Circumstance Distillery

The Free Bacchus Story

Circumstance Distillery opened in 2018 in the industrial heart of Bristol. It is run by Psychopomp Limited, which operates two small distilleries in the city, and its founder, Liam Hirt, thinks English whisky is in what he called a Goldilocks zone: old enough for spirit to have matured, young enough to stay experimental.

The rules leave room for that. English whisky has to be made from grain, aged at least three years in wooden casks and bottled at 40% or more, and beyond that the rulebook is comparatively open. Circumstance makes no single malt at all. It mixes barley with wheat, rye and triticale, ferments the mash for 10 to 14 days, sometimes longer, with beer yeasts such as saison and Bavarian wheat strains, and runs it through a copper hood and a four-plate column before the casks go to work.

Biodynamic Association Certification certifies the distillery as an organic processor, and B Lab lists the company as a certified B Corp since 2022. The bottles sold as organic are its single grain whiskies and its wheat vodka. Its core blend, the Single Grain Estate Whisky that won gold in San Francisco in 2024, is not labelled organic. Spent grain goes to a local farm as cattle feed, and the distillery takes bottles back for reuse.

The Organic Single Grain Wheat Whisky is 70% organic malted wheat and 30% organic malted barley, fermented for 14 days on a Bavarian wheat yeast and aged for 44 months in ex-bourbon, new Andean oak and ex-red vermouth casks. About 400 bottles were made.