Glen Albyn Filling Station 1967

 

Shall we begin?

A quick look online or through your whisky books will confirm, when it comes to photographs, Glen Albyn is a rarity.

On starting this new project, I don't know how many Glen Albyn photographs still exist or are awaiting discovery, but I hope to do it justice and compile as many as possible for this online resource.

Starting with this 1967 photograph, which comes from Old Inverness In Pictures from the Inverness Field Club, we're venturing into the filling station at the distillery. I hope that we can discover other areas as and when. The original caption for this image is:

'Filling barrels with whisky at the Glen Albyn Distillery, by the Muirtown Basin. Used for blending, the output in 1973 was 320,000 gallons a year.'

The book was published in 1978, hence the more recent production figure. It features a trio of Glen Albyn images, which we will replicate for this resource while acknowledging (as the book itself does), if any copyright has been infringed, we hope to be forgiven. 

This photograph was provided by Glen Albyn Distillery for the publication, in other words Mackinlay & Birnie who are mentioned on the barrels. It gives us a sense of the manual effort and a dirty job that still takes places at many distilleries today - with others shipping off their newmake to a more central location. We'll probably never know what happened to casks #2425 and #2426, their numbers indicating that this photograph was likely to have taken place in the second half of 1967. 

On a side note, what's also of interest is that the owners provided photographs of their lesser known distillery - mostly used for blending as per the caption. Glen Mhor was the more widely bottled and available single malt. Perhaps this was an opportunity to showcase its own identity and given the historical emphasis of the book itself, the more logical selection? But why not give us both distilleries? Still, I'd take these images over none at all, anytime.