For decades, the ghosts of Scotch whisky have haunted the landscape — their pagodas intact but their stills long cold. Brora, Port Ellen, Rosebank, and many more. Names once spoken with a mix of reverence and regret. This autumn, as nights draw in and fog settles over the warehouses, it feels fitting to ask what happens when those ghosts come back to life — and what kind of life it really is.
Four decades after the great closures of 1983, some of the distilleries that fell silent are running again. Others, like St Magdalene or Banff, remain forever still, their names now whispered more than spoken. The industry that revived Brora, Port Ellen, and Rosebank is not the same as the one that closed them. Today’s Scotch whisky operates in a more crowded, cautious world — a world where revival can be as risky as it is romantic.
“The mystique for the old bottlings is heightened by the news of reopening,” says Tom Addy, whisky specialist at the Fife Arms, whose Bertie’s bar has 500 open bottles of whisky. “Customers are very interested to see what lay dormant for so long. There’s a real bafflement that a distillery capable of making something so good could ever have closed in the first place.” For Addy, those old bottles still command a sense of reverence. “A silent distillery must be a painful thing to see every day in a rural community, and new life brought in must bring a boost to local job prospects and an unimaginable sense of opportunity. Whisky brings with it a sense of place — and of the people in that place.”
If nostalgia fuels the story, it is pride that powers the reality. “For many years it was widely assumed that Brora and Port Ellen would never return,” says Ewan Gunn, Diageo’s senior global brand ambassador for luxury Scotch. “But whisky doesn’t measure time in days and weeks — it measures it in decades and generations. The fact they’ve been brought back shows long-term confidence in Scotch.”
Gunn remembers tasting the first new-make spirit at Brora in 2021. “It was immediately clear that this is not ‘New Brora’, but simply Brora — the character and DNA shining through every drop.” At Port Ellen, which celebrates its 200th anniversary this year, the resurrection is both faithful and forward-looking: original 1960s blueprints were used to rebuild the stills, but a new 10-part spirit safe lets distillers experiment and analyse the run in ways their predecessors never could. “What excites me most,” Gunn adds, “is that these distilleries aren’t just back — they’re forging their own paths again.”
That faith is not universal. “Too many changes happen when a distillery is rebuilt,” says whisky writer Billy Abbott. “The result may be excellent, but it won’t be what was there before.” For him, the early fascination with reopened distilleries is still built on their past rather than their present. “For the recent reopenings, it’s the stories that give them air-time — with so many questions over the spirit to come, it’s the past that makes them relevant.”
Abbott’s realism echoes through the market. The romance of revival has collided with a tougher global environment: slower growth, high inventories, and a tourist economy less certain than it was a few years ago. At Rosebank, Ian Macleod Distillers have completed a meticulous restoration, even recreating the triple-distilled Lowland character with stills built to the old measurements. Yet only 15 months after opening its new visitor centre, Rosebank announced around 20 job losses following lower-than-expected footfall. The distillery remains a jewel, but the numbers tell a sobering truth.
“It’s a completely new thing,” says Ingvar Ronde, editor of The Malt Whisky Yearbook. “Even 20 years ago, nobody imagined these places would reopen. None of the revivals are about capacity — they’re about heritage and prestige.” He points out that the projects were conceived in boom years. “The timing was fortunate. I’m not sure all of them would have been approved today. The question now is how these resurrected distilleries fit into a slower market.”
Ronde notes that Brora and Port Ellen are in a league of their own, their legacy assured, but other revivals face a sterner test: “The story sells itself for a few years, but after that you have to prove the whisky is worth the attention.”
In a way though it’s not new, but in the past perhaps it had less fanfare. When Stuart Nickerson reopened Glenglassaugh in 2008, 22 years after he’d first helped mothball it, the handover was simple. “All yours, Stuart,” said the outgoing warehouseman, leaving him alone with 35,000 casks. It was, he later recalled, “a lovely but scary moment”. Nickerson, a veteran of Highland Park, Glenrothes, and Glenfiddich, remembered the exact refill sherry butt he filled that first day — not as an anecdote, but as proof that a distillery’s spirit can survive in more than name. His revival was driven by conviction, not nostalgia; belief that the place still had something to say.
Nothing is guaranteed, however, with Glenglassaugh quietly shifting to a shared production model with its sister distillery Benriach this year, alternating active and silent seasons to balance output with demand. Brown-Forman calls it prudent planning; others see it as a sign that the new whisky boom is losing pace.
Still, not all returns are fragile. Benromach, shuttered in 1983 and reborn by Gordon & MacPhail in 1998, is now so established it hardly registers as a revival at all. Its stills have run uninterrupted for more than a quarter century. If some resurrections risk becoming zombies — alive, but not quite vital — Benromach proves that a patient, well-judged rebirth can find its heartbeat and keep it.
There are still ghosts — St Magdalene, Convalmore, Glen Mhor, Banff — whose warehouses and pagodas have vanished or become flats and hotels. Their names linger, as do the few remaining bottles, reminders that some silences are permanent. Yet for every ghost there is another story, like Dallas Dhu in Moray, now being readied for a return under Historic Environment Scotland and Aceo Distillers. It will be a living museum and a working distillery in one — a fitting metaphor for whisky’s complicated relationship with its past.
“The mystique of the old bottlings will never fade,” says Addy. “But one of the best things about whisky is that it keeps moving. Regardless of the age, rarity, or expense, we open everything — it’s respect for the people who made the liquid in the first place. It is a drink after all — liquid history.”
Maybe that’s the truth of it. The stills can be rebuilt, the warehouses repaired, the spirit reborn — but whether a distillery lives again depends on more than steam and copper. Revival is only the start; the real test comes after the first cut, when the stories give way to spirit. In the long run, that’s what separates the living from the dead.
