'Pride in Rosebank' shines through in distillery tours

“The level of local interest in the new Rosebank distillery has been quite extraordinary,” says Liz Gunn, brand homes head of sales & marketing (whisky) at Ian Macleod Distillers. “Pretty much all our visitors in the past couple of weeks have been local people, many of whom had some sort of history with the distillery. They had lived across the road from it, or had driven past it on their way to work.”

Before Rosebank officially opened to the public on June 7, those living in the area were invited to apply to a community ballot for a sneak preview. There were over 6000 applications for just 280 tickets.

Having Falkirk residents to be the first to see the distillery was important to the team at Rosebank, and many have been coming on tours and leaving some glowing reviews on TripAdvisor.

“As a local I’ve loved watching this dilapidated old distillery being brought back to its former glory,” wrote one, who like many, praised the staff and the tour guides. As another visitor put it: “Our guide was a local man and it really came across how proud he was of the heritage of the place.”

“So many of our distillery ambassadors live locally, and they just bring their own relationship to Rosebank on the tour,” says Liz. They are happy to share their own stories, like Ernst who once witnessed a truckload of whisky that never made it on its short journey from the distillery to the bonded warehouse that is now a Beefeater restaurant.

“It was back in the late seventies I guess, and my dad was filling up the car at the petrol station just across from Rosebank, while I got out to stretch my legs,” he recalls. “I watched this little truck emerge from the gate and as it got into the road, it was hit by a van. The truck got tipped on its side, and all the casks fell off and most of them broke.

“The enduring image in my mind,” he continues, “was of a little customs & excise man on his knees with his arms wrapped around a barrel, trying to keep the staves in place so he didn’t lose any excise duty.” How much this loyal servant of HMRC saved is unknown, but the road was awash with whisky and according to Ernst “for weeks afterwards every time we used the car, we got this incredible waft of raw Rosebank spirit”.

Some 50 years on, he is now one of the 28 guides at the new distillery who work alongside the seven in the shop. Of the visitors he has shown round so far, “a large proportion of them have been Falkirk people, and they’re all so pleased that Rosebank is back again, and they really feel us bringing prestige back to the town, which is a lovely sensation,” he said. Scott Jackson, one of Falkirk’s biggest Rosebank whisky fans, was suitably impressed when he went round the new distillery. “It’s quite superb what they’ve done,” he says. “One of the things I really like is how, wherever possible, they’ve retained the original materials.

"There’s quite a lot of exposed brickwork and they’ve reclaimed a lot of timber from the old warehouses. That juxtaposition of old and new, works really well.”

All this positive feedback is clearing heartening for Liz Gunn and her colleagues. She says they want the newly reopened distillery to “bed gently into the local community, and to be as accessible as possible to the people who live around us. The heritage of Rosebank is as much a part of their story, as it is ours”.