News
Roseisle 'Deathstar' Maltings Pauses, Farmers Worry, Whisky Waits
Published 16/11/2025
Diageo’s Roseisle Maltings has paused production with no timeline for resuming, leaving farmers uneasy and rumours plentiful. While all staff remain employed, growers fear the loss of a major buyer amid shifting demand and industry uncertainty. In the rolling farmland of Moray where barley grows, weather launches unprovoked attacks, and rumours ripen faster than crops, there stood the Roseisle Maltings. It worked away politely in the long shadow of Roseisle Distillery, a facility whisky fans called the Death Star distillery. Partly because it looked rather like the sort of place that might one day declare Tuesdays illegal. Happily it has yet to fire in anger. It had been dutifully turning barley into the foundational essence of whisky since 1981, which in distilling years is roughly equivalent to “ages and ages, give or take a committee meeting.” But then something genuinely eyebrow-raising happened.
Roseisle 'Deathstar' Maltings Pauses, Farmers Worry, Whisky Waits
Diageo Launches £5m Peatland Restoration Plan for Scotland
Published 13/11/2025
Diageo has announced a £5 million, five-year initiative to restore up to 3,000 hectares of Scottish peatland in partnership with Caledonian Climate and Wetlands International. The programme aims to protect biodiversity, lock in carbon, and ensure the long-term sustainability of peat-influenced Scotch whisky production. Diageo, an outfit famous for taking barley, water, and the sort of patience usually reserved for saints and elderly watchmakers, has decided to put £5 million over five years into restoring Scotland’s peatlands. This is an admirable effort, given that Scotland’s peatlands have been looking a bit like overworked librarians: fragile, over-prodded, and inclined to release vast quantities of carbon in place of overdue fines.
Diageo Launches £5m Peatland Restoration Plan for Scotland
Can the Americans Keep Waterford’s Dream Alive?
Published 11/11/2025
Waterford Whisky, once Ireland’s bold experiment in terroir-driven spirit making, has found itself adrift until a group of Tennessee distillers offered €6 million to haul it ashore. The deal, still in exclusive talks, covers the distillery, the brand, and its bottled stock, but not the millions of litres of aging whiskey still held by the receivers. It is a story of ambition, insolvency, and a dash of American optimism poured into Irish copper stills. In the vast and baffling ecosystem of Earth’s commerce, somewhere between the mating rituals of hedge funds and the feeding habits of tax lawyers, there floated a curious creature called Waterford Whisky distillery. That fine Irish enterprise is now bobbing belly-up in the great punch bowl of capitalism, with a crew of accountants bailing out numbers instead of water.
Can the Americans Keep Waterford’s Dream Alive?
The World’s Oldest Whisky: Glenlivet 85 by Gordon & MacPhail
Published 09/11/2025
Gordon & MacPhail’s latest release, an 85-year-old Glenlivet bottled from cask #336, has officially become the world’s oldest Scotch whisky ever bottled. Released through Christie’s as part of the “Artistry in Oak” auction, it stands as a patient monument to time, craftsmanship, and the improbable endurance of oak. In a small, mist-soaked corner of Scotland where the sheep are winning the population race, one of those places that seems to have been designed primarily for the amusement of weather systems, a family called Gordon & MacPhail has performed a feat of improbable physics. They have persuaded time itself to move in, unpack its luggage, and stay inside a wooden cask for eighty-five years.
The World’s Oldest Whisky: Glenlivet 85 by Gordon & MacPhail
Uncle Nearest: The Oldest New Distillery in America
Published 08/11/2025
Uncle Nearest, the award-winning whiskey brand founded in 2017 to honour 19th-century distiller Nearest Green, has been placed under court-appointed receivership and may yet file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company is selling off vineyards, a Cognac château, and other non-whiskey assets in an attempt to stay solvent. Few whiskey brands can claim roots deep in the 1850s while only having an official birth certificate from 2017. Uncle Nearest manages it with the kind of confidence usually reserved for politicians, like saying you’ve been a punk since birth but your first gig was last Tuesday.It is, therefore, both the oldest and the newest whiskey you’ve ever heard of, which is a bit like Schrödinger’s bottle, only with better packaging.
Uncle Nearest: The Oldest New Distillery in America
Ardbeg Appoints First Female Manager in Modern Times
Published 07/11/2025
Ardbeg has appointed Bryony McNiven as its new distillery manager, effective 1 January 2026. A chemist by training and lifelong Islay local who has worked with Ardbeg for over a decade. Niven will be the first woman to hold the role in modern times. There are many jobs in the whisky industry that sound wonderfully poetic until you realise they mostly involve paperwork, boilers, and the unpredictable nature of barley. Master Distiller. Keeper of the Quaich. Interpreter of Mysterious Distillery Noises. And on the windy, sea-sprayed isle of Islay, where the air is equal parts oxygen and peat smoke, a new one has just been awarded. Distillery manager!
Ardbeg Appoints First Female Manager in Modern Times
Ardent Spirits Aquires Liquidated Chapter 7 Indie Bottler
Published 06/11/2025
Update Brand Rescued by Ardent Spirits The sector specialist, as it turns out, was not a mysterious consortium of intergalactic accountants but simply Ardent Spirits, a company that already owns Dark Matter Distillers and therefore has at least some experience in handling liquids that encourage philosophical reflection. Begbies Traynor confirmed the acquisition with the solemn relief of people who have finally finished a long and deeply disappointing spreadsheet. Read full update →
Ardent Spirits Aquires Liquidated Chapter 7 Indie Bottler
Whisky Comes Marching Out of Poland (With Vodka Looking Mildly Offended)
Published 06/11/2025
Polish whisky exports have exploded in the last two years, jumping from 40 million to 197 million PLN and turning the once vodka-ruled market into an unexpected battleground. Vodka still leads in total export value, but whisky is now the country’s fastest-growing spirit, reshaping both Poland’s booze economy and its global identity. There are moments in history when entire civilizations pivot: the invention of writing, the first wheel, the discovery that cheese could be eaten and was not, in fact, a failed experiment in milk storage. And now, one more monumental shift must be added to the list:
Whisky Comes Marching Out of Poland (With Vodka Looking Mildly Offended)
The Whisky That Went on Holiday to Antarctica
Published 05/11/2025
Whisky is not, by nature, an adventurous substance. It prefers to stay in one place, usually a barrel, where it can spend several quiet decades occasionally expanding, contracting and achieving a level of philosophical insight normally reserved for monks and cats. It does not expect to travel. It certainly does not expect relocation to Antarctica, a place best described as “winter that has given up any attempt at subtlety” or “Scotland as remembered by George R. R. Martin after the heating broke.”
The Whisky That Went on Holiday to Antarctica
Macallan Distillery Engineers Go On Strike
Published 05/11/2025
Well, it appears there’s trouble brewing in the land of whisky. Not the kind you’d expect, mind you, where brawny Scotsmen with beards the size of small towns throw back a dram or two and start singing ballads. No, this is more of a bureaucratic affair. One where the engineers at Macallan, these days less a distillery than a liquid investment portfolio with caramel colouring, have decided to strike. For most of their careers, the engineers at Edrington’s Speyside distilleries had relied on a quiet understanding with the universe. It was the sort of arrangement that worked like clockwork. If the machinery didn’t explode in a fiery symphony of metal and whisky, and the whisky didn’t decide it was too good for its casks and started misbehaving, then the universe would let the engineers get on with their job. It was far from a perfect system, but it worked.
Macallan Distillery Engineers Go On Strike