Making Welsh whisky at Penderyn distillery

There was a strong history of distillation stretching back through the ages, but whisky production mostly stopped in Wales around the early 19th century. A group of friends got together in the late 1990s and thought, you can get Scotch whisky, Irish whiskey - why can't you get a Welsh whisky? Here we are, more than 20 years later and Penderyn in Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) is a real success story. We're not trying to copy anyone: we produce Welsh whisky. It's really exciting that there's a huge movement of world whiskies. You've got great whiskies from Taiwan, Japan, India, France, and it's great that Penderyn was one of the forerunners of that. And now we have two distilleries in Llandudno and Swansea.

I was born and grew up in Lithuania Jonava town. I finished Kaunas University of Technology in Lithuania and have MSc in Chemical Engineering. I came to UK in 2004 and now Wales is my home. I was looking for the lab-based work in the food or drink industry so I send my CV to the Distillery. I just was lucky being in the right place at the right time as I got the job in the Penderyn Distillery. So, I’m the Master Blender and I do all the nosing and tasting of whiskies. If you want to have pride and passion in your job, you cannot beat working in the world of whisky. The whisky world is fascinating and fun, you will never stop learning.

Penderyn never set out to have a two-female distillation team (Bethan/Aista) plus Martin, who runs the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) distillery. We're not here just because we're female. We're here because we're the best people for the job, and we've all worked really hard to reach our positions. Having said that, there's quite a lot of research which suggests that females have a better nose and sensing ability, and I think that's certainly true.

We take malted barley and pass it into our mash tun with hot water. The water comes from our own borehole underneath the distillery. It's drawn from deep in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) National Park so it's a steady, clean supply of lovely soft water. Over the next eight or nine hours we extract the sugars from the malted barley. When we have that sugary liquid, called the 'wort', we pass it into our fermentation tanks, add yeast and allow that to ferment. Once that's fermented we fill the 'wash' into our stills and distil it for anything from six to twelve hours. We have two unique Faraday stills which give us a really pure, high-strength light spirit with lots of fruit and flavour. It gives us a great spirit to start off with, and when it goes into a cask it can only get better from there.

We've currently got over 17,000 casks in our maturation warehouse, just biding their time, waiting until the moment's right. We've got a whole range of casks - madeira, port, sherry, bourbon, peated - and we work with all of those to create our different expressions. Once we feel the whisky's reached its full potential we start sampling. You have to be very careful to blend whiskies together so all the different casks you're using work together and complement each other.

The classic Penderyn expression is put together using bourbon casks and madeira wine casks to give you a lovely soft, creamy, toffee sort of flavour, and lots of fruit: sultanas, apples. It gives you a really smooth full-bodied whisky. One of our other popular expressions is our port finish. It's got a deep red colour, and a really rich syrupy wine sort of finish, with a lovely velvety feel in the mouth, with lots of dark chocolate and strawberry notes.

Occasionally we come across a whisky that's really great, and it would be a shame to lose those qualities in a normal whisky batch. So we bottle it as a special edition on its own, two or three hundred bottles from the cask, each in its own hand-stencilled box signed by the distillery team. They're highly collectible.

If you're kind enough to buy our whisky, then you should enjoy it however you want it. I'm not going to tell you that you can't add water or ice. But I'm a strong believer that the best way to enjoy it is as it comes. It took a lot of hard work and craft to get it to that point and I think it's worth enjoying as it is. One of the great things about whisky is it's so versatile. You can drink it on its own but equally you can pair it with anything you like. Our port wood goes really well with dark chocolate or a cheeseboard. And our peated whisky works really well with a lamb Sunday lunch.

We didn't want to be known just because we were Welsh. We wanted people to be really proud of the brand because they liked the product. But then some of our importers said, 'Your products are great but a lot of people don't know about Wales.' Now our Dragon Collection really stands out and it's helping to bring Wales to the rest of the world. We've also got our Icons of Wales Collection, which celebrates big moments in Welsh history. That's been great to raise our profile across the world.

We've welcomed over 30,000 visitors for the tours and masterclasses at the visitor centres in Brecon Beacons, Llandudno Lloyd Street Distillery and Swansea Copperworks Distillery, as well as people who arrived at the distillery shops. Whisky is all about telling stories, and explaining to people what we do and why we do it, letting them see the care and attention we put into our products. Every single person who takes the time to come and visit us leaves as a brand ambassador. We get visitors from across the world and they take that message home with them. It helps that we're really lucky to be surrounded by some of the best scenery in Wales.

Visit the Penderyn Whisky website.

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