Port of Leith Distillery: the first vertical whisky distillery in the world

A conventional distillery is a long shed. Grain arrives at one end, moves through mashing, fermentation and distillation in sequence, and everything is pushed along by pumps.

Leith did not have room for a long shed. What it had was a small plot on the harbour basin in a district being rebuilt, and the answer was to stand the process on end. Grain goes in at the top; each stage drops to the floor below; the spirit comes off near the bottom. Gravity does the moving.

The result is architecturally unlike anything else in Scotch whisky, and it makes for a genuinely different tour: instead of walking along a process you descend through it, and each floor is a stage. It is also the reason there is a bar at the top — when your building is forty metres tall on a harbour, you may as well use the view.

The distillery’s name is doing real work. Leith was, for a long stretch of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one of the most important places in the Scotch whisky trade — not for distilling but for everything after it. Whisky came down from the Highlands to be bonded, blended, aged and shipped from these docks.

That trade went. The warehouses were repurposed or demolished, blending consolidated elsewhere, and the port turned to other things. For more than a century Leith had whisky history and no whisky.

Which is why the phrase used about this place — that whisky has come back to Leith — is not marketing. Their own single malt distillation started in early 2024, and given the three-year legal minimum in cask, the first properly Leith-made Scotch is a very recent thing indeed.

The one real objection to this distillery is that it is not in the Old Town. The answer is to stop treating that as a cost.

Leith is Edinburgh’s port, about twenty minutes out by tram, and it has spent the last two decades becoming one of the better parts of the city to spend an evening in. The Shore — the street along the Water of Leith where it meets the harbour — is a short walk from the distillery and has more good restaurants per hundred metres than anywhere on the Royal Mile.

So the sensible shape is: tram down in the late afternoon, tour and tasting, a drink at the top of the building while the light goes, then dinner on the Shore and the tram back. That is a genuinely good Edinburgh evening and the distillery is only the first third of it.

It also solves the whisky-and-driving problem completely, which is more than can be said for most distillery visits anywhere in Scotland.

In a conventional distillery the liquid is pushed. Pumps move wort from the mash tun to the washbacks, wash from the washbacks to the still, and so on down the line. Pumps are reliable, well understood and entirely normal.

They also shear. Moving liquid through an impeller applies force to it, and there is a long argument in distilling about how much that matters to the final spirit. Nobody agrees, which is part of why a distillery built to avoid it is interesting rather than merely tall.

Stacking the process means each stage sits directly above the next and gravity does the work. Grain at the top, spirit at the bottom, nine floors in between. It also means the building has a very small footprint, which is what made it possible to put a working distillery on a harbour basin in a city where land is expensive.

Whether it makes better whisky is a question that needs a decade of casks to answer. Whether it makes a better tour is not in doubt: you descend through the process instead of walking along it, and no other distillery in Scotland can offer that.