Distilleries

Yamazaki was founded in 1923 by Shinjiro Torii, the founder of Suntory, making it Japan's first dedicated malt whisky distillery. Torii chose the Yamazaki valley near Kyoto for its water, at the confluence of three rivers and long known locally as good water for the tea ceremony. Masataka Taketsuru, who had studied distilling in Scotland, was brought in to oversee the first production in 1924, before later leaving to found what became Nikka.

Suntory's first whisky, Shirofuda (White Label), was released in 1929 but was not well received by a domestic market unused to whisky's flavour; commercial success came later, particularly with Kakubin from 1937. Yamazaki today uses a wide variety of pot still shapes and both American and Japanese oak, including mizunara, to produce a broad range of malt styles from one site, which is what its single malt is built from.

The Orientalist Spirits is a Singapore-based drinks house founded by Michel Lu, who brought more than thirty years in hospitality to the project. The company's stated aim is to build an Asian spirits house on its own terms rather than imitating Scotch or bourbon conventions. Its Dragon whisky is a blended malt bringing together mature single malt whiskies distilled in Japan, Taiwan and India, described on the brand's own site as an evolving assemblage of mature Asian malt whiskies rather than a fixed recipe.

The blend is matured for a minimum of eight years before being finished in oloroso-seasoned oak, which gives it dried fruit, sherry and dark chocolate character. It is sold in at least two expressions, an 8-year-old and a 12-year-old, the latter carrying a longer sherry-cask finish.

The Macallan was founded in 1824 by Alexander Reid on the Easter Elchies estate above the River Spey, one of the first distilleries to be licensed after that year's Excise Act. Roderick Kemp bought the estate in 1892 and it stayed under his family's control for over a century. In 1994 Highland Distillers took ownership, and Edrington, which had held a stake in Highland Distillers, became sole owner of the Macallan brand in 1999.

Macallan is known for using a high proportion of sherry-seasoned oak casks, mostly from Spain, and for the small stills it has historically used, which the brand says concentrate flavour. A large, architecturally distinctive new distillery and visitor centre was built into the hillside at the estate and opened in 2018, alongside the original Victorian buildings, which remain in use.

The Glasgow Distillery Company was founded in December 2012 by Liam Hughes and Mike Hayward, aiming to bring single malt whisky production back to Glasgow after more than a century's gap. It operates from a converted industrial unit in Hillington on the city's outskirts rather than a traditional distillery building. The name of its core range, 1770, honours the original Glasgow Distillery Company, which began distilling at Dundashill in that year and grew into one of the largest distilleries in the world before closing in 1902.

The modern 1770 Glasgow Single Malt range includes a peated expression and a triple-distilled bottling, reflecting different production styles rather than different ages. The company describes itself as Glasgow's first independent single malt distillery in over a hundred years.

The pub blends its own. When a whisky gets low in the bottle, what is left goes into the Compass Blend, so it changes as the shelf changes.

Don't ask us the strength: it is over 40%. The flavour is complex. The rest is for you to discover.

The current Lochnagar distillery was founded in 1845 by John Begg, the third distillery built on this stretch of Deeside after its two predecessors both burned down, reportedly at the hands of illicit competitors. Begg wrote directly to Balmoral inviting Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to see the distillery when they took up residence nearby; they visited in 1848, and the royal warrant and the Royal name followed.

The distillery remained in the Begg family until 1916, when it passed to John Dewar & Sons, later part of the Distillers Company and eventually Diageo. It is one of the smallest working distilleries in Scotland, producing on a small scale by hand, and its position a mile from Balmoral Castle remains central to how it presents itself today.

Mortlach was founded in 1823 by James Findlater, on the site of an earlier illicit still, and was the first legally licensed distillery in Dufftown. Ownership changed hands several times in its first decades; George Cowie became a partner in 1853 and sole owner by 1867, and his son Alexander Mitchell Cowie later introduced the distillery's unusual 2.81-times partial distillation and its traditional worm-tub condensers, which still shape Mortlach's character today. William Grant, who went on to found Glenfiddich, worked at and managed Mortlach for twenty years before starting his own distillery.

In 1923 Mortlach was bought by John Walker & Sons, and most of its output has gone into Johnnie Walker blends ever since. It joined the Distillers Company in 1925, passed to Guinness in 1986, and became part of Diageo when Guinness merged with Grand Metropolitan in 1997. Mortlach is nicknamed the Beast of Dufftown for its rich, meaty spirit.

