Speyburn

The Speyburn Distillery was founded in 1897 by John Hopkins & Company for the sum of £17,000. The site was chosen by John Hopkins himself for its unpolluted water supply from the Granty Burn, one of the major tributaries to the River Spey. Hopkins appointed the famous distillery architect Charles C Doig to design the distillery and to this day Speyburn has its classic pagoda ventilator, a hallmark of Doig’s design.
Speyburn is the sixth most popular single malt in the US thanks to the efforts of owners Inver House, who bought the distillery from United Distillers (later to become part of Diageo) in 1991. United Distillers had bottled Speyburn as a 12 year-old for their Flora and Fauna range. This bottling is now very rare and has become something of a collector’s item. The standard expression now is a 10 year-old although older official bottlings have also been released. Independent bottlings are few and far between.