Legal and Regulations
Choeng Doi has been licensed to distil since 2024. Thailand regulates how spirits are made, labelled and sold, and who may drink them, and this page records what we can say plainly about each. It covers our licence, how Thai spirits are classified, strengths and label approval, how licences to sell work, and the legal drinking age of 20. It describes how we operate and is not legal advice. For anything about your own business, ask the Excise Department or a Thai lawyer.
Licensed to distil
Choeng Doi has been licensed to distil since 2024. Our estate, decades older, offers a range of experiences you can book in advance. The distillery operates from that estate, on the edge of the Doi Luang Chiang Dao UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.
How Thai spirits are classified
Our journal explains that Thai excise law defines distilled spirit classifications primarily by alcohol content and production method, not by raw material or flavour profile, so craft producers often have little choice but to register their products within existing categories. The journal also notes that there is no formal appellation, and no regulatory framework that distinguishes fresh juice from molasses production, for Thai sugarcane spirits. That is why this site uses descriptive language, such as sugarcane spirit and rice spirit, and gives the raw material, grower and process for each release.
Strength and label approval
Our Thai bottlings are 40% ABV, in 70 cL bottles. Choeng Doi Blanc and the single estate releases are listed at 40% ABV for Thailand and 51% ABV for international markets. SONKLIN is 40% ABV in both. For private label projects, samples and labels are submitted to the Excise Department for testing and approval before the first dry goods order, and compliance and export documentation are handled as part of the production process.
Licences to sell
The Excise Department issues licences to sell liquor. On its liquor, tobacco and playing card licence page, in Thai, it takes applications online and accepts renewals up to 90 days before expiry. Its published eligibility rules for selling liquor include that the applicant has not had a liquor sale licence revoked within the last year, and that the premises are not a place where the alcohol control law or other law bans sale. For the second category of sale licence the premises also cannot be inside a school, a temple, mosque, church or other place of worship, or a fuel station, nor at a place whose previous licence holder had their licence revoked within the last five years. This is our summary, not an official translation.
The legal drinking age is 20
The legal drinking age in Thailand is 20. Our age gate and footer say so. Visitors under 20 are welcome on a distillery tour, free with a participating adult. Promotions we run, such as SONKLIN Week, state that participants must meet the legal drinking age in Thailand.
