THE FLORIDA CANE DISTILLERY

At the Florida CANE Distillery, we’re a team of craft spirit experts dedicated to creating a tasting experience that captures the Florida lifestyle. With fresh Florida produce and Florida sugar cane at the forefront, we’ve established brand recognition, distribution, and pride of place as Florida’s first EVER vodka tasting room. Today, we’re poised for exponential growth as the global craft spirit market booms—outpacing even craft beer with a CAGR of over 32%.

We don’t settle for ordinary. Our craft spirits can already be found in Wal-Mart, Total Wine, ABC Liquors, Disney, Busch Gardens, Sea World, & more thanks to our exceptional distribution team and award-winning product.

We wanted to create an end-to-end experience, where visitors to our distillery could taste our spirits, see our micro-distilling process, and buy their favorite SKUs to take home, but outdated Florida legislation initially prevented us from taking the leap...So we set out to change that. The result? After yearly visits to the state capitol, we were officially licensed to become Florida's first craft distillery with a vodka tasting room.

Florida CANE Distillery began in 2012 as a proof of concept company by two good friends, Lee Nelson and Pat O'Brien. Using a small business loan of $40,000, the pair established the company in an 800 Sq. Ft. warehouse and released our flagship product, Florida CANE Vodka, followed by a succession of flavored vodkas made with locally-sourced produce. By the end of 2014, they launched and developed a line of high-proof moonshines—Sunshine Moonshine—as well as an award-winning New World Gin—Tamiami Gin.

Lee and Pat advocated tirelessly for legislative reform that would pave the way for the establishment of Florida's first craft distillery with a vodka tasting room, resulting in press exposure and community support that led to increasing demand from large retail accounts and Florida based theme-parks. To keep up with the demand, the pair moved operations to a larger space in the historic Ybor City district of Tampa, Florida...And the rest is history! 

The craft spirits market is set to overtake the craft beer market, with the industry expected to reach revenues of more than $20 billion by 2023 at a CAGR of over 32%. 

We take pride in perfecting every batch that we produce— from the selection of our ingredients to the production. Unlike large batch companies like Tito's, Ciroc, and Grey Goose who extract sugar from cheap grains, we opt for Florida-grown sugar cane: a more labor intensive, but purer form of sugar. 

And it doesn't end there! To take it to the next level, we created and continue to utilize a custom charcoal filtration system made from coconut husks that removes the bitter flavors and impurities that exist in other spirit brands.

We have the largest micro-distillery spirit portfolio in the nation, with 32 SKUs each marketed separately and independently successful.

One of the reasons we have so many key partnerships already established is our attractive incentives program. Our partners get:

We’ve successfully established multiple streams of revenue to ensure our continued success. These include:

In the wake of COVID-19, we were able to supply both our local community and hard-hit areas like New York, New Orleans, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas with our sanitizing products. In addition, we donated a large portion of each batch to local first responders, nonprofits, and vulnerable communities throughout the Tampa Bay area. This pivot allowed us to retain our staff and pay our bills.

The Florida CANE Distillery began in 2012 with 2 people, a 26 Gallon still, and a small storage facility. Over the years, we’ve added:

We’ve established growth, but we’re not stopping here! Our long-term goal is to have a state-wide network of small, interactive, consumer facing nano-distilleries, each featuring highly specialized, small-scale spirit production.