The rich and complex whisky, named Filey Bay and presented in a beautiful bottle bearing the bay's waves and the company's trademark gannet, was a natural progression from beer for Wold Top founder Tom Mellor and his partner at the Spirit of Yorkshire distillery, David Thompson.
“It started with a friendship, really,” says David. “Tom was someone I’d played rugby with for years, and our families grew up together. And one day, he came to me and said, do you fancy making a whisky? As you do!”
Tom explained to David that the ingredients for making a great single malt – essentially barley and spring water – were right there on the doorstep. And because he already ran a brewery, the malted barley mash was easily available, too.
“We had everything we needed to make a great whisky right there,” says David, who, helpfully, has a background in marketing and agriculture. “What we didn’t have was the experience, so we needed someone who could help us on that journey and who had credibility in the industry. We found a lovely Scottish guy called Dr Jim Swan – get his name on your CV and it’s really rubber stamps the fact that you’re doing things right.”
The legendary Dr Swan, who had consulted on distilleries across the world, was with the project right from the start, advising and helping until last year, when, sadly, he died.
“Jim’s input was invaluable – he helped with the build of the stills, and also the flavour profile,” says David. “We started by looking at stills: the best are hand-made by Forsyths of Rothes in Scotland, but at the time, they had a two-year waiting list. We decided to look elsewhere, only to realise after a bit of a road trip around Europe that actually, nobody could make a whisky still as well as the Scots!
“We negotiated with Forsyths, and managed to get them a bit quicker - in June 2016 we did our first spirit run. We’ve now got just short of 1,600 casks filled and maturing.”
Legally, whisky has to be matured in the cask for three years before it’s considered worthy of the name – but David and Tom made the decision to start selling the spirit while it was still just a teenager.
“What we’ve done is quite unusual in the whisky industry in that we’ve taken it to market earlier than traditionally would have been acceptable in terms of flavour and quality – but we’ve done things with our stills to clean the spirit even more so that it matures quicker and gets into the bottle quicker.
“It wasn’t the plan – we were originally going to do a white, gin-type spirit, but we quickly realised that the market really didn’t need another gin! And we’d have had to buy in spirit to make gin, which wasn’t our ethos – it’s all about field to bottle for us.
“When we do tours of the distillery, we give people a taste of the maturing product, and they kept asking why they couldn’t buy it. So it was led by demand – we’ve sold 8,000 bottles of ‘maturing malt’ – it’s not whisky, we can’t legally sell it as such as it’s younger than three years, but it’s great quality.
“And now we’ve got to the date where we can call it whisky, and as it matures it gets more delicate and flavoursome. It’s improving on what’s already a very good starting place.”
“There’s nobody else doing this in Yorkshire – you’d probably have to travel 200 miles before you come across another distillery, in the Lakes, or Norfolk,” says David. “And we have some of the best malt and barley in the world growing here in Yorkshire, which is why we have two malting factories nearby at Bridlington and Knapton.
“It’s been lovely watching how James has created this fantastic place at the Pipe & Glass, and it means a lot to us that he’s a Filey lad, because we’re all from round here too. We wanted to put Filey and Hunmanby on the whisky map: we have a great affinity with this area. Hence the gannet from Bempton Cliffs on our logo – it’s a fantastic bird which represents a lot about what we’re doing here.”
The casks
“The skill of maturation is choosing the right casks to bring out the right flavours and colours – every cask has already had a previous occupant,” explains David. “The blue ones are ex-Bourbon casks from Kentucky – part of the Jack Daniels business. The Bourbon had been in there for seven or eight years imparting all that lovely flavour and colour into the wood, and our spirit draws all that back out again.
“We also have sherry casks – with sherry, there are seven or eight different variants, so those casks marked OLO have held Oloroso, a dark but dry sherry; PX is Pedro Ximenez, which is extremely sweet like a pudding wine. We have some casks which have held red wine; we even have an Oloroso cask that’s had Seville orange peel in it. They’re all imparting these lovely flavours – our skill is to marry these casks to give us a layering of flavour.”
The casks
“The skill of maturation is choosing the right casks to bring out the right flavours and colours – every cask has already had a previous occupant,” explains David. “The blue ones are ex-Bourbon casks from Kentucky – part of the Jack Daniels business. The Bourbon had been in there for seven or eight years imparting all that lovely flavour and colour into the wood, and our spirit draws all that back out again.
“We also have sherry casks – with sherry, there are seven or eight different variants, so those casks marked OLO have held Oloroso, a dark but dry sherry; PX is Pedro Ximenez, which is extremely sweet like a pudding wine. We have some casks which have held red wine; we even have an Oloroso cask that’s had Seville orange peel in it. They’re all imparting these lovely flavours – our skill is to marry these casks to give us a layering of flavour.”
The product
The brand new whisky from the Spirit of Yorkshire distillery, Filey Bay, is a single malt. ‘Single’ denotes that it’s all from just the one distillery; ‘malt’ is 100% malt barley (other grains can be used in whisky, such as rye, corn or wheat). The distillery can ‘marry’ spirits from amongst its own casks to create different flavours – but if it added any from other distilleries, the whisky would become ‘blended’.
Each cask of Filey Bay holds just short of 200 litres of cask-strength (63.5%) spirit, which is then taken down to a bottling strength of 46%, using spring water from the company’s own well – the same water that’s used to make Wold Top beer – yielding around 300 70cl bottles per cask.