Wine made the Adelaide Hills famous, but a new wave of distillers and brewers is giving the region a second drinks story built on native botanicals and fresh-poured ale.
The Adelaide Hills will always be wine country first, but spend a weekend here now and you'll notice another current running underneath — gin, whisky and craft beer made with the same obsessive, small-batch spirit as the region's cellar doors.
Native-botanical gin
The Adelaide Hills Distillery at Oakbank leans hard into a sense of place, building gins around foraged Australian botanicals — its green-ant gin is the conversation-starter, but the range runs through classic dry styles, vodka and a growing whisky program. Tasting flights here are as much about the bush as the bottle.
Beer with a view
The Hills brews well, too. Prancing Pony at Totness has collected national awards for ales like its India Red, while Mismatch Brewing pours clean, drinkable lagers and session ales from a precinct it shares with the distillery. Over in Lobethal, the Bierhaus keeps a German brewing tradition alive in an old wool mill — fitting, in a town settled by German Lutherans.
One precinct, three drinks
The genius of the Oakbank precinct is that you can taste gin, whisky and craft beer back to back without moving the car. Bring a designated driver, take it slow, and you'll come away with a very different picture of the Hills than the wine brochures paint.
