Speyside Distillery Co.

Speyside Distillers Company Ltd. is one of the more unusual names in Scotch whisky, a company whose story runs from a stonemason's decades-long labor of love in the Cairngorms to a modern relocation into the Highlands. Head-officed at 197 Bath Street in Glasgow, the company built and operated the Speyside Distillery near Kingussie and today, as of 2026-07, sits under the ownership of Harvey's of Edinburgh.

History & Heritage

The project began in 1962, when George Christie purchased land near Kingussie and set out to build a distillery in the old-fashioned way. Stonemason Alex Fairlie painstakingly built the distillery by hand over two decades, with the stone building completed in 1987. First distillation did not commence until December 1990, making Speyside one of the slowest-born distilleries in Scotch history. The first single malt to be launched, Drumguish, followed in 1993. Speyside Distillers was sold to a group of private investors in 2000, and since 2012 the company has been under the ownership of Harvey's of Edinburgh, led by Group CEO John Harvey McDonough. Fittingly for a picture-book Highland distillery, the original site appeared as the fictional "Lagganmore distillery" in the BBC series Monarch Of The Glen.

The Whiskey

The original distillery drew its water from the River Tromie, a tributary of the Spey, and ran a 4.2-ton semi-lauter mash tun feeding six stainless steel washbacks of 20,000 liters each. A notably long fermentation of 120 to 180 hours preceded distillation through two traditional copper pot stills, among the smallest in Scotland, at an annual capacity of 600,000 litres. Maturation leaned heavily on first-fill Bourbon, Sherry, and Port casks. The house SPEY range includes Tenne, often finished in Port casks, Trutina, matured in Bourbon casks, the peated Fumare, Chairman's Choice with its Pedro Ximenez sherry finish, and Royal Choice. The distillery also produced the heavily port-matured Beinn Dubh single malt and Byron's Gin. Accolades followed, including the 2021 World Whisky Awards title for Best Single Cask, Single Malt Whisky in the World, a Gold Medal for SPEY Trutina at the 2021 San Francisco World Spirit Awards, and continued recognition through the 2025 World Whisky Awards.

Why It Matters

Speyside is now a chapter in transition. The original distillery at Tromie Mills, Kingussie, ceased production and closed on May 1, 2025, and is now counted among Scotland's lost distilleries. The company is relocating production to a new Highland estate at Strathmashie, near Laggan, where future whiskies will be classified as Highland malts under a different distillery name, while the original Kingussie site has been taken over by Glasgow Whisky with plans to launch a new distillery named Glentromie by 2026. For those who appreciate good whiskey, the closing casks of the original Speyside Distillery now carry the weight of a finite legacy.