London Distillery Company's New Forms Series Brings Three Cask-Strength Single Malts to a City Finding Its Whisky Voice Again
There is no whisky category with more momentum right now than English single malt, and nowhere within that category is the story more complicated — or more compelling — than in London itself. The capital spent more than a century as a gin city, its whisky-making past buried under layers of industrial history and regulatory misfortune. The distilleries that once lined the Thames fell silent one by one, leaving London without a working whisky distillery for more than 100 years after Lea Valley closed in the early 1900s. Into that silence, The London Distillery Company stepped in 2011. Now, reborn under new ownership and with a celebrated whisky maker at the helm, the distillery has announced its most ambitious project to date: the New Forms series, a trio of cask-strength, single-cask single malt expressions that use the distillery's inherited legacy stocks as raw material for bold, uncharted maturation experiments.
The release arrives at a moment when the English whisky world is gathering real international credibility. There are 70 distilleries in England as of April 2026, with 27 of them part of the English Whisky Guild. Norfolk-based The English Distillery was recently crowned for World's Best Single Malt – Small Batch at the World Whiskies Awards 2026, the second time in three years that it has taken a global title. Against that backdrop, the London Distillery Company is positioning itself not as a latecomer to a crowded table, but as a historically rooted pioneer with something genuinely distinct to say about where English whisky can go next.
A Distillery That Has Lived Several Lives
To understand why New Forms matters, it helps to understand just how unlikely it is that these whiskies exist at all. The London Distillery Company was established in 2011, creating the first new whisky distillery in the capital since Lea Valley Distillery closed in 1903. Founded and inspired by the city's lost distilling heritage, it operated from a small but ambitious site in Battersea, quickly gaining recognition for its innovative approach — combining traditional production methods with a fresh, contemporary vision.
The original company's roots actually stretch back further still — at least in spirit. The London Distillery Company's story is linked to 1807, when entrepreneur and engineer Ralph Dodd set out to challenge the status quo of spirit production. Dodd envisioned a distillery that would produce spirits of the highest quality, free from adulteration and mass-market shortcuts. His bold plan promised to deliver purity and integrity at a time when the industry was plagued by inferior products. However, his vision was never fulfilled, and The London Distillery Company would have to wait another 200 years before becoming a reality. Dodd's enterprise was struck down under the 1720 Bubble Act, making it the first case ever made under that act, with the Crown hiring barrister Sir William Garrow as prosecutor. The venture collapsed before a single still was fired.
When Darren Rook and Nick Taylor registered the modern incarnation at Companies House in July 2011, they were consciously reviving that lost thread. TLDC used organic grains and traditional London yeast varieties such as Whitbread B and Young's, which were propagated as a liquid yeast slurry. That commitment to historical authenticity — using heritage raw materials to produce a distinctly London spirit — became the company's calling card. The barley-forward character that defines the stock sitting in casks today is a direct product of those early decisions.
But financial reality intervened. Innovation wasn't enough to sustain the distillery in the market, and operations ceased in 2020. Three years later, the company was acquired by Gleann Mòr Spirits, an independent bottler and drinks producer known for its Rare Find series — limited edition releases from unique single casks, often sourced from well-known Scottish distilleries. Gleann Mor Spirits bought the remaining stock of the now-demolished distillery and in 2025 brought in Matt McKay as Managing Director and Whisky Maker to take care of the remaining roughly 70 casks and look at reviving the historic distillery's name, with a plan to release the remaining whisky and possibly even build a new distillery to continue whisky making.
The Man Behind the Malt
The choice of Matt McKay to lead the revival was not incidental. McKay is known for his role as director of communications and whisky maker at both Bimber and Dunphail distilleries — two operations with sterling reputations among serious single malt drinkers. Bimber, in particular, has become one of the most talked-about craft distilleries in London, known for its handmade, small-batch approach and the depth of flavor it coaxes from unconventional cask choices. McKay's time there gave him not just technical proficiency but a genuine philosophy about what London whisky can be when given room to breathe.
