Glenrothes Distillery

Glen­rothes Dis­tillery is loa­cated beside the Burn of Rothes in the Spey­side region. The Glen­rothes is used in blended scotch whiskies such as Cutty Sark and The Famous Grouse. The Glen­rothes is owned by Berry Broth­ers and Rudd.

Pro­duc­tion

The Glen­rothes is mainly matured in Span­ish ex-Sherry casks, and some ex-Bourbon casks. The Glen­rothes is unique com­pared to other sin­gle malts in that, begin­ning in 1994, the bot­tlings are not deter­mined by age but by vin­tage. Besides the sig­na­ture line in which each year of pro­duc­tion is bot­tled as one vin­tage, The Glen­rothes is also sold as “Select Reserve”, a recently intro­duced non-vintage line. Spe­cial bot­tlings include “Sin­gle Cask” bot­tles, which are taken from one sin­gle cask of whisky from a par­tic­u­larly excep­tional year. Sin­gle casks released include: 1966 Cask 1438, 1966 Cask 1427, 1967 Cask 6994 and 1967 Cask 6998. In the late 1980s, a few years years before Glen­rothes Dis­tillery decided to bot­tle The Glen­rothes as vin­tages, some casks of whisky prior to 1974 were left to mature together. These casks were bot­tled as a 30-year-old Glen­rothes. Only 1134 bot­tles were produced.

Char­ac­ter

The house style is a warm­ing, mouth-coating creamy spirit, with the clas­sic Spey­side “pear drop” char­ac­ter. Tast­ing notes fre­quently also men­tion the descrip­tors “lemony”, “grassy”, “aniseed”, “liquorice” and “toffee”.

The dis­tillery

The dis­tillery was built in 1878 by James Stu­art & Co, who then also worked the nearby Macallan dis­tillery. The first whisky ran off the stills on the 28 Decem­ber 1879, the same day as the Tay Bridge disaster.

The dis­tillery itself had a shaky start and a che­quered his­tory. Over-proof whisky is noto­ri­ously highly flam­ma­ble and the dis­tillery has paid the price. Exten­sion work began in 1896 on a sec­ond malt kiln, and an increase in stills from two to four but, before the work was fin­ished, a fire in Decem­ber 1897 caused seri­ous dam­age. The dis­tillery saw fur­ther dam­age with a seri­ous explo­sion in 1903.

Then, in 1922, a fire in Ware­house Num­ber One caused the loss of 200,000 impe­r­ial gal­lons (900,000 litres) of whisky. As bar­rels exploded in the heat, the matur­ing whisky gushed into the adja­cent Burn of Rothes, where locals were reported to have lifted water by the buck­et­ful. Another fire in 1962 afforded the oppor­tu­nity for expan­sion and a fur­ther re-build in 1982 extended the still hall to five wash stills and five spirit stills.