High Mountain Spirits is a small international team making tea-crafted spirits. We walk the mountains where our teas are grown, source only the finest leaf, and distil every bottle in the country where the leaf itself came from.
High Mountain Spirits was started in 2023, after a conversation about why pairing tea with alcohol the right way wasn’t already a thing. There are tea cocktails. There are tea-infused gins. But no brand was curating the best teas from the world’s most stunning mountain regions and distilling them — taking a leaf already extraordinary to drink and pulling new, different flavours out of it through the still.
Each spirit is designed from the ground up: which tea do we want to showcase, and why. Every bottle is crafted close to its leaf — local sources, local distilleries — so the tea reaches the still as fresh as it can be. The supporting botanicals stay deliberately simple, there only to enhance the leaf, never to compete with it — the essence of the tea remains the centre of the bottle. Distilling also preserves the leaf across years; and because each season’s crop tastes different (climate, rainfall, the water it grew on), every release we ship is signed and labelled by batch.
Our first gin, Alishan Cloud, is released in May 2026 — two thousand bottles, distilled and filled in Taiwan, the country its leaf came from.
Every spirit revolves around the leaf — a single tea, or a considered blend, chosen for the mountain it grew on. Any other botanical is there only to supplement what the tea is already doing, never to compete. We keep the list short, the recipe simple, and trust the leaf to carry the bottle.
We source through relationships, not brokers. Our Alishan tea comes from four hectares above Shizhuo — a single family garden, three generations deep, picked and rolled by the family who have worked the slope all along.
Batches of 500–2,000 bottles. Every cask is a single cask. Every label is hand-finished.
We pay our growers well for their spring pluck, and never haggle. The same applies to our artists and our coopers.