The Lakes Distillery

Gin / Whisky Intro

The Lakes Distillery is a beautiful site, it’s made up of grade 2 listed buildings that were once a dairy farm. Stunning iron gates welcome you into a courtyard, with a centrepiece of an iron sculpture of whisky casks. Owned by Paul Currie, whisky is in his DNA. His family own and run the famous Arran distillery. The Currie family holidayed in The Lakes and so it was Paul’s dream to create whisky in this beautiful area – and found and restored the site in 2014. Its location is perfect being just feet away from the River Derwent and one thing you need a lot of to make wiskey, is water.

The Tour Gin 2 ⭐️ Whiskey 4⭐️

It’s a hard one for me for two reasons. Firstly, I’ve done the tour (a lot) as I used to bring large corporate groups here with M-Sport. Although it is good to listen rather than watching people don’t touch things or wander off. Secondly, I am of course a BIG gin geek and not a whiskey fan. However, I can appreciate the skill and art of the spirit making and the experience of a tour. But I was always going to be disappointed with the gin part of the tour – as it’s very much a whisky distillery that make gin as well, in our hosts words “to make money while they wait for the whiskey”.

You start the with a short video taking your on a journey of the river Derwent. The river is really important reason why they created the distillery here and the video centres on this story. From its source in the mountains to it ends in the sea, with some history interwoven in the story along the way. An enjoyable video for the first time, my Husband really enjoyed it (its my fifth). I know Sarah talked a lot about what was on the walls but I think we should have had five minutes here to read the walls as in my experience reading then hearing will help people remember the messages you want to tell them.

Our host Sarah then showed us then into the distillery. For safety reasons, you can’t take photos in there.

Sarahs presentation style was very laid back. It was very interesting to learn about the whisky process – Yorkshire Barley, milled, mashed, yeast added and alcohol made. Huge beautiful shiny industrial vats, are normally making whiskey ready for the casks ( under maintenance when we visit) disappointing they weren’t on but nevertheless Sarah did a good job explaining the process, and I didn’t miss the smell you would normally have. Most interesting facts for me were that over 19,000 litres of Derwent water are used in the process, as well as how they use copper and steel pipes to make different flavours. We saw the two huge stills used in the whiskey making and Sarah explained the process of how a still works.

Before we left, Sarah showed us the gin/vodka still at the end of the distillery. Its an un-named large 1,200 litre still. Sadly they took the name off a while ago and haven’t put one on since. I’ve never seen an unnamed still before, I hope they are going to name it soon – maybe a competition?

The gin part was about 5 minutes of the tour, Sarah told us that 9 botanicals get “thrown” in to the still and then left over 2 days to seep, then boil. This method, the single shot method, apparently gives a smoother finish. I think the water obviously play a big part in the taste too, apparently they mix in the river water here but bottle elsewhere.