
Helen Glenn sweeps by a cypress and petunia garden that ornaments her tasting room on Bainbridge Island, her arms filled with supplies as she smiles at a handful of visitors. Her hostess, Jesi Munson, is behind the bar chatting about how botanicals from Puget Sound get used in the distillery’s gins and amaro. A few of the patrons listening are locals who enjoy the business’s cozy atmosphere. The rest are visitors who took the ferry ride out of Seattle or crossed a tiny one-lane bridge from the direction of Paulsbo.
Whichever way they came to Highside Distilling, they’re now tasting how the Glenn Family bottles an archipelago of the Pacific Northwest.
Helen’s husband, Jeff, and son, Matt, are the distillers determined to capture Bainbridge’s rare sense of place. And they’re not the only islanders with that level of ambition. Popular imagination may associate distilleries on islands with Hawaiian pineapple groves or the stark, sea-sprayed edges of the Hebrides; but there are other serious engines of rum, whiskey, and gin surrounded by water, drawing visitors from near and far to enjoy their distinctive island spirits.
Bainbridge, for example, is a world unto itself. Five miles wide and ten miles long, the island’s heavily forested terrain includes spits, bluffs, and dunes that spread along its deep-water inlets. Its shoreline hints at a culture of tribal fishermen harvesting salmon and shellfish, while its ports are tied to 19th-century mills that sent heaps of lumber on schooners across the sound. Highside is focused on distilling vibrations of these legacies, and so too is Bainbridge Organic Distillers, a Washington farm-to-bottle operation just down the road. The latter exemplifies the island’s character partly by using fresh-harvested Douglas fir tips as one of its gin botanicals.
With more than four million people taking the ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge’s docks annually, the island has become a major day-trip destination for those seeking a northern experience that’s different from the Emerald City. Bainbridge Organic Distillers and Highside Distilling now constitute an important part of that experience.
Some 830 miles to the south, along the same coastline, a pair of former U.S. Navy bases are churning out whiskey and offering their own doorway to the past. One of these destinations is Treasure Island. It lies in the San Francisco Bay and is home to Gold Bar Distillery and Treecraft Distillery. Gold Bar particularly feels like a mid-century postcard, both its stills and tasting room tucked into an 86-year-old Art Deco airport that gazes out on Alcatraz Island and the Golden Gate Bridge.
Bay dwellers can also take a ferry ride out to Mare Island, where Savage & Cooke is distilling whiskey inside the oldest naval shipbuilding yard on the West Coast.
These bantam islands speak to a California maritime tradition. The warships are gone now, but they still have a certain romance, just as Bainbridge has that romance of mist crawling through trees as it reaches for splashing waves. Whether off the coast of South Carolina or the tip of the Baltic Sea, island distilleries have a dramatic allure that — coupled with their barrel-aging properties — can prove captivating windows for appreciating spirits.
“Our sense of the Pacific Northwest is central to everything we do,” Matt Glenn observes of Highside. “We’re creating a product line that’s intended to share Bainbridge Island and be representative of our home here.”
Drinking in the Forest of Fog and Rain
Jeff Glenn was an avid homebrewer in the 1980s, an interest that Matt later shared with him. Decades on, the father-son team enrolled in the master’s program at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland to focus on transitioning from beer-making to distilling. When they opened Highside on Bainbridge Island in 2018, they were intent on making single-malt whiskeys reminiscent of Highland and Speyside Scotches. The Glenn side of their family originally hails from those Celtic climes. The distillers also wanted to create a specialized amaro that would honor Helen Glenn’s Italian roots. All of it, they knew, had to be either merged with the atmosphere or foliage of the island they were working on.
“We have a somewhat temperate climate here, similar to what you’d see in Scotland, where we don’t have these huge temperature fluctuations,” Matt notes. “I think, being on an island so close to Puget Sound, we do get some colder seasonal weather patterns that can certainly impact the products… We’re also taking classic traditional spirit styles, like single malt, and adding elements of the Northwest to make them distinctly our own. One of the ways we do that in our production process is leveraging our know-how from the craft beer scene here. We’re doing a brewing mash. We’re using specialty grains in our single malt to give it more nuttiness and body.”
The process for making amaro allows for another connection to the shores of Puget Sound and the nearby Olympic Peninsula. The Glenns make all of their amari with native ingredients. That’s led to bottles like Highside’s Sunset Hill Amaro, which brings a sweetly crackling combo of cinnamon tones and faint hints of forest mint.
Offering craft amaro is an additional reason for spirit geeks to make the trek out to Bainbridge Island, though Highside doesn’t have to rely on spirit die-hards alone.
“The cruise ships that come into Seattle make going to Bainbridge Island one of their top recommendations for those aboard,” Matt mentions. “Being here, it cuts both ways. It does pose a lot of challenges: Our shipping and freight costs are pretty crazy to get things out to the island. On the other hand, in the spring and summertime, we have a lot of people coming here from out of state — people who wouldn’t otherwise be introduced to this small island community. And many of them end up seeking out what we’re making.”
Southern Castaway Comfort
Tony Chase knows there’s a languid kind of spell that hangs over his rum distillery. Its blue, barnlike structure stands on the southernmost island of the Carolinas, a 5,200-acre oasis with clusters of magnolia and red buckeye that feel removed from the stress of the mainland. Daufuskie Island is certainly transporting: It’s a realm of Spanish moss draping gnarled, ancient oak branches, a place where former Gullah schoolrooms, a century-old lighthouse, and the remnants of the Oyster Union Society Hall peer through the tree line along white beaches of the low country. When travelers pull up to Chase’s rum operation, they often spot deer, bald eagles, and armadillos moving nearby. As they walk toward its tasting room, they pass a large pond that usually has an alligator in it.