His first major act at TLDC was the Renascence release in the summer of 2025 — a whisky created from the remaining TLDC casks produced between 2011 and 2020, crafted using Plumage Archer, a heritage variety of barley utilized in whisky production in the early 20th century, and matured in a combination of refill barrels and first-fill sherry casks, offering a distinctive but balanced character that celebrated the distillery's pioneering legacy. That release was a deliberate act of archaeology — demonstrating to the world that the original spirit had survived its years of institutional uncertainty intact, and that its character was worth building upon.
Then came Ten Times Around the Sun, London's first 10-year-old single malt whisky, distilled from Quench spring barley and laid down in single ex-bourbon barrel #007, bottled at 51.4% ABV, non-chill-filtered and with natural color. As one of the earliest casks laid down by the distillery, that barrel had matured over a decade, witnessing the growth of England's whisky sector and the rise of a new generation of London-based distilleries. McKay described it as "a tangible piece of London's whisky history." Each release has been a stepping stone, rebuilding credibility with the whisky community while drawing down a finite stock of irreplaceable spirit.
New Forms represents the creative apex of that rebuilding process so far — and the release that shows most clearly what McKay intends to do with both the heritage material he has inherited and the platform that Gleann Mòr has given him.
What the New Forms Series Actually Is
The New Forms series launches with three expressions, each a single cask, each bottled at cask strength, and each finished in a first-fill cask type that the original London Distillery Company never previously employed. That last point is key: these are not retreads of familiar ground but deliberate acts of exploration using stocks that can never be replenished. The series name is not accidental. The spirit is the same at its core across all three expressions. What changes — radically — is the form it takes after time in wood.
New Forms: Ex-Bourbon Cask (60.7% ABV)
The first expression spent twelve months in first-fill ex-Bourbon cask #11190 and is limited to just 222 bottles. At 60.7% ABV, this is the series' most classically structured release, and arguably the most illuminating from a technical perspective, because ex-Bourbon oak does less to mask the underlying distillate than sherry wood and instead amplifies it. The results confirm that the LDC spirit has genuine complexity at its core. The nose delivers honey on buttered toast, ripe banana, sweet lemon zest, tropical fruit juice, pineapple, vanilla blossom, red peppercorns, tart nectarine and toasted grains — a profile that speaks to the kind of ester-rich, grain-forward new make that characterizes the best English craft distilleries. The palate brings buttery caramel, toasted oak, sweet warming cinnamon, bitter lemon zest and deep, rich char. Fresh American oak at cask strength is not subtle; that the distillate's character remains legible underneath the wood influence speaks well of its concentration and structure.
For American whiskey drinkers accustomed to the vanilla-forward, barrel-driven profile of Kentucky bourbon, the LDC Ex-Bourbon expression will feel simultaneously familiar and disorienting. The oak influence is unmistakable, but the grain character underneath it — that barley-driven, slightly grassy, cereal-forward quality — is very much English single malt, not corn-heavy American whiskey. It is a useful reminder of how much of what drinkers attribute to "bourbon flavor" is actually wood, and how different the spirit underneath can be.
New Forms: Fino Sherry Cask (61.4% ABV)
The second expression was finished for eight months in first-fill Fino Sherry hogshead #9001 and is limited to 347 bottles. Fino is the driest, most oxidative style of sherry, produced under a layer of flor yeast that prevents direct contact with oxygen and creates a distinctively saline, almost marine quality in the wine. Those characteristics translate directly into the whisky: the nose shows candied lemon peel, fleshy golden plum, ripe nectarine, peach blossom, dewy rose petals, grape leaves, toasted porridge, brown butter, sweet baking spices, a hint of coconut oil and damp oak — a precise, delicate, floral-driven profile that sits at the lighter end of the sherry cask spectrum. The palate then delivers bright citrus peel, tropical fruit juice, warming spices, white pepper, clove, a hint of ground coffee, toasted oak and a touch of salinity.
That final note of salinity is the Fino's calling card, and it is rare in whisky finished in this style. Most producers default to Oloroso or PX sherry, both of which deliver the dried fruit, dark chocolate and nutty sweetness that many drinkers associate with sherry-matured Scotch. Fino is a more austere, more precise choice — one that complements rather than overwhelms a delicate spirit. McKay's decision to use it reflects both a sophisticated understanding of wood-spirit interaction and a willingness to bet on subtlety in a market that often rewards loudness.
