From the window of her garden office Sarah Burgess can see the clouds of steam and the pagoda roof of a distillery in the near distance. It is one of 51 whisky distilleries in Speyside, where she lives and grew up. Wherever you go in Speyside you will pass a distillery. It is a different story in Cumbria, where there is just one.
Sarah has spent her entire career in the whisky industry, all of it in Scotland, so the significance of running The Lakes Distillery in England cannot be overstated.
“I'm sure you can imagine what all of my colleagues and friends had to say to a Scottish person who’s going over the border, it’s not been pleasant,” she laughs. “My response is ‘oh, Scotch whisky, it’s just so old fashioned. I’m into the new way of English whisky now’.”
That English way has been happening successfully at Setmurthy, near Bassenthwaite Lake, for ten years with The Lakes Distillery winning numerous awards along the way, the pick of which is The World’s Best Single Malt Whisky for The Whiskymaker's Reserve No.4. For a creative innovator like Sarah, it is an opportunity full of potential.
“I've been working in whisky for 27 years and I've done a variety of roles from visitor centre guide to health and safety to operational management then senior leader and then on to whisky making so I’ve had a huge breadth of experience.
“I love Scotland and I'm proud to be Scottish – there is no mistaking my national identity – but because English whisky is so up and coming and The Lakes Distillery is celebrating its tenth birthday this year there is an excitement and energy around English whisky.
“There's opportunity for a whisky maker to play much more in England. Because Scotland is governed by the rules of the Scotch Whisky Association distilleries must only mature in oak casks. In England, we're currently working through getting a Geographical Index (GI), but even in that GI we are allowing English distilleries to use different types of wood casks.
All that, and the attraction of working in the Lake District – even if it is a five-and-a-half-hour drive from home. Sarah isn’t fazed.
“When I went for my interview at the distillery it was very much ‘can I make this journey on a regular basis? What's the drive like? What's the distillery like?’
“Then you come here, park at the distillery and walk down the steps and it's so amazingly beautiful with the model farm, the stonework, the craftsmanship of the gates, all those details. I immediately felt at home. It felt so welcoming and the people were so lovely and I thought, yeah, I definitely want to work here because up until that point I genuinely wasn't sure.”
With two young boys in school – Harvey, who is 13, and nine-year-old Lachlan – moving to Cumbria was not an option and she has found she can do much of her work from home. “As long as I’ve got the time in the studio to do the assessments and make the product then it's all fine,” she explains.
When she comes south she stays for a week and works a 12-hour day. “And a lot of that time is spent with my nose in a glass,” she reveals.
Sarah has stepped into the role previously held by Dhavall Gandhi, who had been at the distillery since 2016 and has gone on to start his own consultancy.
Growing up in Speyside, it was something of a given that Sarah would work, at least temporarily, in a distillery, in her case Cardhu Distillery, owned by Diageo. “Pretty much everyone will have a summer job at a distillery because that’s the peak period, from April to September or October,” she explains.
“I took the job as a visitor centre guide for the summer season and then I was going traveling but once I was there the travel bug dissipated and the whisky bug bit. I just started to have passion for it and a desire to learn more about the whisky industry. It was hugely interesting to me.”
In the following 20 years with Diageo she moved through and up into a variety of roles, including managing the Oban and Glenkinchie distilleries, and completed a management degree along the way.
Her experience of the multiple functions within the industry has been a boon at The Lakes Distillery where as well as leading whisky making and the distillery warehouses, she has responsibility for visitor tours and retail, the bistro and hospitality and all the associated staff.
When an opportunity came up at the famous Macallan distillery – another she can see from her garden office – her recruitment agent put her forward, not confident she would get the job but knowing Macallan was building a new distillery and the interview could lead to something in the future.
That is not to take away her own intuition for the job – and her keen sense of smell.
Sarah explains: “You can teach people how to blend, what the practicalities are, how to source casks and do all that, but if you can’t smell and open that filing cabinet of your mind to say what it is that you can smell…
“Lots of people smell something and say ‘oh, I know what that is’ or ‘that’s lovely’, but that’s not very helpful. You have to be able to describe what it is that's nice, what you can smell. Lots of people can’t match the words to the smell, that's a real skill and if you can't do that part, you probably can't make whisky, well you definitely can’t because you wouldn't be able to pick up the nuances of character.”
Of course, making whisky in Scotland means, by definition, that Sarah had only worked with oak casks, so the opportunity to work with different woods at The Lakes Distillery, where Dhavall focused on sherry casks, is exciting for her.
So far, she has created Decadence exclusively for Scarfes Bar, at Rosewood London; Voyage for The Whisky Club Australia; Cascade, a limited edition £180 bottle of single malt whisky that was only available from The Lakes Distillery’s online shop and sold out over one weekend; and Isadora, another distillery exclusive that is only available from Setmurthy.
She adds: “Decadence for Scarfes Bar was brilliant because they wanted quite a small quantity and thought they were going to have the stock of whisky for a very long time. It sold out online in 45 minutes.”
Her first permanent range for The Lakes Distillery is due to be released in September.
“I think that's going to be really groundbreaking for us,” she says. “Limited editions are great and they're brilliant fun and you can explore a diverse range of flavours. As a maker, you’re allowed to show your own style without deviating too much from the distillery’s character.
“I have an innovation eight weeks in the distillery where I do different mashing, different fermentation models and run the stills in a different way to adjust our overall new make spirits’ character. We've got all our different wood trials going on so we can see how The Lakes converses with these different wood types and see what happens with the flavour profile.”
Contrary to misconception, it is not the difference in Lakeland water that contributes to the flavour profile of The Lakes Single Malt Whisky, but the making process.
“Because there are only the three ingredients – water, malted barley and yeast – people think that the water must contribute but actually it's the processes that the ingredients go through together that create your flavour. How you mash, your fermentation, set temperature, your peak temperature, how long is the fermentation, how you distill.
“We're very lucky the distillery was built with innovation in mind and we have a copper and a stainless steel condenser that we’re able to flip between. That has a huge impact on our new make spirit character.
In the past two years The Lakes has doubled spirit making and plans to double again in the next five years.
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