A NATION’S SPIRIT
A history of Scotch whisky in three volumes
Who it was taken from, who it was handed to, and what the rules were really for.
The trilogy
For most of its history, whisky in Scotland was made on farms, by families, without permission. It was not a luxury and it was not a brand. It was a use for barley in a country with too much barley and too little cash, and the people who made it were the people who drank it.
Then it became a crime — not because it changed, but because the state’s reach finally arrived to tax it. And in arriving, the law took the trade from the people who had always made it and handed it to the people who could afford to make it legally.
A Nation’s Spirit follows what happened next, across three centuries and three volumes: the illicit economy and the war against it; the seventy years in which a handful of merchants turned a farm product into the most successful export Scotland has ever had, and were eaten by the thing they built; and the modern reckoning, in which Scotland kept the making of Scotch and never built the institutions to own it, to govern it, or to say what was in it.
It is not a story of England against Scotland. At every turn the decisive hands are Scottish ones — landlords, merchants, executives, trade bodies — trading a productive asset for admission to a larger system. The distilleries that closed in the 1980s were closed by Scotsmen.
The books are built from the archive rather than the brand: excise records, court testimony, parliamentary debate, company filings, newspaper reports. Where the evidence conflicts, the conflict is printed. Where a story is only a story, it is told at full length and then taken apart.
The volumes
Volume One
THE SMA’ STILL
A People’s Spirit and the War Against It
c.1644 – 1840
A thing made on a farm from barley, water and peat smoke became a crime. This is the world it was made in and the machinery built to end it: the excise officer and the informer’s half-share, the landlord made liable for his own tenants, the punishments that fell hardest on those who could not pay a fine. It is also the volume in which the women are put back — a fifth of one Campbeltown still-maker’s customers were women, and when the excise fired on a crowd at Kilmory in 1817, most of the two hundred people facing them were women, led by one. The trade did not end because the penalties grew fiercer. It ended because in 1823 the licence got cheap — and cheap was still far beyond the reach of the people who had been making it.
Forthcoming
Volume Two
THE BARONS
The Men Who Bottled a Nation
1830 – 1925
The men handed the trade in Volume One spent seventy years making it worth having. A continuous still, a blending vat and an empire’s shipping lanes turned a regional spirit into a global one. Walker, Dewar, Buchanan and Mackie built brands that outlived them, invented their own antiquity while they were doing it, bought their way into Parliament and the peerage, and were consumed one by one by the combine they had spent their careers feeding. Between them stands the Pattison crash of 1898 — the moment the boom’s own bookkeeping came apart — and behind them, accumulating quietly under every chapter, the Distillers Company.
Forthcoming
Volume Three
THE SILENT STILLS
How a Nation Sold Its Spirit and Its Soul
1945 – present
The industry filled its own warehouses, and then emptied its own villages. Between 1983 and 1993 the closures came in waves — Port Ellen, Brora, Dallas Dhu, St Magdalene, Rosebank — and the company that ordered most of them was Scottish and had been for a century. The sale that followed made Scotch the property of firms headquartered elsewhere, and the argument of this volume is not that Scotland was robbed. It is that Scotland was never governed: a nation that retained the work, the water, the warehouses and the name, and never built a single institution capable of owning the thing, ruling on it, or saying what could go in the bottle. That is worse, harder to argue with, and nobody’s fault in a way that makes it everybody’s.
Forthcoming
Publication
| Volume One — The Sma’ Still | Date to be announced |
| Volume Two — The Barons | Date to be announced |
| Volume Three — The Silent Stills | Date to be announced |
Hardback and ebook. Distributed to the trade via IngramSpark / Gardners.
The author
For ten years, Roddy Nicoll’s job was to make something that tasted like whisky without being whisky. It is a peculiar education. You cannot counterfeit a thing convincingly until you understand exactly what it is — where it came from, why it’s made that way, and which parts are chemistry and which are simply story.
Before that came a working life in the Scottish licensed trade; behind it lies his father Watt’s unpublished research from when he created the play Scotch for the Edinburgh Festival, which forms the spine of these three volumes.
He lives in Glasgow. His last book was about his family. This one is about everyone else’s.
Free Rein Press
Free Rein Press is a small independent publisher based in Glasgow. It publishes memoir, food writing, craft and narrative history — books made carefully, in small numbers, to a standard the trade takes seriously.
The press publishes under its own ISBNs and distributes to bookshops and libraries through the book trade. More from the press
For publication dates and early extracts.