Hong Kong Spirits: N.I.P.’s Quest for Local Gin

When Jeremy Li and Nicholas Law decided to open a distillery, they had a clear vision of what they wanted to do. “We wanted a gin that truly tasted local,” says Law. “Local flavours, local ingredients.” 

But they didn’t know just how much of a challenge that would be. When they first hatched the idea in 2017, the only distilleries in Hong Kong were traditional tonic wine factories that had earned their distilling licences decades ago, meaning there wasn’t any clear path forward for opening a brand-new distillery. Even when they finally managed to launch in 2019, Hong Kong was in the throes of political upheaval — with Covid to follow soon after. 

“That was quite a difficult start for us,” says Law. But they made it. Over the past seven years, N.I.P. Distilling has produced nearly two dozen gins, with their Exotic City Gin earning a double gold medal at the 2025 San Francisco World Spirits Competition. They’ve made gin with Hong Kong-grown citrus and other local ingredients. And they’ve collaborated with local artists to create their labels and branding.

“We value local people making things in Hong Kong, because we know it’s actually very difficult to start something and keep it going here,” says Law, standing behind the bar of N.I.P.’s tasting room in Quarry Bay, sipping the distillery’s latest concoction, a gin inspired by yuenyeung, the coffee-tea hybrid popular in cha chaan tengs. “Hong Kong must be one of the toughest places in the world to actually make things. But it’s worth it.”

A quixotic quest for gin

Why start a distillery? “The reason is simple,” says Law, breaking into a grin. “We drink a lot.”

“We used to drink a lot,” clarifies Li, sitting on the opposite side of the bar from Law. “We loved the concept of a good gin and tonic.”

Both were working corporate jobs, Law as a lawyer and Li in branding, and they would often meet for a drink after working long overtime hours. “I think the idea of having our own brand or even setting up a distillery came from us looking at a lot of beautiful bottles behind bars,” says Law. 

At the time, Hong Kong’s craft beer scene was booming, with several new breweries opening per year. But nobody had yet opened a craft distillery. Li and Law saw an opportunity — but first, they had to learn how to actually make spirits. 

“I quit my lawyering gig. I hated my job anyway, so I just quit. And I spent some time travelling around Australia, where I had studied. There are a lot of good distilleries there,” says Law. He earned a diploma in distilling from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling, which offers online courses. “Then we both went to Scotland to do an internship in a very small micro-distillery in Perth, to really get our hands dirty. Making booze is the fun part, but there are a lot of moving parts — how to set the place up, how to run the whole distillery, how to sell the booze. Each of those is very different.” 

The duo returned to Hong Kong at the end of 2017 and looked into what they needed to actually set up a distillery. It wasn’t easy. “There aren’t many distilleries left in Hong Kong,” says Law. “It took us awhile to even identify the correct departments [to work with], because they kept kicking the ball around. There were a lot of hurdles to jump over because of the regulatory landscape — it’s a very old set of laws.”

They stumbled into a byzantine process involving approvals from several different departments, because unlike beer, spirits are considered a dangerous good that needs extra vetting to produce. It’s also a dutiable product — any liquor over 30 percent alcohol by volume in Hong Kong is subject to excise tax — and so Law and Li had to apply for a licence to turn their distilling space into a bonded warehouse. 

“It’s a bit of a fun fact — this space over there is considered outside of Hong Kong,” says Law, pointing to the production room separated from the tasting room by a glass partition. “It’s a tax-free zone in there. If we ship directly from there to another country, we don’t have to pay tax. But if it’s sold in Hong Kong, we have to pay 100 percent tax.” 

“There’s even CCTV,” adds Li. “Customs can access the CCTV to look at what we’re doing whenever they want.” 

If those customs officers were to tune in, what they’d see is a 200-litre copper churning with liquid that will eventually become gin. Getting this crucial piece of equipment proved to be another challenge. Every manufacturer they contacted was suspicious of their motivations: “I mean, we’re China, right? And we only wanted 200 litres. Some red flags went up,” says Law, explaining that the overseas companies were likely suspicious they were a front for a mainland manufacturer who was ordering a small still so they could copy the technology. 

