Milky Way

The Lakes Distillery

£100

Milky Way is both a departure and a return – a Lake District round trip taking us light years from the Lakes sherry house style. Its whimsical, light-hearted nature rings true with its origins as an experiment inspired by the characteristics of vanilla oatmeal stout. Exploring symbiotic opportunities on this joint mission with Lakeland neighbour Cumbrian Ales, we first seasoned our ex-Bourbon barrel with locally brewed stout, then finished our single malt to add a fine layer of cask-derived flavours to our whisky. Milky Way is non-chill filtered and bottled at natural colour at 47% ABV, and re

The Lakes Distillery's own words, read from their page.

Buy from The Lakes DistilleryPrice seen 2026-09-04. Affiliate link.

Where this comes from

The part other shops don't tell you. Three separate questions, kept separate on purpose, each with its source.

UK company
Registered at Companies House as THE LAKES DISTILLERY COMPANY LIMITED, number 07769363. Checked 2026-08-29.
Means the business is a British legal entity, not a British-sounding name owned elsewhere. It says nothing about where anything is made.
UK operations
Stated by the company: "Our head office employs staff in finance, marketing, HR, and IT, amongst other roles." — names a location but no site or process, so this corroborates uk_hq more than operations. Source.
Means people employed here, or premises they actually work from. We keep this separate from the company badge because a registered office can be an accountant's spare room, and a company can be registered in Britain while everything it does happens somewhere else. Where we have not looked, we say so rather than assuming.
British-owned
No majority shareholding traced outside the UK. Companies House.
Read from the register of people with significant control, following the chain of holding companies. It does not gate anything: a firm can be made here and owned elsewhere, and that is worth telling you rather than hiding.
Where it is made
The maker doesn't say, so neither do we.
This is about the individual product, not the company. A British firm can sell things made abroad, which is normal and not a criticism. We would rather tell you which is which than average them into a score.