The Lakes Distillery

Cumbria is home to the Lakes District and, consequently, the Lakes Distillery. It was founded in 2011 by Paul Currie, who you may know as one of the co-founders of the Isle of Arran Distillery. You'll find the distillery in a Lake District national park within a painstakingly renovated 160-year-old farmstead on the banks of the River Derwent. Because of said location, they can’t construct any additional buildings, so they have a very impressive distillery-in-a-room set-up to distil their spirits. For their whisky distillation, they have a pair of custom-designed McMillan stills, as well as a smaller still for their Lakes Gin and Vodka, which were released in 2014. A cool feature of the Lakes Distillery is that their descending lyne arms from the stills can send spirit vapours into two different shell and tube condensers, one made of stainless steel and one made of copper, depending on the style of spirit they want to create. In December 2016, Dhavall Ghandi joined the team as whisky master, bringing immense knowledge from studying centuries of whisky heritage, while also remaining open to a world of new inspiration. If you fancy finding out more about how he gets involved in every aspect of the whisky making process at The Lakes Distillery, we just so happen to have a blog post all about that. Over 80% of The Lakes’ spirit is filled into different types of ex-sherry casks. Excitingly, the Lakes unveiled The Whiskymaker’s Reserve in September 2019, the first in a series of single malt whiskies from the distillery. Oh, and the Lakes Distillery is quite near Penrith. Pen-rith.