Dancing Sands Distillery: Of the clearest spring waters in Takaka, New Zealand

Dancing Sands Distillery - found at the bottom of the world, in the most unassuming and remote town of Takaka, Golden Bay. At the distillery, we create, bottle and label everything by hand. From foraging for local botanicals and developing new flavours and products, this is the Dancing Sands story.

Ben and his wife, Sarah, relocated to New Zealand to start their distilling business. The distillery sits in one of the most beautiful parts of the world, Golden Bay. The Dancing Sands Distillery story begins with its aquifer which is fed from Takaka’s Te Waikoropupu Springs in Golden Bay, which translated to “The Place of the Dancing Sands”.

It boasts the clearest spring water in the world with water visibility of 63 metres deep. The clarity of the water is used in every single product, and it sets the standard for every decision and every ingredient used.

The beginnings of Dancing Sands

"Failure. We fail every day but try to do it in a way that we learn from it and turn into a future success. We do not claim to dust off old recipes and use them in our production. Everything is made from trial and error and once we love drinking it around the distillery then it’s ready to go out for sale." - Ben

Ben creates a wonderful dry gin by distinguishing himself by using a spice profile of cardamom, coriander, and peppercorns, along with fresh manuka leaves, liquorice, angelica root, and almonds for a silky mouthfeel.

All the gins made at the distillery contain no artificial ingredients, colourings, and take pride in using only all natural ingredients. Hand peeled, chopped, macerated, you name it!

With an experimental and innovative streak, Ben experiments and created the next few range of gins, which include interesting offerings, such as a saffron gin, wasabi gin and chocolate gin!

The wasabi gin took a whole year to perfect as it was extremely difficult to impart wasabi flavours into the gin. The wasabi is scourged from deep within the Te Waikoropupu Springs, and only has 15 minutes to live at its optimal taste before turning bad.

Read more about Ben's story here, or return here to learn more about Dancing Sands' offerings