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.
“So I've been able to go shopping with different cooperages, buy different wood species and try them out. In terms of experimentation and innovation to elevate flavour, there is a real opportunity in England.”
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?’
“I live in a remote part of the north east of Scotland, equidistant between Aberdeen and Inverness, and to go shopping or to get to the airport is about an hour, but generally you’d go from Glasgow or Edinburgh and they’re three and a half hours drive away, so you get used to making that journey.
“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.
Sarah says: “Unless you go to work in a brand new distillery, you're always taking over from someone else. As a whisky manager or a distillery manager you are simply a custodian of that place for the length of time that you're there. What you want to do is create excellent quality so you can represent the brand in a really good way, but you’re also leaving behind treasures for the next whisky maker to come across.
“There are lots of things that I'm doing right now that I'll probably never see the benefit of because they're not going to be ready for another five to ten or 15 years.”
Tantalisingly, she cannot reveal what treasures she was left in the distillery’s stock, but since arriving in January last year she has assessed every single cask and implemented a nine-month assessment process to check for quality.
She explains: “You could keep on buying the same cask year on year for ten years and then when you go to make the whisky you find that cask’s not that great. So we’ll look at it in nine months to check, is it bringing up some colour, has it got some maturity around it, and you can provide feedback to the suppliers at that point, which is much better.
“We've got quite a complex process here. We need to look at how maturation is occurring, look at the flavours that we want to enhance and then decide which cask that’s going to move into, so we do a huge amount of sampling.”
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.
“I used to look after 12 visitor centres as part of my senior leadership responsibility so it's not new and it's part of the business that I enjoy. I love meeting customers and dealing with people on holiday is fantastic,” she says.
As time has gone on, more women are working in whisky, growth that corresponds with female representation among whisky drinkers, which is around 36 per cent according to one US and UK study.
Cardhu is famous for being the only old distillery in Scotland to be started and pioneered by a woman, and although women feature in the history of whisky in Scotland they were not talked about.
Naturally, Sarah comes from the ‘find the best person for the job regardless of gender’ school of thought, yet a lack of understanding among some persists. Despite her expertise and years of experience, incredibly she is still sometimes asked if she “actually likes whisky?”. Her response? “I say ‘it'd be kind of difficult to make it if I didn't like it’.”
She found the opportunity to move into whisky making came once her boys came along and travelling to Clynelish, where she was senior site manager, three hours from home became impossible.
Whisky making was one of the few roles she had not done. Ironically, women may be better placed for the role thanks to having more organoleptic receptors than men. Sarah says she knew she had a good sense of smell.
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.
“I was all set to go, then I got the interview schedule,” says Sarah. “I had two one-hour verbal interviews, a 30-minute basic sensory assessment and a one-hour blending activity. I thought, ‘I've never blended anything in my life, why am I even going? I'm going to look ridiculous, I just can't do it’.
“But somewhere along the line I talked myself into going and performed exceptionally well in the interview and did the blending activity almost perfectly. The reason it was slightly off was because I included one whisky that shouldn't have been in but the reason it shouldn't have been in is the reason I picked it, so it was all about having the capability to see it.
“I got the job and was really lucky to work alongside Bob Delgarno who is one of the best whisky makers in Scotland who worked with Macallan for a number of years. Bob was fantastic and taught me everything I know.”
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.”
Smell, it turns out, is more vital than taste.
“We do everything by nose because if you were tasting every cask you’d need to be driven to and from work and would probably need some kind of liver cleanse on a regular basis. Everything's done by nose and it’s when you bring the flavours together that you do the palate check. Obviously people are buying it for how it tastes not how it smells, but you can connect what the nose is to what the palate will be.”
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.
“It's all brand new so I've been tapping into some of the industry experts because the whisky industry itself is quite small and distillers and coopers from around the world do connect quite easily and share information they've got on different wood types and the impact it has.”
She adds: “Then you find your own way and find your own style. There's always this discussion between is whisky making science or art and I think it lives in both spaces.
“When you make a permanent product it's a bit like having an artist do interior decorating and painting; they can do it, but it's not where their real talent is. Making their own paintings and their own expression, that’s where the limited editions are and that's why you need both.”
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.
“But as a consumer I like the whiskies that I like, and I want to be able to go back and buy it again and again and have that same experience. So the new permanent skew is going to be really good for people because they can repeat purchase. From a whisky making perspective, if I wasn’t doing limited editions and only doing permanent products I’d get bored, so I'm really lucky that we've got a nice balance.
“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.
“We can also play with different malt and yeast varieties. One of my favourite yeast types is called pombe. It smells of those old-fashioned cardboard boxes of apples that when you pull the lid off the smell just hits you. Pombe yeast is like that so your entire distillery and all the area around smells of fresh green apples, it’s absolutely stunning.”
Sarah recognises that the complexity of whisky making and the knowledge of those who follow it can be intimidating.
“For most people their first taste of whisky was something they probably got out of their parents’ drinks cabinet at young age so it wasn't particularly good quality and they think that whisky is just a general spirit, not a drink with all the flavours it has.
“You want to explore, but no one wants to look stupid, so you go and look at the shelves of whiskies and there's hundreds of different varieties you don't know where to start. You might not even know the difference between a blended whisky and a single malt, so it’s about explaining what the difference is then looking at country of origin, region, what the flavour differences are and breaking it down so it's easy for people to understand.
“I think whisky has the same range of flavours as wine does now. Maybe in the 1970s and early 80s you would find people that said they didn't like wine because all they were exposed to was Mateus Rose or a Black Tower. Understandably, they didn't like it. But now you can access wine from anywhere in the world and there's something everyone will like. Whisky is the same and, for me, exploring is part of the fun.”
Everyone has different tastes and, due to diet and culture, they vary exponentially across the international market where The Lakes Distillery is playing a growing role as it embarks on expansion. In the past two years The Lakes has doubled spirit making and plans to double again in the next five years.
New chief executive James Pennefather says the ambition is to win a one per cent share of the $10bn global luxury dark spirits market by 2030, building on the four per cent market share it has achieved so far in the UK.
Sarah says: “At the moment our limited editions and our permanent products are made in a way that suits our story so, for example, Decadence was made to celebrate ten years of Scarfes Bar and was all about richness, opulence, and comfort.
“I've made exclusive whiskies for Taiwan in the past – which is a huge whisky market and we're just starting to export there now – but I hadn't visited the country. Now having been there, the palate of Taiwan is very unusual; they have this spicy beef noodle soup and tofu and lots of foods with an excess of ginger and chilli, so they're used to really big bold flavours. You either make a whisky that is complementary to that, or a contrast and I think I'd be more inclined next time to do something much bigger and bolder with more unusual flavours that potentially appeal to their palate a bit more.
“The tobacco industry has been adjusting its recipes to suit specific markets for years and to date the whisky industry hasn’t done that. Will it happen in the future? I’m really interested in that slight variation market to market.”
Worldwide, the demand is phenomenal, driven in part by collectors laying down bottles in the hope that one day they will have gained significant value.
“The demand is unbelievable,” says Sarah. “I can appreciate that whisky collecting is something that's become popular over the years, and it's great that people are choosing to invest their money in it. But as a whisky maker, when you spend such a lot of time and effort to reach what you consider perfection and then no-one’s drinking it, it's really quite upsetting.
“There are more collectors but there’s a lot of drinkers too. People love the flavour of The Lakes Whisky and they want to buy it to open and drink it, which as a whisky maker is exactly what you want.”
