About

About Bend Spirits

Bendistillery brought Crater Lake Spirits to local bars and markets back in 1996. After the initial success of Crater Lake Vodka and Cascade Mountain Gin, Bendstillery moved into the private label distilling arena and Bend Spirits was born. Since then, we’ve successfully launched dozens of private label brands for our clients. With over 20 years of experience navigating the alcoholic beverage industry, we’re your industry experts on everything from licensing to flavor profiles and product formulation.

Two wine glasses full of Bend Spirits premium gin with ice and a curl of cucumber

Your Trusted Private Label Partner

Launching a new spirit brand is a big undertaking. We’re here to help every step of the way. When you partner with Bend Spirits, you get more than a distillery. You get a trusted partner who can help you make sense of the entire process—from concept through bottling.

As one of Oregon’s first distilleries, we’ve got decades of industry experience under our belts. And during that time, we’ve built a network of reliable, quality industry partners. That’s why we can say with confidence that if we don’t offer the service ourselves, we can connect you with someone who does.

Learn More About Our Process

Let Us Be Your Spirit Guides

Sure, we want to be known as makers of high-quality spirits. But our liquors can stand on their own two legs. Which is why we chose to build our reputation on clear and honest communication. Whether that means educating you about the fermentation process for a particular spirit, helping you navigate tricky legal regulations, or being up-front and honest about costs and timelines. As your partner, we’re committed to making sure you’re fully informed every step of the way.

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A bartender in a white shirt with rolled up sleeves making a drink with Bend Spirits liquor

Crater Lake Spirits

The Spirit of Adventure

Our goal has always been to make the best tasting spirits using the most natural ingredients available. But when Bendistillery launched Crater Lake Spirits, we didn’t realize we’d be kicking off the craft liquor revolution. Since 1996, Crater Lake Spirits have been serving up your favorite go-to cocktails with a twist of adventure.

Crater Lake Spirits

Our Success Stories

We’ve launched dozens of successful and award-winning liquor brands. Yours could be next.

It's the Water

When this pro athlete approached Bend Spirits about making a branded vodka, he had one question: Why is Crater Lake Vodka so much better? In researching this project, his team had taste-tested dozens of vodkas. They all agreed that Crater Lake was their favorite, and if this new vodka was going to carry his name, it had better be the best. Our answer was simple – it’s the water.

After a more detailed explanation of the impact of water, filtering, and base spirit grain selection, we got to work creating a vodka with the flavor profile they wanted. Since they had done their due diligence already, we could help them get a product to market relatively quickly. This vodka eventually grew to three expressions and several sizes. It’s one of the first large scale brands Bend Spirits produced.

A Gin Like No Other

Looking to produce a daring new gin, this client trusted Bend Spirits to work with their in-house team to execute a very specific flavor profile. As a division of one of America’s oldest wine families, they were easily our most sophisticated client to-date. While they brought more experience to the project than most of our clients, they also brought pressure to create a product that lived up to an established name.

We worked for months sourcing just the right botanicals to produce a gin that fit their vision. The formula we created for them needed to taste perfect, be scalable, and fit their budget. In the end, Bend Spirits produced three gins for them. The most successful grew beyond our bottling capacity, but we still produced it in bulk for them for a partner facility to bottle.

Home-made to Home-run

As the owner of a submarine-themed bar near a naval base, this client had been making local sailors and patrons an exceptional drink for 20+ years. For years, those customers said, “You really ought to bottle this and sell it!” That was exactly the plan when this client reached out to us at Bend Spirits.

 

Of course, the client had been making this product at their bar using commercially-available brands of ingredients. We quickly found that it would be impossible to scale to production if we were to use those same items. Having made the product for years on their own, the customer was very particular about the flavor profile, color, and mouthfeel: it had to be perfect. They would not take “close enough” as an answer.

 

It took months of working with our supply chain partners to develop custom ingredients that we could source at the scale we needed. But, through sheer determination, we were eventually able to replicate the product perfectly. The client could tell that we took as much pride in the product as they did, and when it was all said and done, they said, “You knocked It out of the park.”

 

Expanding to Whiskey

When a well-established local brewery was interested in turning their award-winning beer into an award-winning whiskey, it was a no-brainer for our two businesses to work together. The goal: create a product that would excite each other’s existing customer base as well as the craft whiskey world.

 

The client provided a batch of their best-selling Stout, and we went to work distilling it down to an amazing White-dog moonshine. After barreling and aging the product for three years, the result was one of the best whiskeys either of our teams had tasted. What started as an experiment is now an ongoing project that thrills everyone who tries it. In fact, it could easily become a new benchmark of American Malt Whiskey.

Keeping the Ball Rolling

This client started their spirit journey with one of our competitors, and they quickly found out that not all distilleries are made equal. After establishing themselves with customers and gaining a huge fan-base, their private label distillery had unilaterally decided to cut them off and no longer produce their product for them. With purchase orders piling up and no product to ship, the client was in a pinch and needed to act fast, or it would be game over for their brand.

 

When they reached out to us, it was clear that there was no time to waste. We quickly went to work, fast-tracking their project through development and production. Having been cut off from their old distillery, we were working in the dark when it came to formulation. But we were able to quickly recreate the product and create something that was “even better than before,” according to the client. From the first contact to the finished product, we were able to get this client back on their feet again within two months to keep their momentum strong.