‘This is an exciting time!’ How Scotland’s whisky industry went from bust to boom
New distilleries are popping up, while old ones are reopening and modernising; some vintages fetch £10,000 a bottle. It’s a new golden age for scotch
O n the eighth floor of the Port of Leith distillery, the latest chapter of the boom-and-bust story of Scottish whisky is under construction. This week, lifts are being installed in what will soon be the UK’s only vertical whisky distillery. The copper stills were supposed to have arrived from Elgin but this is a team as accustomed to delays as whisky distillers are to waiting for their spirit to mature. “No one has built a building like this before,” says Port of Leith co-owner Ian Stirling.
If you’re looking for a symbol of the rise of the Scottish whisky industry, this bold black column soaring 40 metres into the skies over north Edinburgh’s historic port is it. It has taken four years and £13.5m to build the distillery, all of which has come from individual private investors. Meanwhile, Britain has left the EU (home to many of Scottish whisky’s biggest export destinations), and we’ve seen a pandemic, the worst cost-of-living crisis for a generation and an energy crisis that’s hitting the UK harder than anywhere in western Europe. And it takes huge amounts of energy to make whisky. Yet still the spirit flows. “As Britain’s economy stumbles,” ran a recent New York Times headline, “one sector is booming: whisky.”
“This is a really exciting time,” says Stirling. “We see ourselves as part of a new wave.” In 2012, when he and his flatmate (and now Port of Leith co-owner) Paddy Fletcher started “messing about with a little copper still” in their back garden, there hadn’t been a whisky distillery in Edinburgh for almost a century. Now Port of Leith is the third.