In 1966 the three surviving Irish whiskey producers, John Power & Son, John Jameson & Son and the Cork Distilleries Company, merged to form Irish Distillers, pooling resources during a long slump in Irish whiskey's fortunes. Their existing distilleries, including Powers' own John's Lane Distillery on Dublin's John's Lane, founded by James Power in 1791 and the first Irish distiller to bottle its own whiskey, were no longer fit for purpose. Irish Distillers built a new, larger distillery beside the old Midleton Distillery in County Cork, and production of Jameson and Powers moved there; Powers whiskey has been made at Midleton since 1976.

The site has since been expanded repeatedly, most recently with a doubling of capacity funded by a Pernod Ricard investment of over 200 million euros from 2010. The original John's Lane Distillery in Dublin was closed and is no longer in production.

Bowsaw is a straight corn whiskey brand owned by Kirker Greer, a Belfast drinks company whose own roots go back to 1885. The whiskey itself is made in Kentucky, distilled and matured in Owensboro and Louisville, from a mash of 91% corn, 5% barley and 4% rye. Kirker Greer's own marketing describes it as coming from a family-owned distillery run by a third-generation master distiller, but does not name that distillery, which is common practice for a sourced or private-label American whiskey brand rather than one distilled at its own named site.

It is aged four to five years in refill American oak and bottled at 43%. The name nods to the cooper's saw traditionally used to cut the heads off whisky barrels.

Invergordon distillery was built on the Cromarty Firth in Easter Ross, and started production in 1961 as a grain whisky plant, built by Invergordon Distillers Ltd to supply blended Scotch. It later passed through several owners before Whyte & Mackay took control, and Whyte & Mackay itself is now owned by the Philippine drinks group Emperador. Invergordon still produces grain whisky for Whyte & Mackay's blends, alongside malt from the company's other distilleries such as Tamnavulin and Jura.

In July 2023, Whyte & Mackay announced a large expansion of the whisky maturation complex at the site, roughly doubling its footprint. The distillery itself rarely bottles under its own name; most Invergordon whisky that reaches drinkers comes from independent bottlers.

Indri single malt whisky is made at Piccadily Distillery in the village of Indri, Haryana, on the edge of the Himalayan foothills. The distillery sits within a larger sugar and grain-alcohol business, Piccadily Agro Industries, whose roots go back to 1953, when K. N. Sharma founded Kedar Nath and Sons in Doraha, Punjab.

A second sugar factory and distillery followed at Indri in 1994, and the site later added dedicated malt whisky production, commissioned in 2010. The whisky is made from six-row Indian barley, malted and distilled on fourteen Scottish-style copper pot stills, then matured on site. The Indri brand of single malt whisky launched in 2021 and quickly won international awards, including Best in Show, Double Gold, at the Whiskies of the World Awards in 2023. The distillery now has a visitor centre offering tours and tastings.

Ian Macleod Distillers began life as a whisky brokerage founded in 1933 by Leonard Russell senior. His family's firm bought the small business of Ian MacLeod & Co. in March 1963, and two months later bought the Isle of Skye blended Scotch whisky brand, which it still owns.

For decades the company worked mainly as an independent bottler and blender rather than a distiller in its own right. That changed in 2003 when it bought the Glengoyne distillery from the Edrington Group, followed by Tamdhu in 2011 and the Rosebank trademarks and site in 2017. The company remains independent and family-owned, run by descendants of the Russell family, and its portfolio now spans Glengoyne, Tamdhu, Rosebank and Smokehead single malts alongside blends such as Isle of Skye and King Robert II, plus Edinburgh Gin.

Hakushu was built by Suntory in 1973, fifty years after the company's first distillery at Yamazaki, as its second malt whisky site. It sits in forest on the slopes of Mount Kaikomagatake in the Southern Alps, chosen for the softness and mineral balance of the local underground water, and is one of the highest-altitude malt whisky distilleries in the world. The surrounding site is run partly as a bird sanctuary and forest reserve, reflecting Suntory's long-standing environmental branding around the distillery.

Hakushu produces a deliberately different style of spirit from Yamazaki, generally lighter and greener in character, with a heavily peated variant also produced there since 2013. Its core range includes an age-less Distiller's Reserve alongside 12, 18 and 25 year old bottlings.

