United Distillers

United Distillers is a company of somewhat infamous origins. In 1985, the Distillers Company Limited had invited Guinness to buy them, hoping to fend off a hostile takeover bid from the Argyll supermarket group. Guinness were the preferred partners of DCL, however as a much smaller company, it later transpired that the Irish brewer has manipulated its share price to support their £4bn takeover, an incident known as the “Guinness share-trading fraud.” Never-the-less, the deal went through in 1986, and United Distillers was formed the following year through the merger of DCL with Arthur Bell & Sons.

The next decade saw United Distillers leave an indelible mark on the whisky landscape. One of its primary orders of business had been to consolidate and streamline the largely diffuse operations of DCL, which had licensed its distilleries to the semi-autonomous blending companies within its portfolio. The key for United Distillers was to reclaim the distribution of its single malts, and it tightly reeled in the blenders to operate as subsidiaries. The result was the creation of the celebrated Classic Malts of Scotland stable, which launched a collection of six new single malt brands from Cragganmore, Dalwhinnie, Glenkinchie, Lagavulin, Oban and Talisker. Perhaps not an overnight sensation, the series has proven to be a huge success and all but one of the original age-statements is still in production, some of which have barely been rebranded.

Despite the numerous closures of the early 1980s by DCL, the distillery portfolio inherited by United Distillers was vast. Being single malt-minded but unable to individually market each distillery as its own product, the company devised both the Rare Malts Selection and what is now known as the Flora & Fauna series. Both ground-breaking collections, they each packaged whiskies with the same uniform branding, providing exposure to numerous and in many cases previously unseen distilleries.

In some cases, furthers closures were deemed necessary though, and the United Distillers era saw the shuttering of several more distilleries such as Rosebank, Pittyvaich, Bladnoch and Balmenach. The company did however approve the sale of several of them, including some still in operation, to different distillers, diversifying distillery ownership again after years of increasing DCL monopoly.

United Distillers was also enthusiastic about the American whiskey market, particularly the emerging popularity of its products in parts of Europe. Having acquired Schenley and its considerable assets in 1987, they soon commissioned the construction of a new state-of-the-art facility at Bernheim, completed in 1994. DCL had provided it with the historic Stitzel-Weller distillery too, their eventual closure of which in 1992 has made it the stuff of legend in the decades since. In 1996, the company launched the Bourbon Heritage Collection, an attempt to repeat the trick of its Classic Malts series, collecting the W.L. Weller, Old Fitzgerald, Old Charter, George Dickel and I.W. Harper brands. Sadly this was short-lived however, as the following year saw Guinness merge with Grand Metropolitan to create Diageo, which had not shared its predecessors excitement for bourbon at the time.