English whisky finally gets its GI and there’s a few surprises in there
The growing English whisky category has got GI status
English Whisky has finally secured protected Geographical Indication status after six years of lobbying, argument and opposition from Scotland and closer to home. Words and photography by Tom Pattinson
After years of lobbying, consultation and a surprisingly heated intervention from north of the border, English Whisky finally has its GI.
The government confirmed on 11 September that ‘English Whisky’ and ‘English Whiskey’ will become legally protected names under the UK Spirit Drinks Geographical Indications Scheme, putting England alongside Scotch Whisky, Single Malt Welsh Whisky and Irish Whiskey with its own formal definition of what can carry the name.
It comes at a significant point for an industry which barely existed two decades ago. There are now more than 70 distilleries producing English whisky, up from 46 at the end of 2023, with bottles exported to more than 30 countries. Industry estimates put the value of whisky currently maturing in English warehouses at around £1bn.
Environment secretary Dame Angela Eagle described the decision as recognition of both the industry and its growing economic reach.
“The UK is home to world-class whisky production, from grain to glass,” she said. “Standing proudly alongside Scotch, Welsh and Irish whiskies, this new protected status is recognition of English Whisky’s distinctive character alongside the expert craftsmanship that goes into its production.
“It’s a milestone that will be felt far beyond the distillery gates, bringing jobs, investment and pride to communities across the country.”
Read also: The battle for English whisky
At its simplest, a GI protects the relationship between a product and a place. Champagne cannot simply be made anywhere and called Champagne, while Scotch Whisky has long operated under detailed rules covering where and how it can be produced. Until now, ‘English Whisky’ had no equivalent protection.
“At the moment there is nothing stopping someone importing some crap whisky and calling it English whisky,” Andrew Nelstrop of The English Whisky Company told Barley earlier this year. “If you want to make English whisky it should be made in England.”
That was the problem the English Whisky Guild set out to solve. Its application was submitted in 2022 after several years of work and eventually published for opposition in February 2025, before being amended through consultation and finally approved this week.
“This is a defining moment for English Whisky,” said Dan Szor, chair of the English Whisky Guild
“This is a defining moment for English Whisky,” said Dan Szor, chair of the Guild and founder of Cotswolds Distillery. “It gives English Whisky a clear and protected identity, celebrates the quality and provenance behind what we produce, and sends a powerful signal to consumers and markets around the world.”
Under the final rules, English Whisky must use cereal grain grown in the UK and English water. The wort must be created in England, while distillation and at least three years of maturation must also take place in England. Casks can be no larger than 700 litres, the spirit must be distilled below 94.8% ABV and bottled at no less than 40%. Plain caramel colouring is the only additive permitted.
Where things become more interesting is what those rules do not say.
English whisky has not simply taken the Scotch rulebook and shifted it south. Scotch single malt must be mashed, fermented and distilled at one Scottish distillery, using malted barley and pot stills, before spending at least three years maturing in Scotland. Single Malt Welsh Whisky goes further in tying the product to its geography, with mashing, fermentation, distillation, maturation and even bottling required to take place in Wales.
England has deliberately left itself more room. Its whisky can be matured in woods other than oak, provided they are declared on the label, while the rules accommodate modern still designs and allow distillers to work with local breweries for mashing and fermentation. Matured whisky can also be shipped abroad in inert containers and bottled closer to its destination rather than forcing producers to export bottles filled in England.
It was the ability to move parts of production away from the distillery that provoked the strongest outside opposition. The Scotch Whisky Association argued that allowing a spirit to be described as Single Malt English Whisky when its mashing and fermentation had happened elsewhere threatened the established understanding of what single malt means.
“The proposal to define ‘Single Malt’ English Whisky only requires distillation at the single distillery location and not the creation of the spirit from malted barley at a single site,” the SWA said during consultation, arguing that this was “entirely inconsistent with the reputation of single malt whisky”.
For English producers such as Spirit of Yorkshire, however, the Scottish definition makes little sense. Its barley is grown on the family farm, mashed at the family-owned Wold Top Brewery and distilled a couple of miles away at Spirit of Yorkshire.
Jenni Ashwood at Spirit of Yorkshire
“You are walking two miles down the road between sites owned by the same family, using the same grain, the same team and the same philosophy,” Jenni Ashwood told Barley earlier this year. “It is not like we are trucking in spirit from the other side of the country.”
Yet not all resistance to the proposed GI came from Scotland. Some of the most interesting criticism came from England’s smaller experimental distilleries, which supported the principle of protecting English whisky but feared the Guild was trying to define a young industry before it had worked out what it wanted to become.
Circumstance Distillery in Bristol was actually one of the founding members of the English Whisky Guild, before leaving after the GI application was submitted.
For founder Liam Hirt, the distinction is important. “The reason we joined the English Whisky Guild was because we didn’t want English Whisky to end up with the problems that Japanese Whisky had without GI,” he told Barley, referring to the historic ability of companies to import foreign spirit and sell it under a Japanese identity.
His concern was that England risked correcting that problem by going too far in the opposite direction. “We need to avoid the other end of the spectrum as well, where you just narrow it... and we just take on the rules of the Scots.”
Hirt’s argument is that England has been handed an unusual opportunity. Whisky has been distilled here for centuries, but the near disappearance of the industry during the 20th century means its modern producers are not locked into an unbroken production tradition.
“We’ve got history, but we’re not confined by it,” he said.
Liam Hirt at Circumstance distillery
That freedom is visible in how Circumstance itself makes whisky. It uses mixed grain mash bills rather than concentrating on single malt, experiments heavily with beer yeasts and runs fermentations for as long as 14 days. Rather than trying to produce the most consistent or efficient spirit possible before relying on the cask to provide much of the flavour, Hirt is deliberately trying to build flavour before the whisky enters wood.
It’s this sort of experimentation that made him uncomfortable with earlier versions of the GI, including proposals that would have imposed considerably more prescriptive requirements around copper pot distillation.
The final version is notably more flexible. Malt English Whisky must be batch distilled and have at least one distillation in a pot still with sufficient copper contact, but the specification explicitly accommodates modern still designs. The non-oak wooden casks and overseas bottling were another area where Hirt had argued England should resist simply copying Scotch.
He also told Barley that the Welsh GI was “very sensible”, underlining that his argument was never against protected status itself. Intriguingly, he had even wanted stronger provenance rules in one area, arguing that a country capable of growing some of the world’s best barley could have considered requiring English grain rather than grain sourced from across the UK.
Richard Lock at Retribution Distilling
A similar concern about restricting experimentation has been raised by Richard Lock of Retribution Distilling in Somerset, who also left the Guild. Lock has spent years experimenting with heritage barley, brewers’ yeasts, unusually long fermentation, direct-fired stills, chestnut casks and locally sourced smoke, and believes some of the proposed rules risked defining English whisky around the methods favoured by larger producers.
For the Guild, the final specification represents an attempt to find a middle ground – strong enough to prevent imported spirit being passed off as English whisky, while broad enough to allow a relatively young industry to keep experimenting.
“Securing GI status is a landmark achievement for English Whisky and recognition of the quality and innovation across our growing industry,” said Morag Garden, chief executive of the English Whisky Guild. The Guild will now help producers through HMRC verification and attempt to explain to consumers what the protected name represents.
English whisky has spent the past two decades growing partly because nobody had yet agreed exactly what it was supposed to be. The GI finally gives the category boundaries, but the success of those rules will depend on whether there is still enough room inside them for England to continue working out what its whisky can become.
