Bringing Retribution to English single malt whisky

Richard Lock hands me a glass. It contains a sample of his new-make spirit pulled from an orange bitters cask, with corresponding colour and aroma. It’s not quite 11am and I’m the designated driver (inevitable on a solo trip) so my sip is tentative, but it says enough. As with most things Rich has told or shown me on this visit, I come away brimming with fascination and questions.

We’re at his Retribution Distillery, located on a farm in Mells, Somerset. After retiring from a career in the energy industry, Rich escalated his interest in homebrewing to an MSc at Heriott-Watt University’s Institute of Brewing and Distilling. He began experimenting on a 400-litre alembic still in his garden. With an eye on expansion, he took his current premises just before the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020, “which in hindsight was beneficial,” he says. Formalising the business in this way opened up funding opportunities, which helped him buy a mash tun to start whisky production.

He started off collecting spirit in small batches in the alembic (filling a single bourbon cask took about six weeks). The set-up now includes two stills, at 1,800 litres and 1,000 litres, and he distils enough spirit for roughly 10 casks a month. 

I keep saying “he” because it’s just Rich: his single-operator set-up, his tenacity, and his Rok coffee machine. “The place started with next to nothing. There was no pot of money to slowly lay down casks,” he says frankly. “I’ve laid down 45 casks this year [and] will have the biggest LPA volume this year since we started.”

Making Retribution’s whiskies

After trialling a number of grains from Warminster Maltings over the past six years, Rich has settled on Plumage Archer, a mix of two malting barleys traditionally used in brewing. It’s a good match for the brewing yeasts he exclusively uses — greater flavour generators than your typical hyper-efficient distilling strains.

Plumage Archer is up to 60% more expensive per ton than a typical distilling malt like Laureate, and its uneven grain size makes milling a challenge, but for Rich its flavour and texture justify the economics and effort. “Plumage Archer has a juniper note to it, [and] more tropical fruit,” he says, namechecking mango and pineapple.

To enable higher sugar extraction from his low-yielding grain, Rich has invested in a sparge tank to take his mashing process up to three waters. Conventional distilling malts can yield 420 litres of pure alcohol (lpa) per ton. He currently gleans 300lpa from Plumage Archer, but reckons that with the “low wort” stored in the new tank he can raise that to 350.

Rich also buys small quantities of green malt to dry in his homemade smoker. The primary fuel source to date has been Somerset peat, sourced from the only individual with an active licence to extract on the Somerset Levels. It’s formed from reed beds, giving a vastly different flavour to Islay peat. “It is more mellow, more rounded, like a gateway peated whisky,” Rich explains.

However, he’ll soon cease peated malt production in favour of another local smoke source: applewood chips, created from end-of-life apple trees. The sustainability appeals to Rich, but it also supports a trend he’s spotted among European distillers to utilise ‘native’ smoke sources. “I think the discussion is going to move away from talking about peat to talking about smoke,” he says.

Unconventionality has permeated the warehouse, too. He has 124 casks on-site when I visit in September 2026. They range in size from octaves to hogsheads and encompass bourbon, sherry, wine, moscatel, new oak, and a few renegade choices (including that orange bitters cask).

Retribution is taking advantage of the English whisky GI’s permissiveness on wood varieties. His latest small-batch release is from a chestnut cask; I went home with a bottle, paid for gleefully.

The future of Retribution

Thanks to early experiments with barley varieties and yeast strains, Rich has roughly 30 different new makes maturing in 6–8 cask types. “It has taken us this long to work out and be confident in what it is, moving forward,” he says. “It comes to that idea of landrace barley, heritage malts, seven-day fermentations, direct fire, [and] copper pot stills, to create a new-make spirit that does not just have flavour, it has texture.”

The tendency towards novelty means batches to date have been small, but he recognises the limitations of this approach and will change tack next year to start laying down greater volumes of particular recipes. “Small batches of 150 bottles are great, but that means only 150 people will taste what you are doing. If you want people in a room to be talking about what you do, you need them to all be tasting the same thing.”

Another significant change is on the horizon. In a subscriber newsletter in August 2026, Rich announced that Retribution would stop distilling rum and gin to focus on whisky and vodka. “You are better off doing one thing and trying to do it to the best of your ability,” he says sagely, adding that “99%” of his production is now whisky focused.

He expects to fill another 30-40 casks next year but will be more selective in what is filled. “If we lay down 40 casks, 4-6 will be something a bit different,” he says. Do not mistake regularity for mundanity, though. Retribution will continue to “drip-feed” more experimental cask fillings, and its first sherry-matured peated single malt is also set to launch in the next 12 months.

Rich is planning a short production break in early 2027 to remodel his still room. He wants to build out cubicles under the stills to install wood-burning stoves, part of a plan to wean the distillery off gas; wood for fuel will come from the nearby Longleat estate and a local sawmill. The distillery already runs on 100% renewably generated energy, but he feels wood-fired distilling “would be quite a big step” in his push toward net zero. He also has a 1,000-litre column still to erect for vodka production, following proof-of-concept trials redistilling his heads and tails.

The thing that so impresses me about Rich is his practicality. Few things so far have been easy, but he’s in this for genuine love of the game.

“The distillery has evolved out of two things: the fact that we had no money, and the space it had to be in,” he says. This point on space isn’t figurative — all the equipment had to be sized at less than 1,230mm wide to fit it through the door. “All of that has led to the spirit we have. It has been designed out of function, which is quite unique.”