Death’s Door Gin

Brand Name Origin

Death’s Door Gin takes its name from Death’s Door Passage, the most treacherous waterway in the Great Lakes. The passage separates Washington Island in Lake Michigan from the Door County Peninsula of the Wisconsin mainland. It is where the cold waters of Lake Michigan meet with the warm waters of Green Bay, creating severe currents that caused hundreds of shipwrecks. It represents a history of trial and struggles against the forces of nature that have dominated the channel over time. The character required to take on this strait is embodied in our Death’s Door Gin, a truly remarkable spirit.

Brand History

The award-winning Death’s Door Gin brand was acquired in 2019 and is now being produced at our facility in Cambridge, Wisconsin. We relocated the original German Carl hybrid pot still used to produce Death’s Door Gin. The still is dedicated to only making Death’s Door, distilling the gin brand’s recipe of a simple botanical mix of juniper, coriander and fennel.

The Gin

Death’s Door Gin is both a macerated and vapor-infused gin, slanted toward a London Dry profile but uniquely its own. Crafted utilizing a 2,156-liter Carl Pot Still, each small batch run yields roughly 750 liters of 80% ABV distillate. Reverse osmosis-filtered water is slowly added incrementally over several months and rested at bottle proof (47.5% ABV) for an additional month before bottling. Each batch of gin is roughly a 4-month process from distillation to bottling. We are proud to have a Wisconsin produced product sold in some of the world’s largest gin markets including the UK, Italy and Spain.

The Awards