Elbow grease and craft whisky
What is a craft product these days? At least here at Manx Whisky Company it means focusing on every detail and trying to do the best we can to create a true, small scale whisky made from local barley. From horse feed to elegance, all in our own distillery!
DIY
Our company was founded to create a whisky that truly is a product of the Isle of Man and in order to do this we have decided to do it the hard way. Most whisky distilleries are huge process industries designed to bottle millions, if not tens of millions, of bottles of whisky per year. We have no such ambitions. Manx Whisky Company was born out of a desire to prove that it is possible to run a whisky distillery as a small scale company that controls all the steps in the production process.
Where can I buy your whisky?
This is the sad part - you can't! Our whisky will not be ready until at the very earliest Christmas 2023. We are looking at arranging some progress report sessions before then so if you want to stay up to date on planned releases and events, sign up and we will let you know!
Local and small scale
Home made
Most distilleries buy ready made malt but we have decided to do the opposite. Our barley comes directly from the farmer and we floor malt it ourselves in our distillery. We use long fermentation times for optimal flavour development and we age the whisky on site ourselves.
Very limited editions
Doing it all by ourselves means that our production is extremely limited but this is how we prefer it. It is endlessly fascinating to see how humble grains of barley get transformed into delicious whisky right in front of our eyes.
Patience please
We are only just getting started and we will have no whisky available to sell until Christmas 2023 at the very earliest.
Our raw materials
The Barley
Our barley is grown on the Island and we get it directly from the farmer. The strains we are working with at the moment are Concerto and Planet.
The Malt
We malt the barley on the floor in our distillery. While this may sound somewhat strange it is fact the traditional way of doing it and it is still practised at some traditional distilleries. One such example is Springbank who do not use any externally malted grains.
The Water
We have no legendary source of water where ancient Celtic tribes have buried their treasures over the centuries giving rise to mythical whisky making properties. We use the excellent tap water of the Isle of Man.
The peat
Cutting peat is illegal on the Isle of Man and given this we will not produce any peated whiskies. Using peat from other locations would be too much of a deviation from our Manx ethos so if we want to create a smoky whisky we will need to do that in another way.
The yeast
Short of using wild strains (now, that is an interesting idea!) we will use a multitude of yeast strains to get the desired flavour profile. Given that we don't use temperature control during the fermentation we will also use different strains during winter and summer. It will be clearly specified in the bottling notes that will be published on the site what we have used in each particular batch.
The casks
If there ever were large oak forests on the Isle of Man they were cut down at least a millennium ago and since we cannot do without we have to import these. We will work with a variety of sizes and types and as with the yeast it will be clearly stated what has been used with each bottling.
aboutus
Manx Whisky Company was founded in 2019 by Magnus Grinneback and Scott Young.