Yes, just the four, Chris, Alexandra, Alison and Shane make up the entire team from production to marketing, even the artwork was produced by Alexandra, so it’s quite remarkable. While he’s said that he hopes that gives extra fruit flavour, he was also quick to point out that in the early days he and the rest of the team would experiment with different yeasts, so there is potential for variation from cask to cask in the future.Īll of this work with just the four of them. For their own added kink Shane boils the whisky wash for ten minutes at the end, while also stressing the yeast during fermentation to increase its work load and multiplication. Now as Shane and Alison Parr have run the Stonehouse brewery for some fifteen years, they know how to make a mash. In the end a single run of the still gives an equivalent 5-6 distillations, a far cry from what you might find elsewhere but giving a crisper spirit. Proper education is always key, and in 2016 Chris and Shane made their way up to Elgin to participate in an intense week long course from the IBD.Īfter several years of plotting and planning, finally their efforts were rewarded when they received a grant to help them on their way, and immediately went about installing their still ‘Hilda’, a 1000L German made Hybrid pot and column still in November 2017.Īs you can see from Hilda, she’s a pot/column hybrid, eliminating the need for a wash and spirit still as the wash heads into the pot with the distillation running up the column. While the idea was to make a whisky focused distillery, everyone involved knew that it would take a lot of work and they elected to distil other spirits as well. To start a distillery is no simple matter, and much planning went into it. Chris Toller, with fifteen years in telecoms, and wife Alexandra Toller had a few conversations with Shane and Alison Parr who run the nearby Stonehouse Brewery, and the idea for the distillery came from simple discussion between the two families. Henstone Distillery nests in Oswestry, that’s in Shropshire for those who don’t know there geography and that’s in England for those who know it less. 45 minutes and half a bottle of whisky later and I’ve got a pretty good idea about Henstone, so let’s dive in and discuss the latest English whisky producer. Whacking that email link at 6.55PM I sat down to look, listen and furiously scribble notes and immediately noted a few names on the call, Amy Seton, Dan Humphries, Richard Foster, all people well respected through the English whisky industry. What if I did things differently?’įrom new techniques to new crops, to returning to the old ways and bringing in historical grains English whisky has captured that essence of discovery that the country so readily attributes to itself, but with the whisky it’s not just posturing, it has the follow through to routinely and consistently push towards new flavours, new ideas and new horizons for whisky. Those that remain have constantly delivered product above and beyond what we have expected of England, and while some say that they have learnt from their northern and western neighbours what is becoming clearer every day is that they have seen the direction whisky has moved over the past few decades and every distiller has reached the same conclusion ‘huh. If you think about it, in the last decade over two dozen distilleries have sprung up and you could count on one hand which have been less than spectacular. I was unlucky to miss the initial sale despite my excitement about it, but after emailing Henstone and begging asking if they had any left, they were kind enough to invite me on the second round of their virtual whisky launch. Recently Henstone distillery in England celebrated their whisky coming of age, and the first bottles shipped around the country to those eagerly awaiting another chapter in England’s whisky revival. January had some of that too, so for this World Whisky Wednesday let’s look at a promising young English distillery. What gives more cause for celebration though is when a whisky reaches maturity. There hasn’t been much to celebrate yet, though taking the time to find something is fun (for example the 30th of January was the anniversary of The Peace of Munster between Spain and the Netherlands). You can see the original version on Marcus’ site here Ģ021 has had a wild start. Marcus Parmenter, aka, “somewhiskybloke” produced an article about us and our whisky soon after our inaugural launch. Whisky Review – By “somewhiskybloke” Introduction
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