Like everyone, we put our plans on hold for 2020. We still ran the competition, and it continued its year-over-year growth.
2020 Recap
ADC Membership: We now have over 70 members of various types, including artisan distillers, soon-to-be artisan distillers, and suppliers. Our hope is that we can continue to grow this with the Conference & Trade Show coming.
Newsletter: We published 11 newsletters this year, and saw an audience growth of 35%.
Our most popular story was Kind of Blue, by Charlene Rooke, about Victoria Distillers’ attempt to trademark the colour blue for the Empress Gin, and their quest to stop small producers from making blue gins.
CASC: Entries into the 2020 Canadian Artisan Spirit Competition (CASC), which published its results in February, grew by about 10 per cent over the previous year.
Sanitizer! We quickly developed a database of distillers across the country producing sanitizer, updating it almost daily at the beginning of the pandemic.
What’s in Store for 2021?
CASC results: Results will be announced on Tuesday, February 9, 2021.
Artisan Distillers Conference & Trade Show: Save the date! On October 19-20, we’ll be hosting Canada’s first conference created exclusively for artisan distillers! This was originally planned for November 2020, but we’re going to try again. It’s still early days but the website is up!
Artisan Distillers seal? Still in the works. This is another project that was put on hold in 2020, but we hope to revisit it in2021.
ADC Data Project: We have begin a project to understand the scope artisan distilleries and spirits across Canada. As a start we are seeing what information we can access and gather from our governments. We plan to launch an annual survey to augment that data, once we know what we’re missing.
Do you want to help? Do you have any great ideas for things we should be doing? Reach out!