Established in 2014, the East London Liquor Company was born out of an abandoned glue factory in the area from which it takes its name, founded by Alex Wolpert, who had been running several venues for a few years and decided to set up his own with an adjoining distillery.
They began by producing around a thousand bottles of gin and vodka a month for local clubs and restaurants, but soon expanded to include rum (sourced from third parties and blended on site), canned cocktails and of course whisky, with the first rye produced in London for over a century released in 2018.
Now that their bottlings have also arrived in Italy, while waiting to talk about them on these pages, we have a word with the founder.
WhiskyArt: Yours is a rather small production facility, which is practically located behind your bar.
Alex: That’s right, you walk behind the bar and you find yourself in the rooms with all the equipment: the blending tanks, the stills for gin, a 2,000-litre wash still and as a spirit still a 650-litre hybrid still, plus our 3/4,000-litre metal fermentation tank and the mash tun. Practically from grain to glass!
Malted barley and rye come from Crisp Malt in Norfolk, using only Maris Otter quality as barley although we have tested other varieties in the past.
WhiskyArt: What distinguishes your whisky from others?
Alex: A little while ago I had a meeting with a group of bartenders at the Mondrian Hotel here in Shoreditch, with whom we talked about the composition of our mash, the type of yeasts we use, fermentation times and the impact they have on the whisky, while also trying to correct any misconceptions about maturation and flavour. And it’s always nice to engage with people in the industry who are curious and ready for new things, to push them to think differently about a product that has been around for quite some time!
Here, what we do is dictated by the flavours, the aromas, with the liquid and the way we produce it being the essence of our work. When we opened ten years ago, some journalists immediately thought of the Lee Valley Distillery here in London, pointing out that we were therefore the first distillery to return to operation after a century, but that’s not what we wanted to focus on. We want to understand what it means to make whisky today, how to be relevant and continue to be relevant in the future, without dwelling on what was done a hundred years ago.
We want to create something that is good for our customer base, which is largely B2B, but without forgetting retail. We therefore focus on our two main bottlings, single malt and rye, which will be slightly different each year, flanked by some special editions such as the single cask for the Whisky Show, a rye aged in ex-sherry casks, the first time a non-Schotch bottling was chosen for the event.
WhiskyArt: And then there are your labels, full of details about the production aspects, whereas we are used to often only finding information about ageing.
Alex: Just today we welcomed a group of visitors and we started talking about yeasts, how different strains affect aromas, what more than a hundred hours of fermentation entails, what it means to leave the yeasts exhausted and what impact lactic conversion has on esters… well, these details are the only way to dispel some well-established myths about whisky. When I started as a bartender 20 years ago, they used to tell us that almost all the flavours came from the casks, period, which is absurd.
WhiskyArt: And then there are those who, like Waterford, put barley at the centre of everything.
Alex: I think the truth lies somewhere in between. Casks are important, we source through Alexander Sakon who provides us with exceptional ones, which are disassembled, shaved and toasted to ensure quality, so I certainly don’t want to minimize the effect of the cask! The idea that almost everything comes from casks is romantic but too simplistic and far removed from reality. So being able to give more information on how the distillate evolves and how much of what we do influences the final result is very important.
WhiskyArt: How difficult is it to produce whisky in England, given the dominance of Scotland?
Alex: We’ve been attending whisky events since 2018, and at first when people approached our single malt they would ask which distillery in Scotland we got it from, which was really frustrating, but you arm yourself with patience and explain how no, it’s 100% English and it’s made in London. And slowly people are accepting the idea that whisky can be made anywhere, in Oregon, Tokyo, Melbourne, and this is not only normal, but it also offers the opportunity to create excellence. When trying to define what New World Whisky is, I believe the key part is the development and production of the distillate based only on the flavours and not the traditions or the heritage of the place where it is made. We’ve only been in business for ten years, we’re very young, we have our single malt and rye as staples, but to fixate on doing the same thing every year just because it turned out well the last time would be absurd: we want to improve, to challenge ourselves time after time. And we try to communicate this, that we want to learn how to make a better and better spirit, and it is we who have to explain ourselves to consumers, to bartenders, not they who have to try to understand, we have to provoke them to think differently.
