Trusting the process

Trusting the process

I’ve followed White Peak Distillery’s journey for years.

I’ve always admired the way they tell their story, the way they’ve built something new while being sympathetic to what stood there before. During Covid, I even supported them by buying a bottle from their pop-up shop in the car park.

So when I got the chance to do their distillery tour, I jumped on the bike on Friday evening and headed down the A38.

White Peak is tucked away over a bridge amongst the old wire works. It’s not somewhere you’d necessarily stumble across, which somehow makes discovering what’s going on inside even better.

I was lucky enough to be on a tour with just one other couple, so we definitely got the better end of the deal. It became less of a tour and more of a conversation, with plenty of questions along the way.

I knew absolutely nothing about how whisky was made.

It turns out it’s incredibly technical.

Huge stainless-steel mash tubs, copper stills, precise processes and a set of rules that have to be followed if you want to call what you make a single malt. I particularly liked the fact that White Peak doesn’t add colouring to its whisky. What comes out of the cask is what goes into the bottle.

The distillers themselves are works of art, but my favourite bit might have been the whisky safe. Made from brass, it looked wonderfully traditional sitting amongst all the huge modern tanks and machinery.

Then there were the casks.

Bourbon. Virgin oak. Port.

And their own rum casks — something they believe may make them the only whisky producer using casks from their own rum production.

And then, of course, there was the tasting.

But the thing I took away from the evening wasn't really the whisky.

It was the belief required to start something like this in the first place.

To take an old building, respect its history, put your own stamp on it and trust that the process will eventually produce something worth waiting for.

That felt strangely familiar.

It’s a little bit like Sauce & Brown.

You start with an idea that you believe in. You don't really know exactly where it's going to take you. You keep making, learning, changing and trusting the process.

Sometimes you just need to stick with it long enough to see what comes out the other end.