Ailsa Bay

Ailsa Bay is a large modern malt whisky distillery founded in 2007 and officially opened in 2009 by William Grant & Sons - owners of Glenfiddich and Balvenie - on the site of their Girvan grain distillery near Ayr in the Lowlands. Originally built with twelve washbacks and eight stills, in 2013 Ailsa Bay was expanded with twelve more washbacks and eight more stills, doubling the distillery’s capacity to 12m litres per annum.

Like its sister distillery Kininvie, Ailsa Bay was built to supply filling stock of single malt whisky for Grant’s blends, so bottlings of Ailsa Bay’s single malt whisky are thin on the ground despite its massive size and output. The first official bottling of Ailsa Bay appeared in 2015 and only a handful of further releases have followed at the time of writing in 2023.

Distillery bottlings are, as the name suggests, bottled by or for the distillery from which the whisky has originated and are thus often referred to as Official Bottlings or OBs. Distillery bottlings are generally more desirable for collectors and usually fetch higher prices at auction than independent bottlings. They are officially-endorsed versions of the whisky from a particular distillery and are therefore considered the truest expression of the distillery’s character.

This ideal of the distillery character is regarded so seriously by the distilleries and brand owners that casks of whisky that are considered to vary too far from the archetype are frequently sold on to whisky brokers and independent bottlers. When this happens, it is often with the proviso that the distillery’s name is not allowed to be used when the cask is bottled for fear of diminishing or damaging the distillery’s character and status.