Coming Soon - Bimber Ex-Bourbon Casks Batch 003!

We can’t wait to tell you about our forthcoming new arrival - Bimber Ex-Bourbon Casks Batch 003!

Bimber weren’t the first new distillery in England in modern times. They weren’t even the first new whisky distillery in London - not by a long shot. But in just a few years since they began distilling in 2016, Bimber have arguably done more than any other of the new wave of English craft distillers to put English single malt whisky on the map.

In the short period since the release of their first single malt whisky in 2019, Bimber have become one of the UK’s most prominent and popular new distilleries since Daftmill. 

Every new release - and there have been dozens already - is hunted down and snapped up by avid single malt fans. With single cask bottlings of the distillery’s London Single Malt Whisky going as far afield as Australia, China, Taiwan and the USA, becoming a Bimber completist is already a fool’s errand.

So what’s all the hype about? There’s no real secret - Bimber just make great single malt whisky. How do they do this? By going back to basics - every part of the whisky production process at Bimber is done with quality in mind and using traditional methods.

In practice, this means that Bimber use high quality barley from a single farm in Hampshire, which is floor-malted in the traditional manner. At the distillery itself, which is situated in an ugly industrial area in the wilds of Northwest London, the malt is crushed (not milled) before an epic seven day temperature-controlled fermentation in wooden washbacks using their own in-house custom-designed yeasts.

The crushing of the malt, the long fermentation and the temperature control are all designed to bring about a clear wort with maximum esters, as these help to produce a flavoursome, fruity spirit of the highest possible quality. For the same reasons, the distillation itself is run extremely slowly on small, direct-fired alembic stills to maximise copper contact, and the foreshots and feints are discarded rather than redistilled. 

Somewhat unusually for a new distillery, Bimber are also very traditional when it comes to cask types - you won’t find much in the way of exotic wine finishes or STR here. Instead, the distillery ages their spirit mostly in ex-bourbon casks, with a small proportion matured in genuine ex-sherry (rather than "sherry"-treated) casks or virgin oak. Rigorous quality checks are performed at the distillery’s own cooperage, which repairs, rechars or rejects each batch of casks as necessary.

None of this is particularly complex and no wheels have been reinvented here - it’s just ironic (and slightly sad) that Bimber’s ‘innovation’ is to embrace traditional methods of making great single malt whisky. 

It seems so obvious when you think about it - like Bimber’s collaboration with London Transport to release a single cask of London Malt whisky for each London Underground station. It’s such an obviously brilliant idea that it’s incredible that no-one did it before.

Anyway, the first Bimber single malt whisky to grace our shelves up here in Blackpool is almost upon us and it’s going to be a doozy. 

At 5000 bottles, Bimber Ex-Bourbon Casks Batch 003 is the company’s largest release since 2019, but there’s no question of it sitting around gathering dust. It’s also the distillery’s oldest whisky yet released and has been bottled at 51.6% to allow the distillery's full-force fruitiness to take centre stage. No doubt there'll be an army of Bimber fans laying siege to our website the moment it hits our New Arrivals page.

Our allocation of Bimber Ex-Bourbon Casks Batch 003 is due with us next week and will be available to our VIP Club Members only, at strictly One Bottle Per Customer.