Wolfburn Distillery was revived in 2012 after more than 150 years of silence. The original Wolfburn Distillery operated in Thurso, Caithness during the 19th century before closing in the 1860s. For over a century and a half, the site lay abandoned — until a small team came north to find it.
In May 2011, they went looking for whatever remained. What they found was a barely discernible pile of stones. But one thing had survived intact: the water. The Wolf Burn stream that had fed the original mash tun and copper stills was still flowing, cold and clear, exactly as it always had. If the burn was still there, the thinking went, the whisky could be too.
A short walk downstream from the original site, the team found a small flat piece of land — carpeted in thistles, but level and workable. They could take a small volume of water from the burn each day and, once again, turn it into whisky.
The land purchase was completed in May 2012. Ground was broken in August. By the end of September, the structures of the new distillery buildings were taking shape. The first new-make spirit ran from the stills on 25 January 2013 — deliberately chosen as Burns Night, Scotland's celebration of Robert Burns, the national poet.
Today, Wolfburn is one of Scotland's most northerly working distilleries, producing single malt Scotch whisky on the same water source, in the same town, as its 19th-century predecessor.
