Andrew Nelstrop does not talk about sustainability the way most drinks brands do.
There are no grand pledges at The English Distillery in Norfolk, no claims of carbon neutrality, no green halo. Instead, there is a family farm, a chalk aquifer and a managing director who makes no claim that his whisky saves the planet, only that he can do his bit to waste less of it.
The English Distillery was built in Norfolk in 2006, on land the Nelstrop family had farmed themselves. The rest of the family still farms today, mostly in Lincolnshire, and every year some of that barley makes its way into the stills at the distillery. “There’s something really nice about that, because I know each field,” Andrew says, “and I’ve never sold a drop of it.” That stock simply sits and ages, waiting for the right story to tell around it, and accounts for about a tenth of the distillery’s annual production.
A harvest that came in at six tonnes
This year, that has been tested. The Nelstrops’ home farm normally yields around 8.5 tonnes of spring malting barley per hectare. This summer it came in at six, a fall Andrew describes bluntly as “a shocker.” Irrigation offers little relief for cereal crops grown at scale. Andrew buys most of his barley through his maltster in the usual way, where an underperforming / poor spec crop is simply left out of the blend and the customer never sees it. The portion that comes from the family’s own farm works differently. There is no larger blend to absorb a bad year, so the shortfall cannot be quietly smoothed over. “The joy of being a farmer is you think in decades, not years,” he says.
What an English GI means for barley
England’s own whisky rules give that same anxiety a concrete shape. Andrew has been closely involved in securing an English Geographical Indication for whisky, the same protection that covers a Melton Mowbray pork pie or a Stilton cheese, currently going through the system with the Secretary of State. Scotch can be made from barley grown anywhere in the world. English whisky, once the GI is confirmed, will have to use barley grown in the UK. The industry deliberately chose not to narrow that further to England alone. “I think as the climate changes there will be less malting barley grown in the southern counties,” Andrew says, “and that production will move up.” Rather than lock the rules to a region that may no longer grow the crop, the industry kept the definition national, on the calculation that for a generation or two England should be able to grow what it needs from within its own borders. Andrew, ever the farmer, is not entirely sure of even that. “In theory,” he says. “You never know, do you.”
Measuring a water table for twenty years
Water tells a similarly counterintuitive story. The English Distillery draws from the Breckland aquifer, one of England’s largest freshwater reserves, sitting deep beneath sandy Norfolk soil. Despite the driest year in memory, Andrew has measured no meaningful drop in the water table he has monitored for two decades. Unlike some neighbouring farms, the distillery has not been asked to reduce its water use this year. He is quick to put the figure in perspective the distillery uses around 30,000 cubic metres of water annually, a volume he calls “irrelevant” against the demands of heavy industry or a data centre, which he estimates would use as much in a single day.
Much of that water is never truly spent. Cooling water is kept in a closed loop and returned to the ground after use, a system that cuts groundwater use by around 94% and makes the whole process over 90% more efficient than a conventional distillery. Waste grain and liquid left over from mashing and distilling are turned into cattle feed and fertiliser for local farms, and ten acres of the site are planted with cricket bat willows, grown to capture carbon and slow rainwater run-off as well as the eventual bonus of supply to the cricket bat industry.
Why he won’t buy offsets
Andrew is openly sceptical of distilleries that describe themselves as carbon neutral, pointing out that heating water for distilling takes real energy that has to come from somewhere. “That doesn’t mean your distillery is green,” he says of buying offsets. “That means you’re just offloading your guilt somewhere else.”
That inefficiency is one he accepts rather than hides. Because the distillery does not distil around the clock, the stills cool down overnight and at weekends, so each morning begins from what Andrew calls “a lukewarm system rather than a boiling hot system,” requiring a fresh burst of gas to bring them back up to heat. A large-scale producer running continuously, day and night, never faces that cold start. “We are inefficient, if you like, inasmuch as we don’t distil flat out all the time,” he says, “but we are efficient because we don’t distil flat out all of the time.”
Asked for the hardest trade-off sustainability has cost him, Andrew pushes back on the question itself. The distillery only began distilling in 2006, so there was no legacy of old habits to unwind. Heat exchanges and slow-start electrics already existed by then, and the distillery could build them in from the outset. “We were in a position to use those immediately,” he says, pointing out that a distillery running since 1750 would have had to spend money retrofitting what he simply built in from day one. Solar panels at the distillery now supply around 95% of production electricity on a sunny day, a decision Andrew admits will need replacing before it has fully paid for itself financially. “It has more to do with saving the environment than it is just making money,” he says. He is equally firm about sourcing glass and packaging from UK suppliers, a choice that costs more per bottle but one he defends on both environmental and personal grounds. “I like the fact that my bottles are made in England, and my packaging for those bottles is made in England, and I can go and see them and say hello,” he says, travelling there by car or train, not by aeroplane. Most of his business conversations happen face to face. He gets up in the morning, drives over, and sorts things out over coffee instead of a hundred emails or a call that ends in “I’ll get back to you next week.”
What Norfolk does to the whisky
Norfolk’s climate shapes the whisky itself in ways that owe as much to physics as to philosophy. Warmer, drier conditions accelerate maturation, but they change its character too. In Scotland, casks typically lose alcohol and volume at similar rates as spirit evaporates through the wood. In Norfolk’s drier air, the distillery loses more volume than alcohol, so a cask can sit at close to 60% strength for twenty years while steadily shrinking in size.
Asked what worries him about the next decade, he resists the premise. Global demand, he argues, is broad enough that a soft year in one region simply means selling elsewhere. “So long as someone is buying our whisky and enjoying it, I don’t actually care whether they are in England, France or Timbuktu.”
The English Whisky Co. distils, matures and bottles every release on site at The English Distillery in Norfolk. The core range centres on an unpeated Original and a peated Smokey & a sherry cask matured whisky. These are joined by single cask and small batch releases finished in casks including sherry, rum and Madeira. The Norfolk, a separate single grain range, includes a corn whisky alongside a line of liqueurs and cream drinks such as Norfolk Nog, Norfolk PX and Norfolk Bramble. Recent releases have picked up international recognition, with the English Sherry Cask named World’s Best Single Malt in 2024 and the English Gently Smoked Sherry Hogshead named World’s Best Single Malt in the small batch category in 2026.
