The Lakes Distillery has unveiled plans to raise £5m from investors to drive forward a growth strategy - as well as making renewed flotation plans.
The company, which has its head office in Gosforth, Newcastle, became England’s newest and largest whisky, gin and vodka distillery when it started life eight years ago on the banks of Bassenthwaite Lake, after lifting three handmade copper stills into place.
Since then some of its drinks have become widely available, with its gins and vodkas on sale through supermarkets, Amazon and in hotels, bars and restaurants across the 海角视频. Its premium single malt is available to whisky aficionados through specialists in London, including Amethyst and The Whisky Exchange, as well as the likes of Harvey Nichols and Fenwick.
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Now the distillery – which has raised more than £30m in investment since the firm was founded in 2011 – is seeking to increase production of its single malt , with the help of fresh funds.
A crowdfund campaign has been launched on Crowdcube to raise £1.25m, and has already raised more than 50% of its target in its private phase ahead of going public.
The fundraise forms part of wider plans to raise around £5m, also taking investment from its pool of high net worth investors, many of whom have backed the business since it first set out to launch the distillery.
It comes on top of investment programmes, which has seen £3m invested over 2020 and 2021 into its single malt production capacity, installing eight new ‘wash back’ fermentation tanks, to add to the existing four tanks - a project which was delayed by the pandemic as well as bad weather.
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It means the firm now has the capacity of production 130,000 litres of alcohol a year to 375,000 litres.
Chief financial officer David Robinson said: “The reason we are raising equity now is to start to put that increased production to work, and it’s the capital funding that will help us to do that.
"The total we’re trying to raise is £5m - our Crowdcube campaign that goes live will have a target of £1.25m, and that’s just part of where we’re getting our funding from. It’s used to make single malt whisky - we can only make so much every month. We don’t actually need £5m today - we can afford to raise that over the next 12 months if we want to, but it’s cleaner and more efficient if we raise it in one go.
“We have £659,000 at the moment, before going live, which is a good start. It just keeps ticking.
“We’re at a fairly exciting time really. We’re at a tipping point now where we have increasing amounts of single malts in stock and it is becoming the right age, the right quality and the right profile which we have been targeting, and we can start to increase that.
“If we didn’t increase production we could protect our stock - but if we do increase production we can ramp up sales in future years. If we produce more now, we can sell more now - we can start to use our stock more aggressively.”
The company paused its plans for an IPO in 2018 after some investment it had gathered during the initial process began to fall away.
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Mr Robinson said the company’s governance structures remain in place from that original flotation plan, and it is poised for a future liquidity event.
He said: “We’ve had lots of shareholders who’ve been brilliant supporters of ours, in some cases since 2012, and we are as a board absolutely committed to delivering a liquidity event for those guys.
“Our preferred route at the moment is to revisit an IPO. If we can successfully complete this fundraise the board’s attention will turn to that - and it’s a short to medium term goal for the board.”