Clydeside COP26 Glasgow - 2021 Release

The Clydeside distillery was built in 2016 by Morrison Glasgow Distillers, a company led by Tim Morrison with his son Andrew. The Morrisons have a long and distinguished history within the Scotch whisky industry, with Tim Morrison having worked at his father’s company Morrison Bowmore in the 1970s and 1980s before reviving the family’s AD Rattray brand as an indie bottler in the late 1990s.

Construction of the Clydeside distillery took place on the site of the old Pumphouse on Glasgow’s Queen’s Dock, where the Morrisons discovered an unexpected connection - their ancestor John Morrison was a master builder whose Morrison & Mason firm had helped build the Pumphouse and the Queen’s Dock in 1863. The Pumphouse was purchased in 2011, and after a lengthy development period the Clydeside distillery opened in 2017, launching its first single malt whisky in 2021.

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.