This is our continued mission to promote this incredible spirit and get more people to experience it. This really is a labour of love for team LBD. These casks were purchased during our trip to Normandy in June 2024. It took nearly a year to bring them home but we had originally thought these would be out before Christmas 2024! Working with Christian Drouin, we’ve developed and excellent relationship here which really does get us access to some of their best stock. They also release some of their calvados casks to us for filling with whiskies, we’re really looking forward to sharing these with you one day.

We just love this stuff and really do believe these two casks (the Arran cask and the Sauternes cask) must be amongst some of the absolute best Calvados on the market in the UK.

Pays D’Auge so it’s double pot distilled rather than column distilled and it’s just wonderful liquid. The pot distillation creates a richer, heavier distillate that preserves more apple oomph, that’s almost certainly the correct technical term.

We can offer a mixed case of Calvados, or if you just wanted to try it out I’m sure we could get you some samples. For now, here’s a little bit about each of them.

This single cask calvados was filled into a Sauternes, sweet dessert wine cask in 2018 and bottled in April 2025. It is softer than many Calvas that we have tried, just silky on the palate and if this is your introduction to Calvados then wow, what a start!

Apple blossom label celebrates the many varieties of apples grown to produce the complex cider for distillation. We absolutely love this cask and hope that you do to.

No water added by us but likely watered in cask. It’s typical for water to be added to the casks over a number of years for calvados, rather than at bottling, but you knew that already… Natural colour and non-chill filtered.

Softer, sweeter, incredible texture, a magnificent introduction to how good Pays D’Auge Calvados can be.

Chris’s favourite of the cask picks, that’s why we ended up bringing home two casks as we couldn’t decide on one!

COLOUR: Polished brass
NOSE: 1990s health food shop, stewed apple, cinnamon
PALATE: Mirabelle, sugar coated fennel seeds, golden syrup
FINISH: Candied peel, cinnamon buns

This single cask calvados is from an Arran whisky cask so combines two of our favourite distilleries in one bottle!

The label for this one, well in true LBD style, it takes some explanation. You know we’re nerds, whisky nerds, calvados nerds, gin nerds, WW2 history nerds….

As such there’s a level of geekery that you’re going to need to run with for now, but hey it’s our company and we’ll bottle what we like and how we like!

The Christian Drouin distillery is just down the road from the Bénouville bridge, but it’s more famously known as Pegasus Bridge. This was the first area of France to be liberated on D-Day. On the 6th of June 1944, before helicopters came into service, the glider regiment crash landed wooden gliders, at 90 miles per hour within meters of this bridge and stormed it, taking it for the allies. The Ox and Bucks used the code phrase “Ham & Jam” to announce the success of the mission, that’s why that appears on the label and the colours used are representative of the glider and para regiments. So there you go, an obvious choice for a label…. Ok we entertain ourselves.

COLOUR: Mike from Spaced’s glasses
NOSE: Tinned mandarins, apple strudel, a new box of glazed donuts
PALATE: Apple tarte tatin, candy floss, angelica
FINISH: Feint pastis, cumin, white pepper