The North British Lowland grain distillery is a joint enterprise owned by industry behemoth Diageo and Edrington Distillers. North British was established just west of Edinburgh in 1885 by Scotch whisky blenders William Sanderson, Andrew Usher and John Crabbie to ease their reliance on the Distillers Company Limited cartel that was threatening to monopolise grain whisky production.

North British has been running ever since, and has been Edinburgh’s only grain facility since Caledonian distillery closed in 1988.  In 1993 the Edrington group partnered with International Distillers and Vintners (IDV) for an £84 million takeover; with IDV now part of Diageo, North British has ended up in the same family as DCL, the company it was built to oppose. 

Following a subsequent expansion, North British now supplies base spirit for Smirnoff vodka, as well as grain whisky for Diageo’s Johnnie Walker and Edrington’s Famous Grouse blended Scotch whisky brands.

According to the distillery’s website, North British distilled over 2.5 billion litres of spirit between 1887 and 2015 and production capacity now stands at around 70 million litres annually. By our back-of-a-fag-packet calculations, this means that it should pass the 3 billion litre mark around 2022 or 2023. 

Official bottlings of North British are vanishingly rare. Happily, in the last few years both long-aged and - unusually - quite young independent bottlings now available, with the best examples from Douglas Laing, Hunter Laing and Signatory Vintage.