Region & History

Anyone traveling through London in 1887 could find whisky without taking the ferry to Scotland. The distillery chronicler Alfred Barnard visited four English whisky distilleries at the time: Vauxhall and Bank Hall in Liverpool, one in Bristol, and the Lea Valley Distillery in east London, in Stratford. They produced grain and malt whisky decades before anyone spoke of "Scotch" as its own category. England, then, already had a whisky history, one that hardly anyone remembers today.

In 1903, the last fire went out under the still at Lea Valley. Scotch malt and gin were cheaper and more in demand, so the owner shifted production to Scotland. With that, the last English whisky distillery vanished from the market. What followed was one of the longest pauses in drinks history: for almost exactly a hundred years, no whisky was distilled in England.

That changed in 2006 in Roudham, a village in Norfolk. There, St George's Distillery opened, the first distillery built specifically for English malt whisky in a century. The first casks were filled before Christmas 2006, and the first mature cask went on sale in 2009. Anyone who bought a bottle of English whisky back then was buying something genuinely new.

After Norfolk, other regions followed. In 2014, Cotswolds Distillery opened in the English Midlands, and The Lakes Distillery opened in a converted farm near Bassenthwaite Lake in Cumbria. A year later, Dariusz Plażewski and Ewelina Chruszczyk founded Bimber Distillery in London, named after the Polish word for moonshine. In Cornwall, distinctly local projects emerged with Hicks & Healeys and Pocketful of Stones.

Today, England counts around seventy whisky distilleries according to industry figures, most of them in the southwest and southeast of the country. No law protects the name "English whisky" as strictly as "Scotch" is protected; every distillery charts its own course. What unites them is the timing: practically every one was founded after 2005.