New Forms: Moscatel Sherry Cask (61.6% ABV)
The third expression, finished for eight months in first-fill Moscatel Sherry hogshead #9008, is limited to 345 bottles and sits at the sweetest, most voluptuous end of the series. Moscatel is a dessert wine sherry made from Muscat grapes, and it brings a concentrated sweetness that is quite different from either the dry precision of Fino or the dark fruit richness of Oloroso. On the nose: caramelised orange peel, tart lemon, brown butter-poached peaches, cooked apples, icing sugar, Sauternes and dusty oak. The palate delivers oily brown butter, bright citrus, peach, nectarine, orange blossom, burnt toffee, cinnamon and a fiery touch of ginger.
The Moscatel expression is likely to be the most immediately accessible of the three — its sweetness and fruit-forward character will appeal to drinkers who enjoy sherried single malts — but there is genuine complexity underneath the obvious sweetness. The tension between burnt toffee, fiery ginger and the lighter citrus and orchard fruit notes suggests that the underlying LDC distillate is doing real work here, not simply being subsumed by the cask.
The Cask Sourcing and the Spanish Connection
The sherry casks used in New Forms were sourced from Tonelería JL Rodríguez, a renowned Spanish cooperage. This is not a generic procurement decision. McKay has an existing professional relationship with this cooperage from previous projects, and that familiarity matters. The quality and provenance of sherry casks has become one of the most contested issues in the premium whisky world over the past decade. As demand for sherry-finished and sherry-matured expressions has exploded, the supply of genuinely well-seasoned, first-fill sherry casks has tightened considerably. Producers who have direct, long-standing relationships with specific cooperages have a material advantage over those purchasing on the open market.
Tonelería JL Rodríguez operates out of the Jerez region, the heartland of sherry production, and the casks sourced from there carry the genuine character of the wines that previously occupied them. That authenticity — the difference between a cask that held real Fino sherry for years and one that received a cursory seasoning treatment — is detectable in the finished whisky, particularly in the more delicate notes like the Fino's salinity and the Moscatel's honeyed stone fruit quality. The selection of two distinct sherry styles from the same cooperage also gives the series an internal coherence: same source, dramatically different characters.
Design as Philosophy
The packaging for New Forms is worth noting because it directly expresses the conceptual framework of the series. Each whisky is housed in an individual gift carton featuring artwork designed to align with the others, forming a complete image when the three bottles are placed side by side. Critically, the cartons can also be arranged in any order — a deliberate design choice that reflects the equal standing of all three expressions within the series and the idea that the same core spirit can arrive at completely different destinations depending on the wood it encounters. The design tells the story of the whisky without requiring a paragraph of explanation on the label. For a series built around the concept of transformation from a single source, that visual coherence-through-flexibility is an unusually apt piece of communication.
What McKay Says About It
McKay has been characteristically direct about the creative logic behind New Forms. "New Forms is the most creatively exciting project we've undertaken since reviving The London Distillery Company," he said at launch. "The original LDC spirit has always possessed a distinctive character — rich, expressive and deeply barley-driven — but what continues to fascinate me is just how adaptable it becomes when matched with the right cask, where thoughtful maturation and a genuine synergy between wood and spirit can unlock entirely new dimensions of character."
He continued: "This series gave us the opportunity to push our spirit into completely new territories. Each cask has shaped the whisky in a dramatically different way, revealing unexpected layers of texture, flavour and complexity, whilst still retaining the unmistakable DNA of the original distillery at its core. That tension between familiarity and transformation sits at the heart of New Forms."
That phrase — "tension between familiarity and transformation" — is a precise description of what the series achieves technically. The common thread across all three expressions is the grain-led, barley-forward character of the LDC distillate; what changes is everything else. Drinking the three side by side would be an instructive exercise in understanding how much of what any given whisky tastes like is determined by the wood rather than the new make, and how radically the same spirit can diverge when given different environments to mature in.
