Qualla: Dalmore Distillery

Dalmore Distillery: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DavideGorla, CC BY 2.0. In 1917, the British Royal Navy decided that the Cromarty Firth, with its sheltered waters and good rail connections, was the ideal place to manufacture deep-sea mines. The Dalmore distillery sat directly on the firth's banks. Three years later, one of those mines detonated, the resulting fire destroyed much of the distillery, and the Mackenzie family who owned it spent the better part of the next decade in court trying to get the Royal Navy to pay for the damage. The case eventually reached the House of Lords. The whisky kept being made anyway.

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Image: DavideGorla | CC BY 2.0

Dalmore Distillery: The Big Meadow

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wojsyl, CC BY-SA 3.0. Dalmore sits on the banks of the Cromarty Firth in Alness, twenty miles north of Inverness, looking across the water to the Black Isle. The name comes from the same place the distillery does: dail mhor, the big meadow, the flat fertile ground beside the firth. The distillery was ...

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Image: Wojsyl | CC BY-SA 3.0

Dalmore Distillery: Mines on the Firth

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Smooth operations were broken in 1917 when the Royal Navy chose the firth next to the distillery as a site for manufacturing deep-sea mines. The arrangement was a wartime expedient that nobody at Dalmore had asked for, and on a day in 1920 it ended badly. A mine detonated, an exp...

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Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Dalmore Distillery: The Unusual Stills

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Calum from Edinburgh, Scotland, CC BY-SA 2.0. Dalmore does some things differently from most Highland distilleries. The spirit stills carry horizontal external shell-and-tube condensers, an arrangement that mirrors the old worm pipes that once lay in the burn outside the stillhouse - long copper coils submerged in cool water...

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Image: Calum from Edinburgh, Scotland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Dalmore Distillery: The Six-Figure Bottles

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 15 April 2005, a bartender named Denis Barthe at the Ascot Bar in Surrey sold a single bottle of 62-year-old Dalmore for £32,000. It was a blend of five casks from 1868, 1878, 1922, 1926, and 1939, and only twelve bottles had ever been produced. That was the moment Dalmore bec...

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Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0