The original Wolfburn distillery was a modest 19th century operation located in the town of Thurso, on the Caithness coast at the very top of Scotland, with a brief and chequered history that ended in 1852. One hundred and sixty years later, in 2012, a new Wolfburn distillery was constructed by Aurora Brewing Ltd a short distance from the original Wolfburn site.
Aurora’s new Wolfburn distillery is equipped with a steel and copper mash tun that is used to produce a clear wort for brewing, plus four stainless steel washbacks and a pair of small pot stills. Wolfburn distils a characterfully fruity, malty spirit from long-fermented wash, and the distillery currently devotes around 10% of its annual capacity of around 125 000 litres to the production of peated spirit.
Wolfburn’s distillation operations commenced at the beginning of 2013, and the distillery wasted no time bringing its products to market, releasing a work-in-progress spirit in 2015 before the inaugural Wolfburn 3-year-old single malt whisky release, which made its debut in March 2016. The distillery now bottles a wide range of single cask and small batch single malts, mostly matured in ex-bourbon or sherry casks, and replaced its old NAS series of official bottlings in 2025 with a new core range consisting of a flagship Wolfburn 12-year-old accompanied by a sherried 10-year-old expression and a pair of 8-year-old whiskies, one of which is peated.
2025 also saw the first independent bottlings of Wolfburn’s whisky, which were released as mystery malts by Dornoch’s Thompson Brothers and The Scotch Malt Whisky Society, though none of these bottles explicitly mentioned the distillery on the label.