Luck. Fate. Call it what you will, but when four UK businessmen came together to create a one-of-a-kind distillery in Scotland, little did they know they would soon literally be stepping through the doors of history.

After a yearlong search for the perfect location, they decided upon an abandoned power plant in the town of Hawich (pronounced Hoick). As fate would have it, the abandoned power plant turned out to be an even older abandoned distillery dating from the 1920s.
And if this were the end of the story, that would be wonderful. But history beckoned and the discovery didn’t end there.

In the course of remodeling the old structure, an old, wooden desk sat dust covered and forgotten in a corner of the building. Inside the old relic, they discovered something truly amazing. Drawings of the old distillery building and grounds revealed a series of underground aging caves that burrowed into the hillside behind the distillery. However, nothing could be discovered when they walked the grounds. They looked, asked old timers in the town – nothing. No one knew anything about the caves.

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Still, no one gave up searching. And one day, they discovered where an old landslide had covered something truly amazing. After clearing brush, rocks and debris, there before them stood several large, old, warehouse doors. Lighting was brought in and a true treasure filled the cave: three vats containing over 400,000 liters of whisky for a total of nearly 1,215,000 liters of aged product. One date on the big vat was August 1935. There were other date markings too. 1958. 1962. 1968. 1968 was the year the distillery closed its doors. So, the whisky could be 87 years old. Or much younger – a mere 54 years old.

All of the history and multiple dates notwithstanding, we believe the whisky to be at least 30 years old and some of that fine, aged malt is blended in every bottle of Clan Fraser Reserve and this is what gives each wee dram its distinctive ultra-smooth feel and taste. So why don’t we bottle that old stuff and sell it? The simple answer is 1) we don’t know the actual date
for the label, and 2) we sold half of it to another bottler to blend with their own product and used the money to build our modern distillery. The remaining we add to our own blend of Clan Fraser Reserve. And then in 2028, we will release our own single malt, The Borders 10 Year.

For now, enjoy this smooth, literally history-filled bottle of Clan Fraser Reserve. Sláinte!