Luckily, the duo’s travels had earned them a friend in Cameron Mackenzie, the head distiller at Four Pillars, an award-winning gin distillery in the Yarra Valley near Melbourne. Mackenzie recommended them to Christian Carl, a family-run company in Germany that has been making custom-made stills since 1869. “They made the stills for Four Pillars, Ki No Bi in Kyoto, Sipsmith in London — a lot of famous brands,” says Law. “We’re lucky they agreed to work with us because we’re so small. They’re more accustomed to making thousand- or two-thousand-litre stills.” 

Because renovations on the distillery ran late, Law and Li missed their appointment for technicians from Christian Carl to come to Hong Kong to install the still for them. “So they actually sent us 52 different photos,” says Law. “We had to lay all the parts down on the floor and identify them. It took us a couple of days to actually make sense of the whole thing. We ended up assembling it over a Skype call with the German guys.” 

There were plenty of moments when the pair wondered what they had gotten themselves into. “We did talk about whether we should have started a private label,” says Law — in other words, hiring an overseas distillery to make gin according to their recipe, which is the approach taken by Hong Kong gin brand Perfume Tree, whose spirit is distilled in the Netherlands. 

“But at the end of the day, we chose to build our own distillery because we stupidly believe in two things,” says Law, chuckling. “The first thing is that we can’t control the quality if it’s not distilled in Hong Kong. And the second is, we believe that if we’re calling ourselves a Hong Kong gin, we really want it to be made in Hong Kong.”

Gin that tastes like Hong Kong

For their first product, Law and Li decided to create a classic London Dry gin — the kind of juniper-forward tipple you’d use in a martini. “We wanted to stick to the basics rather than going completely off-piste,” saw Law. “But we still inserted a lot of Hong Kong elements.” Among the 21 botanicals are aged tangerine peels, osmanthus, fresh pear and two different types of tea. 

Their second gin, Exotic City, takes things in a more contemporary direction. “We wanted to focus on local citrus, and we found this particular farm in Kwu Tung that grows perfume lemon, which has a lemongrassy flavour to it,” says Law. They added a total of 16 botanicals to complement the perfume lemon, including kaffir lime leaves, cardamom, verbena and black tea from Yunnan. 

There are many more. “We like to play around with different flavours,” says Law. “Because gin is very subjective, right?” 

There have been some failed experiments. “I really wanted to try red dates, because when you cook it in a soup with some rice balls, it’s sweet,” says Law. “But when you distill it, it’s really weird. It’s almost foul.” 

But there have been even more successes, especially with a series of gins called Catnip that showcase different types of tea. “The first one we made is with Honey Phoenix Orchid, an oolong that is on the floral side and a bit fruity as well,” says Law. “We added a bit of grapefruit, a bit of ginger and juniper berries. Da Hong Pao is more full-bodied, a lot sweeter, with a bit of a stone fruit character. So we added tangerine peel, coriander seeds and juniper berries to keep it dry, light, elegant.”

The third edition of Catnip is based on yuenyeung. “We’re using two different types of jasmine tea and a locally-roasted Ethiopian coffee,” says Law. He pours out a small measure, adds a splash of tonic water, and takes a sip. His eyes light up. “It tastes like espresso and tonic.”

Craft versus commerce

N.I.P. is about more than just gin — something hinted at by its name, short for No Important Person, which the pair translated as 無名氏 (mou4 ming4 si6, “anonymous”) in Cantonese. “We believe firmly that you don’t need to be a VIP, you don’t need to have background or status, to do what you want,” says Law. “Even in a place like Hong Kong, as long as you take the first step, through hard work and persistence, you can still do something that you’re passionate about, something that you deem worthwhile.”

That philosophy has motivated the pair of distillers to work with local artists on their branding. They hired renowned calligrapher Fung Siu-wah, better known as Wah Gor or Brother Wah, to create their logo. “He made a lot of signs around Yau Ma Tei and Jordan, so even if we didn’t know it at the time, we grew up looking at his work,” says Li. They hired illustrator Kathy Lam, known for her playful cat characters, to draw the labels for Catnip. Another local artist, Charlene Man, made the label for a gin aged in Madeira casks. 

Ultimately, it comes down to the distinction between craft and commerce. “Being a local manufacturer, we want to work with other people making things here,” says Law. “We insist on telling a different story in each different bottle. And that’s how we do it.”