Growing: Spring Barley 2023 – May Update

A quick update on how the Spring Barley is looking, three weeks or so post-drilling. In a nutshell… great!

We’re really pleased with how it’s coming through and having sheep graze the cover crops over winter in a sort of light-mob style (where they moved around different parts of the fields every few days) seems to have created a really effective seed bed.

We’ll keep sharing the crops’ progress on social channels and on here over the next couple of months. This might seem small in the grand scheme of whisky but for us it’s really important. Not only are we one of only a handful of whisky distilleries around the world who grow 100% of the barley used in their whisky themselves, but we do it in a no-till/direct drilled way, using cover crops over winter to regenerate the soil. Some call it single estate; we use the term field to bottle.

Now (we’re farmers so there’s always something to grumble about) … where’s that sun?!