Spirit of the Underground is one of Bimber Distillery's London-themed limited releases, a small-batch single malt that nods to the capital's iconic transport network and to Bimber's own roots in Park Royal, west London. The distillery sits almost within earshot of the Central Line, and releases like this one are the team's way of wearing their postcode on their sleeve.
Bimber was founded in 2015 by Dariusz Plazewski, who learned to distil from his father and grandfather in Poland before moving to London. From the first day the distillery has insisted on the old methods — 100% English-grown barley floor-malted in Norfolk, long open-wooden-washback fermentations of around a week, slow direct-fired distillation in small hand-hammered copper pots, and maturation in carefully chosen American and European oak. Everything is done in-house, and volumes are modest by design.
That insistence on craft is why Bimber's bottles are so often bottled at cask strength, non-chill-filtered and without added colour. Spirit of the Underground follows that template, presenting Bimber's signature tropical, honey-and-orchard-fruit spirit in its most undiluted form. As with the rest of Bimber's limited releases, the batch is small and the bottle tends to move fast.
For anyone tracking the rise of English single malt, Bimber's London-themed series offers both a sense of place and a sense of possibility. Spirit of the Underground is a reminder that some of the most exciting malt whisky being made today is travelling the same tunnels as the rest of us — just in a copper pot still a few streets from the station.
