The Battle for Glenlivet: Who Could Claim the Name?

George Smith said he wore a pair of hair-trigger pistols in his belt for ten years after neighbours threatened to “burn the distillery to the ground, and me at the heart of it”.[4] The later battle over his whisky’s name turned on something smaller: the word “The”. Detailed historical accounts describe a settlement that reserved “The Glenlivet” for the Smiths’ whisky while allowing other distillers to keep Glenlivet alongside their own names. It was a compromise over a name that had travelled far beyond its glen.[2][3][4]

How Glenlivet became more than a place

Before Glenlivet became a contested whisky name, it was a place: Glen Livet in Banffshire. The Dictionary of the Scots Language records Glenlivet, Glenlivat and Glenleevit, with its earliest quotation drawn from Walter Scott’s St Ronan’s Well in 1824: “a mutchkin of Glenlivat”.[8]

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That same year, George Smith, a tenant of the Duke of Gordon, founded his licensed distillery. Charles MacLean’s entry in The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails identifies him as the first in Speyside to take out a distilling licence, having distilled illegally since at least 1815. That Speyside claim does not establish that Smith operated Scotland’s first legal distillery.[1]

The family’s distilling roots went deeper. The Smiths had distilled without a licence at Upper Drumin farm since 1774. In 1858, a larger distillery named Glenlivet was built at the present Minmore site. Upper Drumin and the leased Cairngorm distillery at Delnabo closed the following year.[4]

Taking a licence brought danger as well as legitimacy. Smith’s account of his neighbours’ threats explains the pistols: the laird of Aberlour gave him the pair that he said he carried for ten years.[4]

Meanwhile, Glenlivet was finding its way into advertisements. Dramface, quoting the Caledonian Mercury, records “Old Malt, Highland and Glenlivet” whisky advertised in the 1820s. The advertisements show the name in commercial circulation, though they do not identify the producer of every whisky sold under it.[7]

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Why the Smiths challenged other Glenlivets

By the 1880s, about thirty distilleries were using Glenlivet, according to MacLean, some miles from the glen itself. Hence the joke that Glenlivet was “the longest glen in Scotland”. For the Smiths, the joke captured a serious commercial problem: a name identifying their whisky had become useful to a much wider trade.[1][4]

The Whisky Professor dates the Smiths’ registration of Glenlivet as a trade mark to 1870, followed by an erroneous re-registration in 1875. In 1881, John Gordon Smith issued a written statement announcing his intention to begin legal proceedings.[2]

The challenge sharpened in 1882. In Iain Russell’s account, Smith and his agents, the Ushers, sought to remove other trade names containing Glenlivet from the Register of Trade Marks. Their opponents petitioned to remove Smith’s own mark. They argued that the trade had long used Glenlivet for whisky of the district, not exclusively for Smith’s production.[3]

Here was the heart of the dispute. The Smiths wanted to protect an identifying name; their rivals argued that wider commercial usage already had a claim on it. What mattered was how the trade had used Glenlivet, rather than simply whether each competing distillery stood within the glen.[2][3]

Blended whisky complicated the argument. Russell reports that the opponents challenged the Ushers’ position partly because their product contained only a small share of Glenlivet whisky. Any agreement would have to deal with blends as well as the names of individual distilleries.[3]

When was the Glenlivet case settled?

The detailed chronology leads to a compromise in May 1884, rather than a single courtroom triumph in 1880. Gavin D Smith in Whisky Magazine, Michael Jackson’s 1994 text and Dramface give the earlier date; the Whisky Professor and Russell trace proceedings through 1881 and 1882 to the later compromise. The accounts also disagree over the outcome’s legal form, as the two verdicts below show.[1][2][3][4][6][7]

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The sequence puts the dispute in perspective:

Who could claim the name after the compromise?

Only Smith’s whisky could call itself “The Glenlivet”. His trade mark stood, while other distillers could retain Glenlivet as a hyphenated prefix or suffix attached to their own names.[2][4]

The settlement account names ten distilleries: Glenlossie, Macallan, Aberlour, Benrinnes, Cragganmore, Linkwood, Glenrothes, Glen Grant, Mortlach and Glenfarclas. The Smiths dropped their charges, and Smith and the Ushers agreed not to interfere with those distillers’ use of Glenlivet. Names such as Macallan-Glenlivet, Aberlour-Glenlivet and Linkwood-Glenlivet reflected the continued use permitted by the settlement, rather than simply showing that rivals had ignored it.[2][3][7]

Blends had a distinct rule. Russell records that Smith and the Ushers would not interfere with blends described as “blended Glenlivet” if they contained two or more of the specified whiskies. The Ushers, in turn, had to qualify their own mark with “a blend of Glenlivet and other whiskies”.[3]

That wording matters as much as the celebrated “The”. The agreement distinguished one distillery from its neighbours, but it also demanded a clearer description of a blended product. Smith’s own agents accepted a restriction alongside the protection they had sought.[3]

Why the suffix outlasted the battle

Glenlivet continued to be used after the Victorian compromise. Dramface records that Glenallachie, founded in 1967, also adopted the name. The Whisky Professor counted 28 distilleries that, by the 1980s, were registered as “X-Glenlivet”, used it as a trade mark or placed it on labels.[2][7]

These totals describe different things at different times. MacLean’s approximately thirty users in the 1880s cannot be read as a directly comparable count with the later 28, which combines registered names, trade marks and label use. Jackson, writing in 1994, referred to about 18 other distilleries at one time or another.[1][2][6]

By 1994, Jackson described the practice as declining. In 2018, the Whisky Professor reported that Tamnavulin, Glen Moray, Speyburn and Tomintoul retained Glenlivet in their registered names, while Macallan had dropped it. Dramface still recorded Tomintoul and Glen Moray with the name in 2022. Both trade accounts also noted its continued use by independent bottlers.[2][6][7]

Read an old Glenlivet suffix in that historical setting. Its presence does not, by itself, show that the whisky came from Smith’s distillery. Equally, its absence does not erase a distillery’s earlier place in this shared naming tradition.[2][3][7]

Sources

[1] Oxford University Press. The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, entry “The Glenlivet”, Charles MacLean, online edition, publication year not supplied in the fact sheet.
https://www.spiritsanddistilling.com/dictionary/acref-9780199311132-e-129

[2] ScotchWhisky.com. The Whisky Professor. Why are other distilleries called Glenlivet?, 21 February 2018.
https://scotchwhisky.com/magazine/ask-the-professor/17898/why-are-other-distilleries-called-glenlivet/

[3] ScotchWhisky.com. Iain Russell. Whisky heroes: Andrew and John Usher, 7 June 2017.
https://scotchwhisky.com/magazine/whisky-heroes/14768/andrew-and-john-usher/

[4] Whisky Magazine. Gavin D Smith. The genuine article: The Glenlivet in its 200th year, 2 August 2024.
https://www.whiskymag.com/articles/the-genuine-article-the-glenlivet-in-its-200th-year/

[6] Michael Jackson. Text on Glenlivet hosted by the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics, 1994; original publication title not supplied in the fact sheet.
https://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/jhb/whisky/smws/2.html

[7] Dramface. Ye Olde Glenlivet Whisky, 2022.
https://dramface.com/features/2022/ye-olde-whisky-glenlivet

[8] Dictionary of the Scots Language. Scottish National Dictionary, entry “Glenlivet”, online edition, publication year not supplied in the fact sheet.
https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/glenlivet

This desk-researched article uses the supplied verified fact sheet, separating the broadly agreed naming terms from conflicting historical accounts of the proceedings.

Last checked: November 2026