Standing at the quayside of the former Queen’s Dock on the River Clyde, visitors to Scotland’s largest city are surrounded by the modern face of Glasgow. Further upstream, the multicoloured wrap-around lights of the Hydro music venue and the Sydney Opera House-esque Armadillo auditorium stand facing the glass and metal latticework of the BBC and STV television studios and the Glasgow Science Centre on the opposite bank. Downstream, the Riverside Museum’s roof resembles a print-out of a spiky electrocardiogram test.
One hundred and fifty years ago the Queen’s Dock formed the beating heart of Glasgow’s international trade, as ships laden with whisky set sail across the Atlantic and beyond. Standing guard over the moored vessels and the quaysides lined with warehouses was the stone-built Pumphouse, a four-storey tower that provided the hydraulic power for the dock’s swing bridge, and later housed the exciseman’s office.
Since 2017, the Pumphouse has been home to the Clydeside Distillery, the first dedicated whisky producer to open in the city for more than a century. As well as being a major harbour for exporting Scotch, Glasgow was once home to scores of distilleries before Prohibition and the boom-and-bust cycles of the global spirits industry took their toll.
At the heart of the city’s whisky revival stands managing director Andrew Morrison, whose family built the distillery. The name ‘Morrison’ has been synonymous with single malts for generations, with AD Rattray, the family’s independent bottling business, tracing its roots back to 1868, and the boom in grocers becoming blenders of malt and grain whiskies.
Today, the family is arguably best known for building and selling the Morrison Bowmore business, having taken over Bowmore distillery on Islay in 1963 before adding Glen Garioch in Aberdeenshire in 1970, and Auchentoshan further down the river at Clydebank in 1984. In 1989, Japanese drinks giant Suntory acquired a stake in the business, then bought the rest of the company five years later from Andrew’s father, Tim, and uncle, Brian.
The sale allowed Tim to concentrate on building up AD Rattray’s impressive inventory of casks, but, as demand soared, and the Scotch whisky market began to grow once more, it became increasingly hard to replenish stocks. Meanwhile, while working for Pacific Edge Wine & Spirits, AD Rattray’s importer in California, Andrew had noticed the surge in interest in single malt Scotch. The stage was set for the family to return to the distilling side of the industry.
“Choosing this site was almost instantaneous,” explains Andrew Morrison over tea in the distillery’s busy café. “While we’re a new distillery, it feels like there was already a lot of whisky heritage here. Our family is from Glasgow, we have strong connections to the city, and our intuition told us this location would be popular with tourists. Thankfully, that intuition proved to be right.”
The distillery expects to welcome around 100,000 visitors this year, including between 50,000 and 60,000 people on its tours. Around 80 per cent of those tourists are from overseas, with the site proving popular with bus tours around the city, and coaches ferrying tourists from the cruise ships docking in Greenock at the mouth of the Clyde.
While the Covid-19 pandemic made Morrison feel like he was starting the tourism side of the business again from scratch, the UK government’s furlough scheme allowed him to retain most of his staff. While distilleries in the Highlands and other rural locations are struggling to fill vacancies, Morrison praises the calibre of hospitality workers he is able to find in Glasgow, with several members of staff starting their careers in the café, before moving on to roles as tour guides and even distillery operators.
One of the first members of staff Morrison recruited for the project was distillery manager Alistair McDonald, who had cut his teeth in the whisky industry as an apprentice at Bowmore on his native Islay, and eventually rose through the ranks to become distillery manager at Morrison Bowmore stablemate Auchentoshan. Construction began in 2016 — including lowering the pair of gleaming stills made by coppersmith Forsyths at Rothes on Speyside into the glass still house, with its panoramic views down the Clyde. McDonald joined the following year, just in time to guide the rest of the installation and fit-out.