WhiskyArt: So every year you intervene on certain aspects of the processing, such as yeast, fermentation time and more?
Alex: Over time we have found things that work, with the rye we have established a composition of 55% malted rye and 45% malted barley and for the single malt we are comfortable with Maris Otter barley, which provides a certain butteriness in the texture. Or the tropical and citrus aromas that come from the Saison yeast that we use along with the distillation yeast, for at least 100 hours of fermentation. There are constants that we are refining, but it will still be years before we finally establish a precise path. We will always be transparent on the label, stating everything we do, and our signature is precisely experimentation, the desire to always put ourselves to the test, and I think that is what also creates curiosity in the consumer, who wants to find out what we have come up with this year.
WhiskyArt: One of your limited editions is aged in ex-Islay casks, which give it some very special notes. Do you have plans to make your own peat in the future?
Alex: A fraction of the barley we use is peated, and we have plans underway that we will only see if they bear fruit in a few years’ time, but if you take casks that have contained peated whisky and use them with unpeated malt distillate, having the patience to wait five years or more, the integration with the smoky part is really exceptional. So much so that in a blind tasting I’m sure you would not be able to distinguish our Islay Single Malt from an original peated one. And with so many used casks which contained peated whisky available in the world, I believe that new and old distilleries also have a moral obligation to reuse them rather than resort to new peat.
WhiskyArt: How many casks do you currently have maturing?
Alex: We have a few hundred casks resting in a warehouse in Liverpool, we manage to produce approximately 22k LPA a year, which roughly equates to 20 casks a month. We are thinking about how to expand production, but it is all still a work in progress.
WhiskyArt: Looking at your website, one notices how your name, East London, goes beyond a simple geographical connotation, there is a very close connection with your territory, which also goes through the fonts used for the logo, in a sort of “social terroir”, as explained by Dave Broom in his writings.
Alex: I was born in London, my roots are in the city, in the community, I couldn’t make whisky anywhere else. And I think East London represents just the necessary provocation and innovation that we want to bring to our whisky. We are tied to local places, to local pubs, to local hotels, and in times like these where ‘buy local’ is a mantra, I say that’s all very well, but only when local also means better. You can’t buy local just because they make it on your doorstep, find yourself eating bad bread just because you get it from the baker on your street! It sounds obvious, but not everyone buys local because they get the best products that way. We don’t want to be just the local distillery, we want our distillate to be excellent, whether it is gin, the rum we import and blend or whisky. It is not a matter of arrogance, but of ambition.
WhiskyArt: And then there are the collaborations with foreign countries, as you have done with Italy.
Alex: I admit to having a soft spot for Italy, a market that has given us a lot of satisfaction in recent years, especially in Rome. Here we have found venues that have welcomed us with great enthusiasm and curiosity, like Morrison’s for which we created an exclusive single cask, in collaboration with Kernel and finished in a Saison cask: it was a gamble, but when they tasted it they were enthusiastic. And that’s what we want, to be ambitious, to experiment, to provoke not for the sake of it but to push ourselves towards new horizons.
WhiskyArt; Anything special you have in store this year?
Alex: A single cask of our rye aged in an ex-chardonnay cask, which will be released in March or so, and it’s going to be great! Then up to Christmas we will release four more single casks, and we should be able to get it all to Italy as well.
WhiskyArt: Last question, how do you see the future of whisky, particularly English whisky?
Alex: I’m a member of the English Whisky Guild, and I believe in the importance of a framework that everyone agrees on when it comes to making whisky, and I don’t think it will be a problem. It is designed to be less stringent than other existing specifications in the world, and it has been submitted to the Departmentr of Agriculture and Food for English GI status: we are waiting for their review, which could take weeks or years, I have no idea. The Guild’s aim is to promote English whisky as a category, to be considered in the same way as Japanese, American, Scottish or Irish whisky, both at government and commercial level. It’s an industry that has grown impressively in recent years, albeit in a rather apocalyptic global economic environment, but it is still being taken lightly, and we are working to change that.
It’s hard to know what will happen in the next ten years, there are so many new places in the world producing excellent whiskies, like in Finland, Sweden, Denmark and even Italy, and it’s really exciting. We will see.
Thanks to Alex’s friendliness and helpfulness, you will soon see their bottlings on these pages as well.