Founder, distiller, brand ambassador and head cleaner - Richard Lock

A jack of all trades: designing stills, building 3 phase control panels one day then applying for Rural Development Grants the next, all while producing IWSC gold medal winning new make spirit and vodka. Not to mentioning the cleaning!

From lean-to to whisky distillery

  • Homebrewing in the lean-to

    It all started with homebrew, in a lean-to in Plymouth, a hobby turned into a passion to brew the best beer possible, which after studying Brewing and Distilling at Heriot Watt lead to Retribution Distilling.

  • Distilling in the garden shed

    Retribution Distilling like many good things started off in the garden shed, it quickly became apparent more space was need and a garden shed had some big limitations when trying to build a whisky and rum distillery!

  • The early days at the Farm

    After 6 months in the garden shed we up stills and moved to a local farm where we started producing rum, whisky and more recently our own vodka from whisky production waste

Continuing to grow and the future

We have boot strapped our way to building a fully functioning award winning whisky distillery capable of laying down three 200L barrels of whisky a week. Its now about continuing to create high quality spirit but not just following the masses - we will continue to experiment with peat, smoking malt, and malting on site, not to mention yeast and grain experimentation, and dare we say Single Pot Still English Whisky!