Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
There are now only two or three fully working distilleries in Campbeltown. Once
there were dozens.
Blame that whole boom-and-bust thing.
What happened was that back in the latter part of the nineteenth century Campbeltown
grew to become, in effect, the whisky capital of Scotland, never quite eclipsing Speyside
in terms of its productive capacity but almost equalling it in the number of distilleries
in the region and certainly providing a more focussed concentration of whisky-making
than anywhere in Speyside or the rest of Scotland could boast. The place fairly reeked
of whisky, stank of distilling; soon the local grain supplies proved insufficient and loads
were brought in not just from the rest of Scotland but from Denmark and even Russia.
The dried draff was exported as far as Germany, allegedly to feed the Prussian army's
horses.
The local whisky barons built mansions on the profits. Campbeltown became a boom
town, the unchallenged Whisky Metropolis of the west coast. By 1891 this essentially
wee daft town in the middle of a watery nowhere with a population of less than 2000
souls had the highest per capita income of anywhere in Britain, and all because of whisky.
It couldn't and didn't last.
A degree of complacency set in, and standards fell. In an industry where you don't
reap what you sow for at least three years and probably a lot longer, this is both an ever-
present temptation and an act of complete and almost inevitably utter and terminal stupid-
ity. Even more to the point, speculators started to buy up supplies of product, investing in
entire warehouses of still-maturing spirit, so encouraging the production of more of the
same. What looked at the time like a virtuous spiral set in, investment encouraging pro-
duction, until the boom's bust point was reached, there was a tiny blip that turned into a
big one, the premium was suddenly on quality not quantity, and the whole shaky speculat-
ive, down-marketed edifice fell apart. The First World War didn't help matters, however
it was the combination of punitive tax hikes by Liberal Chancellor Lloyd George, along
with post-war mass unemployment in Glasgow and the local coal beds running out which
completed the destruction.
In the twenties, when the US was undergoing its honourably intentioned but basically
insane experiment with Prohibition, Campbeltown started to blossom again, but it was
still predominantly bottom-of-the-range stuff, and after a reprise of the boom-and-slump
trajectory it had experienced two decades before, the place sank back into the productive
stagnation that lasts till this day.
The one great shining light in all this sorry tale of commercial darkness is Springbank.
Springbank distillery does all the things that almost nobody else does; it malts its own
barley - grown locally - it flavours and dries the barley over smouldering local peat, it
