In earlier days, Granville Island was more or less a market, some scattered theatres and restaurants, and a whole lot of driftwood sculpture. The rewards for passing through the island’s bottleneck entrance have become more intriguing since then. Case in point: the Liberty Distillery’s elegant tasting room, with its early-20th-century carved-wood bar.

Here, staff of the two-year-old establishment serve up a menu of signature cocktails based on the contents of the copper pots visible through the room’s interior windows, such as silky Truth vodka, the martini-loving Endeavour gin, and Railspur No. 1 White whiskey, a suave cousin of the drink commonly known as moonshine. And all of it comes from B.C.–grown raw materials.

But don’t get too wobbly if you’re planning to shop afterward at the glass-blower just down the road—you know, all those shelves, that open furnace…