The Cornish Distilling Co at Norton Barton Artisan Food Village has created a new metal-packaged spirits brand to tell its sustainability story.
“We have our own wind turbine and solar panel array here at Norton Barton, allowing our distillery to run entirely on electricity, but we haven’t shouted about this much in the past. Instead we have focused more on the quality of our alcohol – we are one of the few distilleries in the UK to ferment molasses from scratch to make our rum,” said Adam Tynan, head of sales & marketing at Norton Barton, whose other brands include Cornish Charcuterie and Whalesborough Cheese.
“We decided it was time to talk about being a wind-powered distillery – as far as I know we are the only one in the UK. We’re producing spirits from wind power, so our work literally starts ‘after the storm’.”
After The Storm is a way of not only “landing” this sustainability message, but also conveying the “romance” of the distillery’s rugged location on the Cornish coast.
The Cornish Distilling Co has chosen a metal bottle format for the brand, for reasons explained by Tynan: “We thought that if we were making sustainability a USP, we had better carry that through to the packaging. Metal is a lot lighter than glass, which benefits the carbon footprint of the product through every supply chain step. Metal is also the most recycled material in the UK – the consumer understands that you can recycle metal.”
The distillery’s rum is the first product to get the After The Storm treatment, and will most likely be followed by gin and vodka, said Tynan.
The Bude distillery’s house rum is created using Norton Barton’s own bore hole water in the molasses fermentation, and Cornish spring water when proofing the spirit down before it goes into the stills.
WSP will be £15 for 50cl; RRP around £30.
cornishdistilling.co.uk
This article first appeared in the May 2025 issue of Fine Food Digest.
