“O whisky, you are my heart’s delight,
In your embrace, I shall take flight.” – Dylan Thomas

When people think whisky, they tend to think Scotland… or Kentucky. They don’t usually think Lancaster. But buckle up, because one company is sure that that’s all about to change… with a mission dedicated to the pursuit of flavour, and developing a beautiful whisky for the burgeoning English Whisky scene.

I start this article with the disclaimer that I gave up chemistry when I was sixteen, so when I went along to Lancaster Brewery and Lancaster Spirits Company and met with Chris Pateman, one of the distillers and the commercial marketing manager. I said he would need to explain the process to me starting with the basics, and we could work our way up in complexity from there!

As such, I was given a crash course in how to make whisky and how the Lancaster Spirits Company came into being. The Company was dreamt up in 2019 as, among other things, the Brewery had four fermentation vessels of ten thousand litres and only two were being used, the company decided they wanted to expand and use the other two to make spirits, whilst being in full control of the process “from grain to glass,” with everything being done under one roof. Stay with me here as I take you to chemistry class to learn (abbreviated version) how to make whisky…

The start of the whisky journey (bar the malting of the barley), and one of the most important parts, is making sure that the brewing process is executed impeccably, so that the base of the spirit is of the highest possible quality. One of the key ways the brewery ensures this, is a lot of the process is by employing traditional processes, often done by hand. Apparently, when making the mash (the base product of beer/whisky etc.), most breweries will use a lauter in a mash tun to keep the mix of barley and water consistent – Lancaster Brewery doesn’t do that. Instead, the brewer mashes by hand, using an extremely long spade and turns the mixture himself (that would be a good forearm workout, wouldn’t it?!), which takes twenty to thirty minutes each time. This mixture is then left to macerate, which creates the wort, a sweet sugary liquid, ready for fermenting into alcohol.

Lancaster Brewery prides itself on two key qualities; taste and tradition. Taste comes before all else, as without that, there is no product and no reputation to build on. One of the ways that the brewery ensures the quality of the taste, is by using live yeast. Live yeast has fallen out of favour with many breweries, in lieu of something called “distillers yeast” (creative name, I know), because it has a higher yield than traditional live yeast, converting all the fermentable sugars into alcohol in just 48 hours, as opposed to traditional live brewer’s yeast which takes 96+ hours. The crux is the taste. By using the live yeast, the brewer is able to extract unique flavours and create a complex wash that is fruity and full of flavour. I was also keen on the fact that the waste product from this process is then used as animal feed, which a local farmer comes and picks up once or week or so.

Trying to keep their environmental impact to a minimum, the brewery has their own water borehole on site (apparently when they were drilling, the pressure in the chamber below was so high that upon hitting the chamber, water shot about 40m in the air!), the stills are steam powered from the hot water processes, and the brewery hall is solar powered.

Anyway, back to making whisky! The wash is then distilled twice, initially in a wash still, which strips away the low alcohols and keeps the high alcohols for the second distillation. The two-thousand litres of wash that comes from the brewery is distilled in the first instance into seven hundred litres at 35%; the second distilling, the spirit run brings the spirit from so called low wines into high percentage spirit ready for filling into casks. I tasted a very small amount of this new-make spirit mixture (on the tip of my finger), being told at this point the spirit is at 70% alcohol – definitely not at the fainthearted!

The spirit is then stored into barrels. When I first arrived on site, I naively assumed that a barrel was a barrel was a barrel. Apparently not. When making whisky, the barrel that the spirit is stored in effects the final taste in the bottle. Once it was explained, it made perfect sense, but it’s not something that I had even thought about before then. The Lancaster Spirit Company uses a variety of barrels to diversify the flavours that come out after maturation; from sherry barrels, to single use bourbon barrels from the US, to port barrels, so there are plenty of different tones and tastes for the blender to use when bottling the spirit.

The spirit is bottled by single cask, following the maturation process, and the first whisky will be available at the beginning of 2027, when the first spirit run from 2024 has been matured for the requisite three years to be labelled whisky.

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The really exciting thing for whisky lovers is that this is just the beginning, and there is an opportunity to get involved with the process. By contacting Lancaster Spirit Company, avid whisky lovers can purchase their own barrel and become part of the ‘Cask Collective,’ (which some folks have already done – I spotted barrels labelled “the weasel clan” and “S Taylor”). The whisky inside, of course, becomes yours, and it’s up to you what you do with it – whether you bottle it at three years, five years, seven years, etc. whether you bottle the whole barrel, or only part of it; or you could sell it back to Lancaster Spirit Company at the end of the day. The global whisky market has been steadily growing over the past few years (after a rapid rise and settle during/immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic), and whisky is clearly an investment for those interested in that sort of thing. Owning a barrel at Lancaster Spirits Company could be just the ticket, and as detailed above, the options as to what you do with it are numerous!

There is a huge amount of potential here for Lancaster Spirit Company as the market for English Whisky continues to grow. There is now an English Whisky Guild, of which there are plenty of members (and growing), with the aim to protect and promote English Whisky. This is all relatively new and English Whisky is just beginning it’s exciting journey onto the world stage; I for one am excited to watch (and taste) and see how it unfolds from here!