We met in a room surrounded by whisky connoisseurs. A new acquaintance called me over to the New Brunswick Distillery booth, “You have to try this gin!” he insisted. Seeing the lavender label on it, I was hesitant, but two smiles and one professional reassurance from the distillery co-owner, Katherine Lanteigne, I was converted.
New Brunswick Distillery is located in the small town of Bathurst, New Brunswick. The business is a passion project of Katherine Lanteigne and her husband, Michael (Mihai) Petrovici, fueled by a generational history in spirit making. With just over a year in production, the distillery has already received a Silver award for Best Distillery in NB by Excellence NB, People’s Choice Award (2025), and the Vodka Lemonade received the “Foodie’s Choice Award” by Food & Beverage Atlantic (2025).
Kateryna Topol: When did New Brunswick Distillery open?
Katherine Lanteigne: We opened in July 2024. We are still very, very new, and as you could see at the NB Spirits Festival, we only had two gins because when we registered a few months ago, we only had those two products at the liquor store [the festival requires pre-approval of all showcased spirits]. But now we have more, including vodka, rum, and ready-to-drink beverages (RTD), so we are slowly but surely making our way into the market.
It was an honour to be at the Spirits Festival, because there were only two companies from New Brunswick – First Light Distillery and us – and it is a whisky-focused festival, so making the cut was an honour. A few of our RTD products have put us on the map because they have been performing well in stores, which helped us catch the attention of the ANBL (The New Brunswick Liquor Corporation).
KT: Which is great support, I’m sure. As far as the concept for the distillery, your website mentions generations of spirit-making history, tell me about that
KL: My husband, Michael Petrovici, is from Eastern Europe, from Romania, and making spirits is deeply rooted in their traditions. It is still legal in Romania to make your own alcohol, so it’s very common for people to have a still in their garage or backyard. The earth in Romania is so fertile, it is insane. You walk on the streets, and there are apricot trees, blackberries growing in ditches, and hops climbing fences along the road. Here we are working hard to grow hops, and there they are basically a weed. So they have access to all this fruit so many of them make brandy.
Michael’s parents have an orchard and since he was little, he was making alcohol with his father, grandfather, and uncles. And that’s still the case now, every time we go there, it’s like “batch 2025” there, it’s called Țuică, it’s plum brandy, a national alcoholic beverage of Romania, but you can make it with any fruit. This year, his family made apple brandy.
We met here, our distillery is on Main Street, and we do have a few other businesses here: Kaffeine Espresso Bar and Au Bootlegger Pub, just beside the distillery. Michael was always saying it would be nice to create something, some products and spirits. Which was also very tactical for our pub. Working with a distiller, Chris Bartkow, we started with what most distilleries start with: vodka, followed by gin, because those two don’t need ageing. We now have two gins, including a London Dry gin called Leap Day London Dry, which we tested on Leap Day before we opened; it was a very special day. That was followed by vodka and the Lemon Lavender Gin, which we had at the Spirits Festival.
Left: Distiller Chris Bartkow; image by Fred Guitard, La Cave Media. Katherine Lanteigne at the Food & Beverage Atlantic awards.
KT: And those two go hand-in-hand because you need vodka to make the gin, right?
KL: Yes, exactly! And then we started making the RTD products, which I think is what gained us all the attention. Our Vodka Lemonade launched in April, and in the summer, it surpassed Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Smirnoff Iced in sales, which is when ANBL noticed us.
KT: Very cool! I don’t see them on your website, though …
KL: No, because we aren’t selling them online, we are having a hard time keeping up with the demand.
KT: So it’s kind of like you closed a loop between your properties by opening a distillery, and you make beer as well?
KL: We do make beer, but it’s mostly for our bar. There is so much competition in beer, so spirits are the main focus. We actually just launched Vodka Carbanerry, made with local cranberries, and it’s been very popular.
KT: So you use a lot of local ingredients?
KL: We try to source as locally as possible, but things like lemons, you can’t get those here. We recently launched a new gin, called Arboré Gin, which uses all local ingredients. I go into the Acadian Forest with my family to forage throughout the year. It’s a very local gin which uses things like spruce tips, cedar bark, winter greens, and so on. Our first batch was only 69 bottles, which we sold in a week and a half. For this gin, it takes us a full year to gather all the ingredients because they are not available year-round. We’re in the middle of bottling the latest batch now, should be about 500 bottles this time.
KT: Very cool! What are some of your other sustainability initiatives?
KL: We have a few. Right now, all of the leftover stillage from production we send to local farmers, for example. We are also looking at creative ways to use the leftover botanicals from the gin, aiming to produce as little waste as possible.
All branding for the distillery is done by a local designer, Zoé Arseneau from Miette Design.
KT: Being located in the heart of Bathurst, you probably don’t have a lot of room to grow, how big is your production?
KL: We have one still, and to be honest, we are already feeling like we’re running out of space. It’s a three-story building, but everything happens on the main floor. There is also a tasting room there, so not a lot of room for production. For example, if we’re shipping 13 pallets of RTDs, we don’t actually have floorspace to store them, so we have to get creative.
KT: So no immediate plans for expansion?
KL: Not right now, we don’t want to grow too fast, we need to look at trends and think through it all strategically to avoid being a one-hit-wonder.
KT: Totally makes sense. And people can visit the distillery?
KL: Yes, we have a tasting room, we do tours, and the space is available for event rentals as well. We are looking at hosting bigger tour groups in Bathurst, so working on fine-tuning those in the next few months. We will also soon have workshops, like a workshop on making your own gin – we have a six-station area upstairs, called the gin school, it’s already gathering quite a bit of attention because of the setup.
