Distillery
Kingsbarns
Kingsbarns Distillery began with a golf caddie's idea, not a distiller's plan. Douglas Clement spent thirteen years carrying clubs at Kingsbarns Golf Links on the Fife coast in Scotland's Lowland region. Visitors kept asking why there was no local whisky to try. In 2009 he found a derelict 18th-century farm steading on the Cambo Estate and decided to build one himself. Raising the money took far longer than finding the site. Clement gathered £100,000 from 32 investors, many of them fellow golfers. A Scottish government grant added £670,000, but the total still fell short. In 2013 he sold the project to the Wemyss family, owners of Wemyss Malts. They spent three years restoring the farm steading before opening the distillery on St Andrew's Day in 2014. The Wemyss connection to the land ran deeper than money. The family's ancestor, the seventh Earl of Wemyss, had owned part of the same Cambo Estate between 1759 and 1783. That link predates any whisky made on the site by more than two centuries.
