What exactly does a craft distillery do on a Tuesday afternoon when the tour groups haven’t arrived and the heat outside hits 108 degrees? At the Scottsdale outpost of Arizona Distilling Company, the answer, it turns out, is quietly run one of the more interesting small bars in Old Town.
The tasting room sits along The Strand, a stretch of Old Town Scottsdale that draws a mix of locals who know better than to fight the weekend crowds and visitors who wandered off the main drag and stumbled onto something genuinely worth their time. The room itself isn’t trying to be rustic or industrial in the way craft-spirit spaces so often do — wood, copper accents, some natural light. The setup is clean and unpretentious, which lets the spirits themselves carry the room.
Arizona Distilling focuses on Arizona-grown ingredients: desert durum wheat, Pima County barley, local botanicals. Their flagship Copper City Bourbon is the entry point most people reach for first, and it’s a good call — it’s approachable but not soft, with a dry finish that makes sense in the context of the desert. The more interesting pour is the Copper City Single Barrel expression when it’s available; ask the bartender what’s open that week. Mesa Luna, their blanco tequila-style spirit made with 100% blue agave grown in the state, reads cleaner than most tequilas at the same price and deserves more attention than it typically gets.
Flights run around twelve to sixteen dollars depending on what’s in them, and the staff will walk through each pour without making it feel like a lecture. On a slow Tuesday in August, two regulars were working through a cocktail menu while one of the distillers wandered in and out of the production space in the back. That kind of casual proximity to the actual craft — the smell of grain mash faint in the air, bottles being labeled at a table nearby — is part of what separates this from a cocktail bar that happens to sell whiskey.
The cocktail program is small but considered. The Sonoran Old Fashioned swaps maple syrup for the standard sugar cube, which plays better with the bourbon’s grain-forward profile. A mezcal-adjacent smoky sour made with their Ocho Ojos expression is worth a detour if citrus-forward drinks are the preference. Neither is revolutionary, but both are competently made and reasonably priced for Old Town.
Saturday mornings bring a different crowd — people stopping in after the farmers market, groups starting an Old Town crawl before noon, the occasional bachelorette party still early enough to be sober. The distillery’s production tours, usually offered on weekends, run about forty-five minutes and include a pour at the end. They fill up; booking ahead is worth the effort.
Pricing is honest across the board. A flight, a cocktail, a bottled spirit to take home — none of it requires a second look at the tab. For a region where craft spirits have mostly meant gin or vodka made somewhere else and rebranded, Arizona Distilling is doing something with more conviction: keeping the supply chain short, naming the farms, and making a bourbon that actually reflects where it’s from.
On a hot weekday afternoon, that’s enough reason to stay an extra round.
