17th August 2026
Does Expensive Alcohol Taste Better?
We’ve all wondered to ourselves “So does expensive alcohol taste better?” There’s that moment familiar when you stand in the spirits aisle of a supermarket or local off licence or shop. In one hand, you’re holding a perfectly respectable-looking bottle of gin for £20. In the other you hold a beautiful bottle containing a small-batch craft gin costing £40 or £45.
Both will make a G&T. One costs twice as much. So what exactly are you paying for?
Is the expensive one genuinely better? Are the ingredients better? Is somebody taking more care over it? Can you actually taste the difference? Can you trust it? Or are you just about to pay £25 extra for a handsome bottle, a nice label and a story about botanicals gathered at dawn?
The answer is that it depends.
First: what are you actually paying for?
Making spirits in Britain isn’t cheap. Alcohol Duty on spirits above 22% ABV is currently charged according to the amount of pure alcohol in the bottle. This duty point is worth knowing because it makes the economics concrete: since 1 February 2026, UK spirits above 22% ABV attract Alcohol Duty of £33.99 per litre of pure alcohol. A 70cl bottle at 40% therefore contains roughly £9.52 of Alcohol Duty alone, before VAT, bottle, ingredients, production, branding, distribution or profit.
But there are also enormous differences in how spirits themselves are produced.
At one end of the scale are businesses designed to make very large quantities extremely efficiently. At the other are small distilleries doing things that are slower, more hands-on and consequently more expensive.
Rosemullion Distillery sits very firmly in the latter camp. We make our spirits in the Cornish countryside near our home on the Helford River, using hand-built copper stills to produce batches of around 300–500 bottles.
Small isn’t automatically better. But it does allow distillers like us to pay very close attention to what’s happening in each batch — and to make decisions based on flavour rather than simply volume and consistency.
And those decisions can end up in your glass.
The expensive bit is often what gets left out
One of the less glamorous secrets of distilling is that you don’t necessarily want everything that comes out of the still.
During distillation, different compounds emerge at different stages. The distiller has to decide which part of the run to keep for the finished spirit — the desirable ‘heart’ — and where to make the cuts separating it from the heads and tails.
Those decisions affect both flavour and yield.
Then there are the raw ingredients themselves. Different botanicals, fruit, grain and molasses cost different amounts. Fresh and locally sourced ingredients can cost more than mass-produced alternatives. Ageing a spirit means buying barrels, finding somewhere to keep them and then waiting while your money sits inside them.
Rosemullion’s Gold Rum, for example, is 100% pot distilled and then oak-aged. That ageing isn’t simply there to make it look golden. The interaction between spirit and wood contributes vanilla and oak alongside the bittersweet cane character of the rum.
You can speed up many things in life. Oak barrels are less cooperative.
While answering ‘does expensive alcohol taste better?’, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the beautiful bottle – expensive gin v cheap gin.
Marketing also costs money.
So does packaging.
So do celebrity endorsements, elaborate launches, advertising campaigns, design agencies and bottles so architectural that you feel guilty putting them in the recycling.
A £50 spirit isn’t necessarily twice as good as a £25 spirit simply because it costs twice as much.
Some of the extra money may have gone into making what’s inside the bottle. Some may have gone into making you want what’s inside the bottle.
Usually, it’s a mixture of both.
Which leaves us with the much more interesting question.
Can you actually taste the difference?
There’s one rather good way to find out
Do it blind.
Take a £20 supermarket gin and a craft gin costing £35–£45. Ideally choose broadly comparable styles — there’s not much point putting a traditional London Dry against something flavoured with rhubarb and declaring that they’re different.
Get someone else to pour a small measure of each into identical glasses without telling you which is which.
And then forget all the nonsense.
You don’t have to swirl the glass meaningfully while announcing that you’re getting wet slate and a distant memory of grandfather’s tool shed.
Smell them.
Which smells more appealing? Can you distinguish individual aromas? Does one simply smell strongly of alcohol while the other has more going on?
Then take a small sip.
Which feels smoother? Which tastes more balanced? Does one flavour dominate everything else, or do different flavours emerge as you hold it in your mouth? What remains after you’ve swallowed?
Most importantly: which one do you want to drink again?
That’s your answer.
What does ‘better’ actually taste like?
This is where things become subjective.
A well-made spirit might have greater complexity: instead of one obvious flavour, you find several. It might have better balance, so that alcohol, sweetness, botanicals, fruit, oak or spice work together rather than fighting for attention.
Texture matters too. One spirit may feel thin and fiery while another seems rounder or silkier.
Then there’s the finish — simply what remains after you’ve swallowed. Does the flavour disappear immediately or does something pleasant linger?
None of this requires expertise.
If one rum tastes of vanilla, another reminds you of gingerbread and a third just makes you think Christ, that’s strong, those are perfectly valid tasting notes.
In fact, they’re probably more useful than somebody else’s.
Price can buy time
The difference becomes particularly interesting with aged spirits.
Time is an ingredient you can’t list on the back of a bottle, but somebody has to pay for it.
With Cornish rum or Cornish whisky, the type of wood, previous use of the barrel, length of maturation and character of the original spirit all affect what eventually comes out.
The producer also has money tied up in something that can’t yet be sold.
That’s one reason comparing a cheap young spirit with something carefully matured isn’t quite the same as comparing two brands of baked beans.
You’re partly paying for waiting.
Whether you personally think the result is worth waiting — and paying — for is another matter.
So does expensive alcohol taste better?
Sometimes.
Better ingredients can cost more. Small-scale production costs more. Taking greater care over distillation can reduce yield. Oak ageing costs money. Time costs money.
All of those things can produce a spirit with greater flavour, complexity, balance and character.
But price itself isn’t a flavour.
A famous name costs money. A spectacular bottle costs money. Marketing costs money. And there are undoubtedly relatively inexpensive spirits that punch well above their weight — just as there are expensive ones you may find thoroughly underwhelming.
That’s why the blind tasting is so useful.
If you prefer the £45 craft gin, you may begin to understand what you’re paying the extra £25 for.
If you prefer the £20 one, congratulations. You’ve just saved yourself £25.
The point isn’t to train yourself to like expensive booze.
It’s to become slightly more curious about what’s in the glass: how it was made, what you’re paying for and, ultimately, whether you can taste the difference.
At Rosemullion Distillery, we make our spirits in batches of just 300–500 bottles using traditional copper stills, local botanicals and fruit where appropriate, with our rum pot-distilled and selected spirits matured in oak.
But you shouldn’t buy a bottle simply because we’ve told you all that. Or because we’ve told you that we have repeat customers from all over the world.
