Doing More With Less: Humdinger Named Sustainable Distillery of the Year

We've been named Sustainable Distillery of the Year at the 2026 NZ Small Batch Gin Awards — the one our small Geraldine team is proudest of. The judges called out "the depth and authenticity of our sustainable practices". Here's what that actually means in the still room.

We make more power than we use

Our rooftop solar generates 188% of the distillery's electricity. The still, the bottling line and the cellar door run on Canterbury sunshine — and the surplus goes back into the grid.

We use our water twice

Cooling water from the still is held in a tank and reused to clean the still after each run, instead of going down the drain. The water that goes into the gin is filtered on site, and we keep refining that process to pull more flavour from every botanical — better gin, less waste.

Bring your bottle back

Empty Humdinger bottle? Bring it to the cellar door and we'll refill it, $5 off. Good glass stays in use. The judges liked that one too.

We grow our own sloes

The berries for our Sloe Gin are hand-picked from New Zealand's only sloe orchard — over 1,000 blackthorn trees in Canterbury. Nothing imported.

Every gin we entered came home with a medal: back-to-back Gold for our Dry Gin, Gold for the Sloe, Silver for Citrus, and Bronze for our Pink, Rum Barrel-Aged and Pekapeka gins. But this is the one on the mantelpiece.

Come and see it

The best way to understand "doing more with less" is to stand in the still room. Book a distillery tour — weekdays, about 45 minutes, finishing with a tasting — or call into the cellar door on the corner of Talbot and Peel Streets. Or skip straight to the good part and taste the result.

As featured in the Otago Daily Times and The Geraldine News, July 2026.