Mosstowie

Mosstowie was one of a handful of short-lived malt whiskies produced on Lomond stills within another distillery – in this case Miltonduff, near Elgin.

The Canadian distiller Hiram Walker had owned George Ballantine & Son since 1935, and bought Miltonduff distillery on Speyside a year later. With the post-war surge in blended Scotch, especially in North America, the firm needed to ramp up production and produce a sufficient variety of malts for the likes of Ballantine’s Finest. One of these was Mosstowie – a so-called ‘Lomond malt’ which went into production in 1964 at Miltonduff distillery. But with the rectifying plates notoriously hard to clean and little demand from other blenders, Mosstowie was abandoned in 1981 and the stills were ripped out and replaced with traditional pot stills.