Glen Scotia was founded in 1832 by James Stewart and John Galbraith as the Scotia Distillery, one of more than thirty that once operated in Campbeltown when the town was regarded as whisky's capital. It has had a chequered history: in 1930 its then owner, Duncan MacCallum, took his own life after losing his savings in a scam, and the business was bought by Bloch Brothers, who added Glen to the name. Bloch owned it until 1954, when it passed to the Canadian firm Hiram Walker.

Despite rebuilding work in the late 1970s, the distillery closed between 1984 and 1989, one of many Campbeltown casualties as the region's distilling industry contracted to just a handful of survivors. It has changed hands several times since, and is now owned by the Loch Lomond Group. Much of its original 1830s fabric survives, including its fermenters, stillroom and dunnage warehouse.

GlenAllachie was built in 1967 at Aberlour on Speyside, designed by William Delmé-Evans and built for Scottish & Newcastle's distilling division. For decades its malt went almost entirely into blends and was rarely seen as a single malt in its own right. Ownership passed through several large drinks groups, ending up with Chivas Brothers, who sold the distillery in 2017 to a trio of industry veterans: Billy Walker, formerly of BenRiach, together with Trisha Savage and Graham Stevenson, previously of Inver House Distillers.

Trading as The GlenAllachie Distillers Company, the new owners are independent of any larger drinks group. In 2018 they launched the first dedicated single malt range under the GlenAllachie name, drawing on stock built up in the distillery's sixteen on-site warehouses. Billy Walker, who has worked in Scotch whisky for over fifty years, remains master distiller.

Caol Ila was founded in 1846 by Hector Henderson on the Sound of Islay, chosen for its sheltered sea access, a nearby fresh water source at Loch nam Ban, and the peat of the surrounding land. Ownership changed several times in the nineteenth century, passing to Norman Buchanan of Isle of Jura in 1854 and then to the Glasgow whisky traders Bulloch Lade & Co in 1863. The distillery was almost entirely rebuilt between 1972 and 1974, when the original buildings were demolished and replaced with a larger plant that kept only the old warehouses, and the number of stills was increased to six.

It passed into the Distillers Company Limited group and from there, via United Distillers, to Diageo, which owns it today. Most of its output has traditionally gone into blends, though official single malt bottlings and a considerable trade in independent bottlings, such as this one, are also well established.

Bruichladdich was built in 1881 by three Harvey brothers, William, John and Robert, on the shore of Loch Indaal on the Rinns of Islay, the westernmost part of the island. The Harveys were an established Glasgow whisky family and used an inheritance to finance this, their third distillery, designed by John and engineered by Robert. Bruichladdich changed hands several times over the twentieth century and closed in 1994. It was bought out of mothballs in December 2000 by a group of investors led by Mark Reynier, with Jim McEwan brought in as master distiller and many original staff rehired.

Rémy Cointreau bought the distillery in 2012. Bruichladdich is known for using traceable, mostly Scottish-grown barley and for its heavily peated Octomore range, among the most heavily peated whiskies made anywhere. In 2020 it became the first Scotch whisky producer to gain B Corp certification.

Auchentoshan was founded in the early nineteenth century at Dalmuir, on the north bank of the Clyde near Clydebank. John Bulloch established the site, first as Duntocher, before it was formally licensed as Auchentoshan in 1823. Ownership passed through several hands over the following century, including John Hart and Alexander Filshie from 1834.

The distillery was badly damaged by bombing in the Second World War and was rebuilt by new owners Eadie Cairns from 1969. In 1984 the Morrison family's company took over, and in 1994 that company, and Auchentoshan with it, was bought by the Japanese firm Suntory. It remains one of the few Lowland distilleries still working, and is unusual among Scotch producers for triple distilling all of its spirit rather than the more common double distillation.

BenRiach was built in 1898 by John Duff, next to his other distillery, Longmorn, just south of Elgin in Speyside. Its opening coincided almost exactly with the collapse of Pattisons Ltd, a major whisky broker whose failure in 1900 wrecked demand across the industry, and BenRiach was mothballed within two years of starting up, with only its floor maltings kept working. It did not distil again until 1965, when Glenlivet Distillers reopened it.

The site passed through several corporate owners over the following decades and was mothballed again in 2002, before an independent consortium led by Billy Walker bought it in 2004 and rebuilt its reputation, distilling in classic, peated and triple-distilled styles side by side. Brown-Forman, the American drinks group, bought BenRiach for £281 million in 2016 and still owns it, with Dr Rachel Barrie as master blender.