“It’s a quaint little island,” Chase reflects of Daufuskie. “And what we’ve built here, it’s just a beautiful setting.”

And that atmosphere has gotten plenty of travelers intrigued by the unique southern island rum Chase keeps perfecting.
Originally a pharmacist, Chase first moved to Daufuskie in 2012. While enjoying its beachside solitude, a friend proposed that Chase use his skills with microbiology and organic chemistry to found a distillery. Chase liked the idea. He was soon on a quest to figure out what kind of rum he would make on this hideaway anchored between two of the South’s most famous cities, Charleston and Savannah.
Chase’s research made him gravitate to rums that possess the notes and nuances that come from using Demerara sugarcane, which grows along the banks of the Demerara River in Guyana. Fortunately, he didn’t need to have the commodity imported from South America. Chase found a company near West Palm Beach, Florida, that was growing it. That discovery, along with his progress as a distiller and the island itself, have made Daufuskie’s rum and spirits very distinctive.
“What I’ve seen is that our bourbons and our aged rums just age faster here,” Chase explains. “Think about being in the upper levels of somebody’s big rickhouses, where it’s so hot and the barrels are aging pretty rapidly — we have that year-round. We don’t get the cold winter months or the ice storms. It’s very favorable for continuous high-temp aging.”
Recent changes to South Carolina’s laws have allowed Daufuskie Island Rum Company to augment its tasting room with a restaurant and cocktail bar. It’s an even bigger attraction on the island now. People were already flocking to Daufuskie to learn about historic Gullah culture or play golf on its oceanside greens. Now, they couple those activities with eating shrimp and scallop po’ boys at Chase’s distillery.
According to the island’s business community, plenty are making the trek. Daufuskie only has about 400 full-time residents, but it averages more than 80,000 visitors a year. Chase estimates that 85 to 90% of those folks end up at his front door. That allows him to sell craft cocktails, sugarcane vodka, various rums, and his island bourbon at full retail. Chase’s products have a distributor based in Charleston, but on-site sales are far better for his business.
“For every bottle I sell here, in order to match that from a profitability standpoint, I have to sell four or five bottles through my distributor,” he stresses. “We’ve had visitors from all 50 states and 67 different countries, and we also have die-hard regulars who just make Daufuskie their regular vacation spot every year. So, being on the island is novel — no question about that. It really adds a lot of mystique to who we are and what we’re doing.
Reaching for the Stars
When the Renaissance astronomer Tycho Brahe was charting constellations from the island of Hven, its encompassing night and endless star fields offered him an awesome glimpse of the heavens.
Brahe made his contributions to science from this Swedish sanctum between 1576 and 1596 as he manned the largest observatory in all of Europe. Today, the spirit of Brahe’s ingenuity and curiosity are carried on by a newer trailblazer to Hven: Henric Molin, a chemistry-savvy whiskey pioneer with a full laboratory on the island. For Molin, Hven is a place where metaphoric links to the heavens are still very present.
“When people ask me what the island is like, I say, ‘You’ve heard of the Bible, right?’” Molin reflects, “‘then you’ve heard about Eden?’”

Molin and his wife, Anja, started as Hven’s hoteliers in 1999. They catered to visitors fascinated by the island’s rich history with Viking seafarers and pre-telescope astronomy. People also love Hven for its seasonal grandeur: Summertime is warm enough to swim in the ocean, while winter gets so cold there’s ice-skating on the island’s lake. The couple owned a family farm along with their hotel. Molin knew the island’s soil could grow corn and rye, so he decided to start making whiskey during the chilly months when there were fewer tourists. Over the years, his brand of Swedish whiskey — Spirit of Hven — would land awards on both sides of the Atlantic, including a Best of Class at ADI’s International Spirits Competition in 2021. Molin himself has been named European Distiller of the Year and a Wizard of Whisky.
Molin emphasizes that his approach is heavily tied to the island itself.
“We have hot air coming up from the soil, and obviously we’re surrounded by sea, so we get a very humid climate — but not too warm or hot,” he says. “And, very often, the worst weather systems go around us because of thermodynamics. So, we, like many islands, have very good soil, and that also will affect the mineralities you have, the metals you have, your nitrogen, your proteins. It even impacts what kind of carbohydrates you actually create within the grain. So, it really gives you a special character.”
But Molin acknowledges that water is another huge component of whiskey, and that’s where some challenges with localizing his spirits pop up. The island’s water is good for whiskey, but it is use-restricted because there is not enough. That means Molin imports the distillery’s water from the mainland. After that, he uses his laboratory to add the biological properties and exact minerals that Hven’s water possesses. At that point, everything about this serenely detached piece of Scandinavia flows through Molin’s whiskey.
Asked how important the island itself is to introducing people to his spirits, Molin’s answer comes quickly.
“It is important because your story always should be — and needs to be — integrated with your brand and how you express yourself,” he reflects. “When we tell our story, part of our DNA is where we’re from: Knowing the farm, knowing the land and trying to mirror that character into our bottles. When they drink our spirits, they should feel where it’s coming from.”