demonstrate Aber Falls’ passion and skill in craftsmanship.
The Aber Falls range covers whisky, gin and liqueurs, and the whisky was not only the first one to be created in Wales for over 100 years, but is made using Welsh ingredients.
Bluestone Brewing Co is a small team who really love good quality craft beer. The ethos behind the business has always been about producing great-tasting beer with as little impact on the planet as possible.
The range consists of Al Fresco hazy pale ale, Stone Cold pale ale, Bedrock Blonde blonde ale, Carningli Pembrokeshire pale ale, Preseli Pils bohemian lager, Rocketeer best bitter, and a range of specials, from red ales to an imperial stout aged in an oak Welsh rum barrel.
Founded in 2008 following the discovery of a natural spring at neighbouring Trederwen Hall, Trederwen Springs are located in Llansantffraid-ym-Mechain, a charming rural village at the foothills of the Cain Valley in Mid-Wales.
They are experts in the art of creating flavoured water that delivers customer delight and have earned their place on the shelves of prominent UK retailers – a testament to their commitment to quality.
In the small hamlet of Bethania, West Wales, on the edge of the Cambrian Mountains, likes the celebrated spring of Tŷ Nant natural mineral water. Amongst the mysteries of human powers is the art of water divination. Drawn from an unseen force, the water diviner can locate exactly the source of vast amounts of underground water. In this way the powerful Tŷ Nant water source was discovered in 1976 by an eminent water diviner, Tom Astley, who was invited to locate water for domestic use on farmland in Bethania.
