The stills of Glen Mhor fell silent in 1983, along with those of the neighbouring distillery Glen Albyn. It was in 1980 that Diageo acquired Glens Albyn and Mhor respectively, demolishing them both several years later to make way for a shopping centre. Glen Mhor sits more or less atop the Caledonian Canal, the 62 mile man-made waterway which cuts a course from Inverness to Corpach. The whisky distillery was Scotland’s first to install a Saladin Box, a malting device which proved thoroughly economical for quite some time.
Founded in 1892, by John Birnie and James Mackinlay, Glen Mhor draws its waters from the tourist Mecca of Loch Ness. The renowned Scottish author, Neil Gunn, was, for many years, an exciseman and he spent some time in the highlands and was posted almost permanently at Glen Mhor. There he learnt to love single malt whiskies, in a period when they were pretty much inaccessible for anyone who lived further from the distillery than on its very doorstep. Gunn recalled the first sip of a good dram: "at such a moment the basest man would bless his enemy". The single malt whiskies of the Glen Mhor distillery are quite rare today; there have been but a couple of house bottlings and a handful of independent releases over the years.