We found them during the renovation of the old malting house in February — a wooden box, water-damaged on the outside but dry within, containing the production ledgers for Meridian Cask Distillery from January 1923 to September 1941, when distillation was suspended for the duration of the war.
The ledgers are written in three different hands — two in ink, one in pencil that has faded to near-illegibility in places. They record every distillation run, every cask fill, every repair to the stills, every delivery of barley and every sale of spirit.
What the Numbers Tell Us
The distillery in 1923 was running two pot stills — the same two that operate today — at roughly the same capacity as we currently achieve. The wash still was filled twice weekly. The spirit still ran every other day. Annual production was between 180,000 and 220,000 litres of pure alcohol — comfortably within the range we operate at now.
The cask sizes recorded are predominantly hogsheads — the 250-litre cask that remains our primary maturation vessel. There are occasional references to "punches" — large 500-litre casks that were apparently used for the first fill of new make before transfer to hogsheads for extended maturation. We do not know if this practice continued after 1941.
The Repair Record of 11 March 1931
One entry stands out. On 11 March 1931, the ledger records: "Wash still lower section re-riveted by J. Mackay & Sons, Inverness. Three days lost. Spirit character unchanged on recommencement." The distiller at the time — one Angus Frazer, whose name appears on every entry from 1923 to 1938 — clearly considered it worth noting that the repair had not affected the character of the spirit.
J. Mackay & Sons no longer exists. But the family that took over their business — who repaired our stills in 2003 — are almost certainly their successors. The same hands, separated by ninety years, working on the same copper.
We have had the ledgers conserved and they are now kept in the distillery archive. We intend to publish selected transcriptions — the full 1923 production year, and the final entries before the war suspension. They are a record of this place doing exactly what it still does. That continuity is what Meridian Cask is built on.