Single Malt Scotch Whisky; one of Scotland’s proudest creations and exports, enjoying unprecedented international demand and, like golf, key to Scotland’s tourism sector. Visiting a distillery is now a “must-do” activity with 8% of visitors to Scotland touring one (ScotlandWhisky)
And yet there is at present a glaring gap in Scotland’s whisky geography. The mass of golfers and visitors alike who flock to St Andrews, the home of golf, discover they have to travel over an hour, outwith the Kingdom of Fife, to unravel the distillery mysteries of making “uisge beatha – water of life”. This is all the more surprising when one considers Fife’s long associations with Scotch whisky. For the earliest surviving record relating to our national drink is from 1494 when a monk in Newburgh, Fife, was given barley by King James IV “wherewith to make aqua vitae”, and today at the Cameron Bridge (Windygates) site founded by John Haig in 1824, over 100 million litres of grain spirit are produced. .
All this is soon about to change! Overlooking the world famous Kingsbarns Golf Links within the magical Cambo Estate and only a few miles from St Andrews, ‘Home of Golf’, The Kingsbarns Distillery will be arise from the charming and architecturally important East Newhall Farm Steading.
Its ancient barns, doocot, mill and stables provide us with the ideal site to take whisky making back to its artisanal, craft origins, back to a time when farmers themselves would distil their surplus barley. To help us achieve this goal we have looked beyond Scotland to the ends of the earth – to Tasmania – where the “grandfather” of Australian whisky Bill Lark has re-invented micro-distilling (aka craft distilling, artisan distilling) like no other.
Bill is bringing his pioneering whisky making model to Scotland for the first time with us at Kingsbarns. We will be closely following many of his groundbreaking techniques to help us produce the lightly peated, deep whisky with a big finish that we are striving for. In so doing we will be breaking free from the typical traditional light and floral lowland style in order to offer something truly unique and outstanding to whisky lovers.
The flexibility of Bill’s micro-distilling model will also enable us to produce not only single malt whisky but also a range of non matured spirits such as gin, schnapps and liqueurs.
