The History of Chivas Regal

Chivas Regal begins not in a distillery but in a provisions shop. In 1801, a young grocer named William Edward opened a business at 13 King Street, Aberdeen, supplying tea, coffee, spices and fine spirits to the merchants and gentry of the north-east of Scotland. James Chivas joined the firm in 1837, took full control by the 1850s, and gave the house the name it bears today.

The distinction of Chivas Brothers in the mid-nineteenth century was the quality of its clientele. In 1843, the firm was granted a Royal Warrant by Queen Victoria to supply provisions to Balmoral, and thereafter the Chivas name became associated with the highest standards of the Scottish trade. It was against this background that the brothers began to blend whiskies — first for private customers, then for wider release.

The Chivas Regal blend itself was created in 1909. It was one of the first Scotch whiskies to carry an age statement on its label, a twenty-five-year-old expression aimed initially at the American market, where a taste for premium Scotch was beginning to emerge. The twelve-year-old that most drinkers now know as Chivas Regal was introduced later in the twentieth century and became the definitive expression of the house.

Chivas Regal was among the first to put a number on the label. The industry has followed for a century.

At the centre of Chivas Regal sits Strathisla, the distillery in Keith, Speyside, that supplies the principal malt of the blend. Strathisla was founded in 1786 and is one of the oldest continuously operating distilleries in the Scottish Highlands, distinguished by its low pagoda-topped buildings and the water drawn from the Fons Bulliens well. The malt it produces gives Chivas Regal its rich, honeyed core.

The blend also draws on a wider circle of Speyside and Highland malts, together with grain whiskies from the Chivas Brothers estate. All components are aged for at least twelve years before blending, and the blend is married in cask for a further period before bottling.

The role of Chivas Regal in the wider history of Scotch is significant. It was among the earliest brands to position itself explicitly as a luxury blend, distinct from the workaday whiskies of the period, and it helped to establish the principle that blended Scotch could stand as a category of the highest quality. Its early adoption of the age statement, now universal, was in its day a bold departure.

Today Chivas Regal remains one of the most recognised Scotch whiskies in the world, and the Strathisla Distillery — often described as the most beautiful in Speyside — continues to welcome visitors who wish to see the source of its central malt.