The Evolution Collection

Inside the Collection

Every Evolution Collection comes with the following:

The Bairn

We call our New Make spirit ‘The Bairn’, the Northern English for ‘child’. It’ll take a minimum of three years in first-fill bourbon barrels before we can officially call it a whisky.


Beginning life in the pearl barley fields of East Yorkshire, The Bairn is made using our Distiller’s Beer – a porter-style beer (minus the hops) packed with notes of cherry, ripe bananas and toasted malt, with a sweet and creamy richness. In collaboration with Theakston Brewery, with nearly 200 years of brewing heritage, we set out to give our single malt maximum flavour from the start. Traditional whisky distilleries spend a fraction of the time creating a rudimentary whisky beer (or ‘wash’ as the industry calls it) that you’d prefer not to drink on its own. You could drink ours with your Sunday roast!


Gently distilled using handcrafted Italian equipment – including a steam-heated 20-plate column still and 2,500 litre copper pot still – our distillery team patiently guides the flavour of our Distiller’s Beer through to the New Make spirit. At every stage, The Bairn’s flavour develops; first rising as vapour through the plates of our column still and then over and over from inside the pot still, before intensifying on its journey out of our precisely angled lyne arm. It then matures within first-fill bourbon barrels from Heaven Hill Distillery in Kentucky, United States.

The Evolution Collection features five exclusive 50cl bottles of the New Make spirit, bottled at every stage of its flavour evolution. Our 0 Month New Make is already multi-award-winning, and collectors will be taken on an insider’s journey to experience how this unaged New Make spirit develops every six months, up to 24 months. There will only ever be 500 collections released, with no more once they’re gone.

The First Release Single Malt Whisky

Once The Bairn has come of age at the end of its maturation evolution, collectors will be given one of just 1,000 bottles of our single malt first release English whisky. Patiently aged in an American oak cask, we’ve only used first-fill bourbon barrels from Heaven Hill Distillery in Kentucky, USA, as with The Bairn.

These barrels have been charred for approximately 40 seconds, caramelising the sugars on the inside of the oak cask, which delivers a delicate sweetness to the spirit as it ages. During maturation, the wood will pass on layers of flavour, ranging from rich vanilla and sweet banana to subtle hints of spice and cherry. The New Make’s sharper edges will soften over time, as its flavours marry through the passage of time. The result is set to be a luxurious single malt packed with flavour that celebrates its proud Yorkshire origins.


“The first release of a distillery’s whisky only ever happens once and, as a result, they’re incredibly rare and sought-after by collectors and whisky aficionados. Our Evolution Collection is the first chance for people to secure a bottle of our first release single malt whisky, but you also get to come along on this exciting but patient journey, as we taste the transformation of what we know will be an exceptional whisky.” ~ Chris Fraser, Founder, Ellers Farm Distillery

Our flavour philosophy

At every stage of our single malt’s journey, its flavour is our priority. Using patience and care, we believe that giving our whisky everything it needs to develop gracefully – the best ingredients, the best equipment, passion and, most importantly, time – will produce a carbon neutral whisky the world can be proud of.

Our Bairn marries the dark, rich flavours of our porter-style Distiller's Beer, brewed by the legendary Theakston Brewery, with the technical capability of our state-of-the-art, custom distillery. Our distillery team meticulously oversees every step of its column and pot distillation processes, prioritising quality and flavour. Each distillation yields a mere seven casks as a result. This ‘small batch cask-filling’ approach gives us greater control than larger whisky producers over distillation and ageing, so we can create a single malt that delivers a complex yet delicate flavour profile to remember.

The Evolution Collection was born out of an idea to bring collectors on this flavour journey with us. Whilst planning the maturation of our New Make spirit and keeping a close watch on the ageing liquid’s transformation every six months, our distillery team conjured an idea. They wanted to bring collectors along on the single malt’s flavour evolution with us, with an exclusive opportunity to taste the new make spirit every six months as they do. The Evolution Collection takes you behind-the-scenes and into the distillery room, filled with intrigue, excitement and discovery. Drawn from single casks by our distillery team, The Evolution Collection is a rare and limited chance to watch a single malt grow from humble beginnings.

“At Ellers Farm, innovation in the pursuit of the best possible liquids is in our DNA and our whisky is no different. Our collaboration with Theakston Brewery is an example of this, and something traditional whisky distilleries don’t typically invest as much time in. Rather than creating a typical ‘wash’, we partnered with Yorkshire’s most renowned family brewer – a brewer with almost 200 years of brewing expertise behind it – to co-create our ‘Distiller's Beer’ using Yorkshire grown and malted barley as the start of our whisky. This beer is so good you could happily sit down and enjoy a pint with your Sunday lunch. We then carefully distil that beer through our state-of-the-art distillery, to produce a high-quality liquid aged in first-fill bourbon casks. It will make, what we believe, will be a truly remarkable English whisky.”
~ Chris Fraser, Founder, Ellers Farm Distillery