“One of the things that attracted me to the project was that the Morrison family didn’t just want to make a product for the sake of it — they wanted to make a premium-quality product,” McDonald remembers. “Not many distillery managers get to be involved right at the start of a distillery and build their team, so that was exciting too.”
Morrison adds, “When I met Alistair, I told him he had full autonomy. He could tell me the steps to make the best whisky, and we would build the business plan around that.”
That focus on quality includes longer fermentation times — 72 hours, compared with the 48 hours that have become the industry standard at larger distilleries — and slower distillation speeds. “We’ve instilled that into everyone in the production team, and everyone’s bought into it — there’s no rushing the distillation so they can knock-off early on a Friday,” laughs McDonald.
The distillery’s barley is grown at four farms in the Borders, and is malted by Simpsons, another family-owned business. Its early wood policy was guided by the late, great whisky consultant Dr Jim Swan, and has since developed to features a mixture of first-fill and refill bourbon barrels, along with sherry casks, various wine vessels, and shaved, toasted, and re-charred oak.
Morrison says, “One of the things that my dad instilled in me is that the whisky business is all about relationships.” Morrison inherited his love of golf from his father, entertaining importers and wood suppliers from the US at the Open Championship at Royal Troon over the summer. “We work with a family-owned bourbon business in Kentucky, and that relationship has helped us during the current barrel shortage — we’ve still been able to buy the high-quality casks we need.”
The other major ingredient — water — comes from Loch Katrine, a reservoir to the north of Glasgow that also supplies much of the city’s drinking water. While researching the history of the Pumphouse, the Morrisons stumbled across another unexpected family connection. John Morrison, one of Tim and Andrew’s ancestors, ran the building firm that not only constructed the Queen’s Dock during the 1870s but also raised the height of Loch Katrine to help quench the thirst of the city’s expanding population. “We didn’t realise John Morrison’s connection to the Queen’s Dock until we started building the distillery,” laughs Andrew Morrison.
As well as telling the story of the family’s connections to the whisky industry, the visitors’ centre at Clydeside also acts as a museum for the wider city’s spirits industry and the tale of shipbuilding along the river. “So many people — even in the whisky trade — don’t realise how important Glasgow was to the Scotch whisky industry,” explains McDonald.
The site’s rich heritage is also celebrated in the distillery’s branding. Its maiden whisky, Stobcross, was released in 2021, and was named after the area of Glasgow in which the Queen’s Dock was located.
It was joined this summer by Napier, aged exclusively in sherry casks, and named after Robert Napier, the engineer known as the father of shipbuilding on the Clyde for his pioneering work with steam engines for boats, and his construction of the first iron-hulled vessels for the Royal Navy. Napier’s livery — black and vermillion-red hoops painted onto his ships’ funnels — was later adopted by the famous Cunard line after he went into business with shipping magnate Samuel Cunard.
That nautical theme extends into Clydeside’s packaging design, with its labels, boxes, and signage all split in half by a horizontal stripe, echoing the Plimsoll line along a ship’s side indicating the maximum depth to which it may be safely immersed when loaded with cargo. Even the distillery’s typeface is based on the shapes made by the warehouses that lined the docks, with small bars representing the firebreaks in between the giant buildings.
While the distillery is proud of its site’s maritime past, McDonald has a weather eye on the future. He and Morrison are keen to tie their distillery’s move away from burning gas into any wider district heating plans proposed by the neighbouring Scottish Events Campus, home to the Hydro and Armadillo, and built on the site of the Queen’s Dock after it was closed in 1969 and filled in during 1977.
Moving from two shifts to three for five days each week has already helped McDonald and his team to increase production from 200,000 litres of pure alcohol (lpa) each year to the present 550,000lpa. Shifting to seven-day working would boost output to around 680,000lpa, with further tweaks to the set-up taking production to just shy of one million lpa.
Could the site grow to expand past the one-million mark? Morrison and McDonald exchange a knowing glance at the question. “We’ve had those conversations,” Morrison smiles.