The Wider Context: English Whisky at a Crossroads
New Forms arrives at an inflection point for English whisky broadly and London whisky specifically. There are now more than 60 distilleries across England in various stages of making and laying down spirit, and the category is beginning to attract the kind of international attention that was unimaginable even a decade ago. McKay himself, as a founding member of The English Whisky Guild, has noted that in the past 10 years there has been "an absolute explosion in the number of English distilleries."
What distinguishes the English category from Scotland's massively capitalized industry is, paradoxically, its scale. As McKay has observed, English distilleries "are all, by and large, owned independently and they are craft — not making large scale, where they're producing 100,000 bottles, and yield is everything." That independence translates directly into creative freedom: the willingness to use Fino sherry casks rather than Oloroso, to finish for eight months rather than two years, to bottle at cask strength and trust the drinker to add water rather than standardizing at 46%. English whisky has more regulatory flexibility than traditional whisky producers, enabling more experimentation with a range of styles, grain selection, cask ageing and blending techniques.
For American drinkers who have spent the past decade expanding their palates beyond bourbon and rye — into Japanese single malt, into independent Scottish bottlings, into the broader world of aged grain spirits — English single malt represents a genuinely underexplored frontier. The stylistic range is real. As McKay has described it, "what you have in England is an amazing amount of diversity of whisky. They're the people doing all sorts of different things… everyone's got their unique spin on it" — from the grains being used, to the yeast, to the cask. The New Forms series is a near-perfect illustration of that diversity compressed into a single distillery's output.
There is also the matter of value. In a secondary market where allocated bourbon releases routinely trade at multiples of their retail price and age-stated Scotch single malts cost three figures as a matter of course, the LDC New Forms expressions are priced at £75 per bottle or £200 for the complete three-bottle collection — roughly $95 and $255 at current exchange rates. For three cask-strength, single-cask, naturally colored, un-chill-filtered expressions from a historically significant distillery with a finite and irreplaceable stock, that represents serious value. These are not bottles that will be pressed into service as everyday pours; they are collector's items with genuine drinking merit, which is a combination that is harder to find than it should be at any price point.
A Finite Stock and a Long Game
The urgency underlying New Forms is real. The LDC stock inherited from the original Battersea operation is not unlimited. Gleann Mòr took custody of roughly 70 casks, with a longer-term plan that includes possibly building a new distillery — but until that new make spirit begins its own years-long journey through wood, every release from the current stock is drawing down a non-renewable resource. The Renascence release was 410 bottles. Ten Times Around the Sun was limited to 220. The New Forms expressions range from 222 to 347 bottles each. These are not artificial scarcity plays; they are the natural consequence of working with single casks from a small distillery that has not operated for half a decade.
That finitude is also part of what makes the New Forms series philosophically interesting. McKay is not building toward a permanent product line here. He is documenting what these particular casks — filled with this particular barley-driven spirit, at this particular point in the distillery's history — became when placed in these specific vessels. It is closer to the work of an archivist than a brand builder, though the commercial stakes are real enough.
TLDC is currently a distillery without walls: no active stills, no new make spirit being laid down — yet. The long-term goal is to rebuild and resume distilling, but the current releases are about proving the old spirit still has something to say. New Forms says it emphatically.
Availability and What to Do About It
The London Distillery Company New Forms series goes on sale June 12, available directly from londondistillery.co.uk and through selected specialist retailers. Given the bottle counts — particularly the 222-bottle Ex-Bourbon expression — anyone with genuine interest in the series would be well advised not to treat that date as approximate. Single-cask releases at this level of specification, from a distillery with this backstory, do not typically linger on shelves.
For American buyers, the international shipping logistics and potential import considerations are worth thinking through in advance. Specialist importers who carry English single malt are the most reliable route for stateside acquisition, though the distillery's direct online channel should be the first call. The complete three-bottle collection at £200 is the obvious choice for anyone serious about the series — the packaging design only fully resolves when all three bottles are together, and the tasting experience of working through all three expressions side by side is, by any reasonable estimate, the point of the exercise.
The London Distillery Company has spent the better part of two centuries trying to exist. What is sitting in those casks — barley grown with intention, fermented with historical yeast strains, distilled at a small London operation against considerable commercial headwinds — deserves to be drunk, and drunk carefully. New Forms is the most direct invitation yet to do exactly that.
