On my way up to Thy’s annual whisky festival (and then Norway) in June, I had to go through Hamburg. Any journey from the continent up into Denmark forces you to at least change trains there, if not stay the night. I did the latter, travelling up in the evening for a quick sleep and onward journey the next day. However, my best train option north left Hamburg Altona just after lunch, so I wanted to squeeze in time for some Hamburg whisky sights…
I visited the nearby NORDIK Edelbrennerei back in 2023 - you can read about that here. However, you can actually find a whisky distillery within Hamburg city itself: Drilling. Sadly, after many emails and Instagram messages, I still had no response to my requests for a visit/tour/conversation with anyone at the distillery. But standing in Hamburg with time to kill that morning, I thought - why not? Let’s go and see what we can get.
It’s an easy, quick walk from the S-Bahn stop of Bahrenfeld to this former marzipan factory. The red brick looks well, and there’s enough signage to make it clear from the outside.
Inside, cask ends line the walls of quite an attractive bar. You can see the edge of the distillery and warehouse in the background, but unfortunately I didn’t get to see them. After a while, one person turned up at the bar to help me (it was early Monday afternoon). While she couldn’t get me in to see production (and made it clear that she was a new bar employee who knew very little about the whisky here), I still got as much help as she could give.
The backbar is lined with bottles, including the firmly photogenic whiskies of Drilling and the more brightly coloured liqueurs/other spirits they make.
There were two expressions available to taste, both labelled ‘2019’. The first comprises a batch of just two casks, aged for just three years. Someone might want to tell Drilling what ‘single cask’ means (or at least implies), but the bottle design is great. This dram has a creamy fruitiness on the nose, and almond biscuit notes which make me think of Lowland Scotch whisky. A few floral edges, some sweet cherry blossoms maybe… it's a very nice nose in all. While there’s a little prickle, this whisky doesn’t taste too young overall. You can tell it's young and only bourbon-cask aged, but good wood has led to a nice result nonetheless.
The partner to this is the Sherry Cask, a six year old bottling drawn from the same 2019 batch of malt. You can see that this is labelled ‘Hamburg’s einziger Whisky’, while the other bottle declared itself ‘Hamburg’s Erster Whisky’. Apparently, this sherry cask represented the most unique whisky in the city, rather than the first.
This one has a very savoury note to it - what I could call a very German nose, in that it reminds me of other whiskies aged in German oak. The palate keeps that at first before smoothing out to a rich, oxidised aftertaste. Not too syrupy - it keeps some heat and dryness. Seeing as this sherry cask only produced 349 bottles, I think it’s safe to assume it lost a lot to evaporation/oxidation. It would explain much of the flavour…
Overall, both drams are 45% ABV, and have a good level of depth for that. It’s a shame they seem to have made a limited batch in 2019 and stopped there, with the sherry cask being bottled in 2025. The bottle design (and glassware, for what that’s worth) were great, so it feels like Drilling got all the hard parts of European whiskymaking right.
In the end, the first impression matters. I can’t tell you any more about this whisky because they wouldn’t tell me. Small distillers of Europe - let people know what you’re up to, and talk to them! It's not a problem I have often, but it does happen, and I wonder how this working with your back to the public can possibly make sense from a business standpoint.
For now, Hamburg does have whisky, but NORDIK remains the best distillery in the area.
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