Kingsbarns dovecote
Kingsbarns distillery is one of more than a dozen new distilling ventures in Scotland's Lowlands region. Established in 2014, the distillery is located in the historic county of Fife, slightly north of Edinburgh.
Kingsbarns whisky debuted in 2018 in the form of a limited edition designed for Founders' Club members, and the first widely available edition, Kingsbarns Dream to Dram, hit the market in 2019.
These days another edition has been released to form the core of the distillery's core offering, namely Kingsbarns Doocot. It is a whisky with a strength of 46% vol., unfiltered cold and not subjected to the coloring process. Matured in bourbon barrels and STR barrels of Portuguese red wine. The whisky is made from barley grown no more than a six-mile radius from the distillery, making it a local beverage that celebrates the distilling traditions of this part of Scotland.
The name of the new edition of the whisky is the Scottish form of the English word "dovecote," meaning dove. Kingsbarns Distillery was built in historic farm buildings, and an important and specially exhibited part of it is the historic pigeon-house. Resting there, as if in a sort of mausoleum, is cask number one, the first cask of whisky distilled at Kingsbarns.
The whisky has begun to appear in specialty liquor stores for several days, with a suggested retail price of the equivalent of £45.
The Lowlands region, where Kingsbarns has been operating since 2014, seemed until a few years earlier to be a region almost completely extinct in terms of distilling. Not counting the huge grain whisky plants (Cameronbridge, Girvan, North British, Starlaw and Strathclyde), only two malt whisky distilleries - Glenkinchie and Auchentoshan - operated in the Lowlands at certain times during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The latter is the only one in all of Scotland to cultivate the triple distillation technique traditional to the Lowlands. With the huge and rapidly growing popularity of Scotch whisky, the number of malt whisky distilleries operating in the Lowlands has grown to about twenty in the past two decades. Among them, the largest percentage are new distilleries, built from scratch, such as Aberargie, Glasgow, InchDairnie, and Clydeside. Noteworthy is the restart of Bladnoch (zał. 1817) in 2015, the resurrection of Annandale in the historic 1830s distillery buildings, or the erection of a modern distillery on the site of historic Lindores Abbey, a place widely recognized as the cradle of Scotch whisky. It was at Lindores Abbey that the monk John Cor was brewing aqua vitae for King James IV as early as 1494, as recorded in the 1495 tax books, which in turn is the first historical mention of whisky production in Scotland.
Kingsbarns Distillery is located at the eastern end of County Fife, near the North Sea coast, a dozen or so kilometers southeast of St. Andrews, a town famous for its m.in. of the famous golf halves, including the historic Old Course, the oldest golf course in the world.
Right next to the whisky distillery there is also a gin factory, owned by the same owners, the Wemyss family. The Darnley gin produced there is one of the more highly regarded gins made in Scotland. The Wemyss family is also independently bottling whisky under the co-brand Wemyss Malts. The Kingsbarns distillery is open to the public, and the store on the premises sells most of the liquors offered under brands owned by the Wemyss family.
Although the Kingsbarns distillery does not boast a long history and wide range of products, its products are available in permanent offer of the House of Whisky Online, which we cordially invite you to familiarize yourself with.
[10.03.2023 / photo: Kingsbarns]