Bimber 2019-2023 - Private Cask - Single Cask 201926

The tiny Bimber distillery was built in north-west London in 2015, with the first spirit coming off the company’s alembic stills the following year. After some early vodka distillation runs, the distillery switched to malt whisky production and the inaugural bottling of Bimber’s English single malt whisky followed in late 2019.

Bimber is a proudly independent distillery, sourcing barley but malting it themselves on their homemade malting floor, designing their own yeast strains and building much of their own equipment. Bimber’s wash is fermented for a full week in wooden washbacks before distillation in their direct-fired 1000-litre wash still and 600-litre spirit still. The success of Bimber’s early whisky releases has led to planned expansion into a new location, with a forthcoming third still projected to raise the distillery’s capacity to 100,000 litres per annum.

A private bottling is a cask of single malt or single grain whisky that has been bottled privately by its owner or owners, and usually bottles are not released for public sale. Private bottlings may sometimes be bottled for their owners by the distillery of origin, but are not official bottlings by that distillery. 

Alternatively, if the cask is not housed at the distillery where it was made, it may be bottled either by another distillery or private cask storage facility, or transported to a third party commercial bottler.

Private bottlings used to be relatively common, a legacy of the whisky lake of the 1980s, when distilleries had excess stock and were desperate to offload their inventory. These kinds of casks rarely make it to private bottlings nowadays - casks that were very inexpensive twenty or thirty years ago have shot up in value, and distilleries have scrambled to buy back privately-owned casks of their own spirit, while cask owners are rarely short of offers from brokers or independent bottlers.