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The distilery is just east of the village of Aberfeldy. The oldest buildings date from 1896 and it opened in 1898, purpose-built by John and Thomas Dewar, sons of John Dewar of Aberfeldy. 'Whisky Tom' the younger of the brothers was an entrepreneur and a great character, reputed to have been the third owner of a motor car in Britain. John the elder was a wine and spirit merchant in Perth and an early pioneer of whisky blending. The distillery is on land bought from by Dewar's from the Marquis of Breadalbane and its water comes from the Pitlie burn. The whisky was designed to be a blending malt for Dewars' whiskies, being neither too light nor too assertively peaty. There was a previous distillery in the area, called Pitlie, closed since 1867 and long since demolished. There was much reconstruction and expansion in the 1960s and 1970s and in 1972 the distillery expanded from one pair of stills to two. Until the 1960s the distillery had a direct rail link taking whisky to Dewar's warehouses in Perth. The original design of the distillery demonstrated the progress of malt distillation from a farm-based exercise to an industry in its own right - the buildings are purpose-built and form a long row, taking in barley at one end and producing filled casks at the other, with a recognisable production flow from end to end.
Aberfeldy nowadays gets its malt - a medium peated grain - from the Glenesk
maltings at Montrose. It employs wooden washbacks.
smws/mj/cm/o.m.
Aberfeldy, Perthshire, PH15 2EB Tel: 01887-820330
Hear "Aberfeldy" pronounced in AU or WAV format
Read an article about Aberfeldy distillery
Search Dr. Do'g's index for the history of Aberfeldy
There just might be some news about Aberfeldy in The "Scotsman" newspaper