Royal Lochnagar Distillery

Royal Lochna­gar was awarded its royal pre­fix in 1848 — fol­low­ing a visit and tast­ing by Queen Vic­to­ria and Prince Albert. The event came about after the dis­tillery man­ager John Begg dropped a note to their Royal High­nesses directly invit­ing them to pay a visit and sam­ple the delights of the dis­tillery and rather impu­dently, he men­tioned that if they didn’t arrive by 6pm they would miss the dis­tillery in oper­a­tion. To him, there was no ques­tion that he would extend the rou­tine to accom­mo­date his royal guests. What hap­pened next was quite extra­or­di­nary – with­out fan­fare, Vic­to­ria and Albert paid an impromptu call and were suit­ably impressed. The rest, as the say­ing goes, is history.

The Royal con­nec­tion has meant that the dis­tillery has played host to a string of famous vis­i­tors, many of them British prime min­is­ters tak­ing an hour or so off between meet­ings with the monarch of the day at Balmoral.

The his­tory of the dis­tillery nearly ran a very dif­fer­ent course. The first licensed Lochna­gar dis­tillery was estab­lished in 1826, on the north side of the river by a for­mer illicit dis­tiller. Soon after fel­low smug­glers burnt it down — appar­ently non­plussed that one of their own was ‘going legit’. It was later rebuilt in 1845 by Begg on the south bank of the river; he renamed it New Lochna­gar. The north-bank dis­tillery closed by 1860 and Lochna­gar con­tin­ued to pros­per — although the Abergeldie Estates refused to sell the dis­tillery the grounds it occu­pied, see­ing the value increase as the dis­tillery flour­ished and expanded.

The dis­tillery is now owned by Dia­geo Scot­land Ltd, one of the largest spirit pro­duc­ing com­pa­nies in the world. Royal Lochna­gar is one of the small­est dis­til­leries in The Clas­sic Malts Selec­tion™, and has been rebuilt three times. How­ever, it still retains the tra­di­tional dis­tillery appear­ance — with its two pagoda kiln heads – and tech­niques (includ­ing an open mash tun) and also has a vis­i­tor cen­tre and a ‘learn­ing cen­tre’ for the appre­ci­a­tion of malt whisky.