Building work on the new home of Durham Distillery is almost complete, the entrepreneur behind it has revealed.
Jon Chadwick, a former NHS boss, has spent thousands turning space under Durham's Prince Bishops Shopping Centre into a distillery, shop and bar. With a team now in place, including a Greek distiller who has previously worked for Beavertown Brewery, the visitor attract is due offer a preview event in the coming days with full opening in December.
The 5,000 sq ft distillery under the streets of Durham will host tours and drinks classes, as well offer customers the chance to buy Durham's range of gins, vodka and whisky which will use North East-sourced ingredients. Mr Chadwick said: "We've got all our existing equipment in there now, plus a couple of whisky stills we had custom built in Slovenia - which are gorgeous and about 4.5 metres high and solid copper."
Read more: Former Ringtons director launches new business venture
He added: "It's almost like a whole city block underground. It's really dramatic and with the kind of stills and and production kit in there, it's really spectacular."
The project has been several years in the making and Mr Chadwick says it represents one of the most unusual newer uses of the high street - which in Durham he says has seen a "remarkable turnaround in the past 12 months". The company's "radical" approach to distilling aims to make English whisky distinct from its Scottish counterparts.
Mr Chadwick explained: "You've got two factions in English whisky. Faction number one is people who are basically multimillionaires, probably from financial services, who want a Scottish whisky distillery but want it built very close to their stately home in Berkshire - and money is no object and what they really want is for everything to be as similar to Scotland as possible. Then you've got guys like us, with a much smaller budget - and we've still spent between £800,000-£900,000 on this - and what we want to do is something a little different."
Since speaking about his plans earlier this year, Mr Chadwick says the project has had to endure a tumultuous economic period in which inflation has made materials such as glass more expensive. But as consumer confidence surveys make for troubled reading, Mr Chadwick is hopeful that Durham's position among the top 10 places to visit in the UK will ensure a steady footfall.
Among future customers in the distillery's sights are the international students of Durham University, many of them from Asian countries where whisky is popular. Mr Chadwick points to use of English barley in the Japanese whisky making process.
He adds: "All we're doing is hi-jacking a bit of that barley that goes down to Muntons at Bridlington, gets malted and then gets sent to Japan to make expensive whisky."
Durham Distillery is due to begin taking bookings for visitors in the coming days.
READ NEXT:
