Henstone Distillery – English and/or Welsh?

This chapter of my life started about ten years ago although the seed had been sown many decades before, however, that part is for another day. Towards the end of a career that involved relentless travelling I decided that I wanted to live from home – this was in mid-2015. Within a few weeks of living from home I’d spotted the opportunity to establish Henstone Distillery and took it. I was working part-time at a brewery and suggested we establish a distillery and Henstone was born. This worked well for the first few years and we produced multi-award winning whiskies, gins, vodkas, rums, and brandies.

During covid, the cracks in the business relationship began to show and as a result I now see 2023 as the year of business restructure; 2024 as the year of business relocation; and 2025 as the year of business reestablishment. What will 2026 and 2027 bring? The restructure, in 2023, involved buying my previous partners out and getting another partner involved. As you can imagine, this period had its challenges but we pushed through and got ourselves to the next stage.

Relocation, in 2024, had to take place at pace and it was imperative we were located in England. We’d spent a lot of time and energy getting our whisky recognised as English and I’m a board member of the English Whisky Guild. Our new business partner owns Dingle Farm, just outside Welshpool, which ‘straddles’ the English/Welsh border and we set about building a temporary facility out of shipping containers. The area we had identified had the hard-standing laid in January 2024 and we were in and operational by the end of June 2024! The back of this ‘temporary’ distillery is around 5 metres from the English/Welsh border! Although a little embarrassed in the early days the feedback we get from visitors including customers, suppliers, delivery drivers, etc is amazing as they are stunned at difference between the interior and the exterior of the facility.

2025, the year of reestablishment, has meant pushing sales and this has gone well. Without putting any statistics to this, we have attended more shows and markets than ever before and have acquired many new on and off trade customers whilst also maintaining our existingbase.

Now to the future

When we hit a certain revenue target (we know it but we’re not going to share it) we plan to purpose build the Henstone English Whisky Distillery about another 95 meters into England. We’ve earmarked the area for this and have already levelled it. Once this distillery has been built and is operational we plan to build a smaller version on the other side of the border in Wales! Yes, two distilleries on one site but in different countries. We don’t have specific dates associated with these plans as they are performance related but, that said, I got Henstone Distillery onto the English Whisky Map back in 2016 when it was just a ‘twinkle in my eye’ and we plan to have Henstone on the Welsh Whisky Map in 2026!

I’m sure many will have questions about the name of the Welsh Distillery but for the time being we are simply going to refer to them as Henstone England and Henstone Wales. Whether that will stick is for another day.

We have started running tours again so if you would like to visit us and see the site for yourselves then book yourself onto one of these – booking is only via our online shop

(https://www.henstonedistillery.com) and places are strictly limited to ten per tour.

Guest blog writer: Chris Toller, Henstone Distillery.

Photography: Steve Jenkins.