From a small island distillery to a gin that changes colour in the glass.

Empress 1908 is a gin made by Victoria Distillers in Sidney, British Columbia, a small town on the Saanich Peninsula north of Victoria on Vancouver Island. The distillery began life under another name. The trade site Distillery Trail reported in June 2017 that the business had started as Victoria Spirits, an artisan distillery run by Bryan and Valerie Murray; it was bought from the Murrays in 2015, renamed Victoria Distillers, and moved into a new distillery on the Seaport Place waterfront in Sidney, which opened in May 2016. The company still describes that waterfront building as the home of the copper pot stills that make its spirits.

The gin’s name and its idea both come from Victoria’s best-known building. The Empress, the Châteauesque hotel on Victoria’s Inner Harbour, opened on 20 January 1908, English Wikipedia records. It was built by Canadian Pacific Hotels, a division of the Canadian Pacific Railway, to designs begun by the architect Francis Rattenbury, was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1981, and is managed today under the Fairmont name. Its afternoon tea, served in the Lobby Lounge, is one of the city’s set pieces for visitors.

Victoria Distillers says it set out in 2016 to create a new gin and turned to the hotel and its tea programme for inspiration. According to the company, its master distiller worked through the hotel’s teas alongside the gin’s other botanicals and settled on a pairing of the Empress signature blend tea with butterfly pea blossom, which it says it found in a tea blend called Blue Suede Shoes. The company dates the arrival of what it now calls Empress 1908 Indigo Gin to 2017. Distillery Trail reported in June 2017 that the gin had been announced, describing it as inspired by the hotel’s tea and cocktail programmes, and Business in Vancouver reported in May 2017 that it was going on sale in British Columbia that week. In the same June 2017 report, the company’s president Peter Hunt said the gin would reach the United States that summer, starting in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Florida and California.

A colour that moves, a bottle that wraps it and a date on the label.

The colour is the product’s whole argument. Distillery Trail described Empress 1908 in 2017 as an indigo blue spirit whose colour comes from butterfly pea blossom infused during distillation, and reported that adding citrus or tonic turns the gin from indigo to a monarch purple and then a rose petal pink. The company describes the gin as made in small batches in copper-pot stills.

The bottle was chosen to show the colour off. A case study published by the French glassmaker Saverglass says the gin is packed in its OXYGEN bottle, and that the brand wanted packaging that reflected the regal influence of Queen Victoria, the monarch the city and the hotel are named for. Saverglass describes the brand’s signature labelling as a matte, textured label that spirals around the bottle near the shoulder, with a second matte label wrapped almost all the way around near the base. When Victoria Distillers asked for a larger 1.75-litre bottle, the glassmaker says, the original shape was too tall for standard shelf heights and had to be adapted, and the spiral label was reworked as a printed version.

The name itself does the rest of the work. “Empress” ties the gin to the hotel, and “1908” is the year the hotel opened, so the date on the label points to a place rather than to the age of the distillery or the recipe. The company’s current range carries the full name, date included, on every expression, from Empress 1908 Elderflower Rose to Empress 1908 Cucumber Lemon.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all craft whiskey, gin and tequila names: Tequila Ocho, Fortaleza, High West, Westland, Balcones, St. George Spirits and Empress 1908. Craft spirits brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small distilleries that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a local bottle shop to a bar list far from home.

A craft spirits brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spirit is actually distilled and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its spirit is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Texas owner, new colours and the same Sidney stills.

In June 2022 the Canadian distillery passed to an American owner. Milestone Brands, a spirits company based in Austin, Texas, announced that it had acquired Victoria Distillers together with Azzurre Spirits, the United States importer of Empress 1908, Shanken News Daily reported on 21 June 2022; the Vancouver law firm Farris, which acted for Victoria Distillers, said the deal included the production facility in Sidney and a recently established packaging facility in Vancouver. Milestone said Peter Hunt would continue to lead Victoria Distillers as president and that the distillery’s team would stay, and that the investment firm BDT Capital Partners had taken a significant minority stake in Milestone to fund the purchase. At the time Milestone said Empress 1908 had grown to more than 200,000 cases worldwide. Milestone itself was formed in 2016 by Eric Dopkins, a former chief executive of Deep Eddy Vodka, and Chad Auler, a Deep Eddy co-founder.

Under the new owner the range has spread across more colours. BevNET reported in 2023 that an Elderflower Rose gin, coloured a ruby red with red rose petals and black carrots, had been released first in British Columbia that May before reaching the United States later in the year. In May 2024 the company announced the United States launch of a Cucumber Lemon gin, with Eric Dopkins quoted as chief executive and chairman of Milestone Brands. As of October 2026 the brand’s own site also lists an alcohol-free 0.0 Indigo alongside the original indigo gin.

The name needs care online. The Fairmont Empress hotel, which inspired the gin, is a separate business with its own site; the gin’s home is empressgin.com, and the distillery’s is victoriadistillers.com. Several unrelated products also use the word Empress, including a Canadian maker of guitar effects pedals.

For a design guide, Empress 1908 shows how a single natural colour, a date borrowed from a hotel and a spiralled matte label can make a gin from a small British Columbia distillery recognisable at a glance on back bars far from Vancouver Island. Compare Deep Eddy, the Austin vodka started by one of Milestone’s founders, and Rogers’ Chocolates, the Victoria chocolatier on Government Street. For this guide we use indigo, monarch purple and rose pink with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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