Auchinblae Distillery — Highland Single Malt Whisky

Auchinblae Distillery is a closed Scotch whisky distillery that stood in the village of Auchenblae, Aberdeenshire (historically Kincardineshire), in the Highland region of Scotland. It was founded in 1895 and closed for good in 1930, having spent its final years under the ownership of the blending firm Macdonald Greenlees, Williams Ltd. The distillery is chiefly remembered today for a surviving pagoda-roofed kiln building designed by the celebrated distillery architect Charles C. Doig, and for having been built on the site of an 18th-century spinning mill.

History

Auchinblae Distillery was established in 1895 on the site of the Den Mill, a flax-spinning mill built in 1795 beside the Luther Water. Conversion of the mill into a whisky distillery was overseen by Charles C. Doig, the Elgin-based architect famous for popularising the pagoda-style kiln roof that later became an emblem of the Scotch whisky industry. Doig's work at Auchinblae included damming the Luther Water, installing a water-driven turbine to generate electricity for the site, and building a new iron bridge so that horse-drawn carts could reach the distillery. Auchinblae traded for barely two decades before running into financial difficulty: it went into liquidation in 1916, after which it was acquired by Macdonald Greenlees, Williams Ltd. Production never fully recovered under the new ownership, and the distillery closed permanently in 1930.

Quick Facts

• Region: Highland (Kincardineshire, Aberdeenshire)
• Founded: 1895
• Owner: Closed; last owned by Macdonald Greenlees, Williams Ltd
• Status: Closed

Closure & Legacy

Auchinblae's closure in 1930 came amid the broader contraction of the Scotch whisky industry between the world wars, a period in which many small, locally-financed distilleries that had opened during the 1890s building boom failed to survive changing market conditions. Most of the distillery's original buildings were later demolished, but two physical traces remain in Auchenblae village today: the original hydroelectric turbine and a pagoda-roofed building on Burnett Street, which is protected as a Category B listed building. As a distillery that closed nearly a century ago, confirmed original Auchinblae single malt bottlings are essentially unknown in today's whisky market, making surviving examples, if any exist, a matter of interest chiefly to specialist collectors of lost-distillery whisky rather than a regularly traded style.