Woven Whisky Is Bringing Blending Back to Leith — and This Time, Everyone's Invited
On a stretch of Edinburgh's waterfront where the warehouses once sweated with the smell of aging spirit and the docks hummed with barrels bound for every corner of the empire, something is stirring again. Woven Whisky, the Edinburgh-based independent blender that has been quietly rewriting the rules of Scotch since its founding, has announced plans for a dedicated whisky blending facility in Leith — and the ambitions behind it are anything but modest.
Independent whisky maker Woven Whisky has unveiled plans for a dedicated whisky blending facility and visitor destination at Brown's of Leith in Edinburgh, with a hands-on Blending Rooms experience launching now as the project's first phase. The announcement, made in May 2026, landed with the weight of history behind it. Once realized in full, Woven's Blending Rooms at Brown's of Leith will represent the largest purpose-built investment in whisky blending infrastructure in Leith since the neighborhood's golden age as Scotland's whisky capital in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Scale of the Vision
The Edinburgh-based whisky maker plans to complete the new two-floor facility in 2027, which will house Woven's full blending operations, blending rooms, a tasting space, and lounge bar. That footprint — spread across two floors of one of Leith's most storied industrial buildings — signals a serious escalation for a company that, until recently, was operating out of a tiny studio in an old biscuit factory. The move from a 6-by-3-meter blending lab to a purpose-built destination facility isn't just a change of address. It's a declaration of intent.
The first phase, Woven's Blending Rooms experience, which has now launched, is designed as "a creative apprenticeship in blending." The first phase of Woven Whisky's major facility project in Leith, a hands-on blending experience, will open on 1 June. That staging — launching the experience before the full facility is built — is deliberate, letting Woven establish its community presence inside the building before the bricks-and-mortar transformation gets underway.
What Actually Happens Inside the Blending Rooms
This isn't a pour-and-nose distillery tour dressed up in new clothing. The Blending Rooms experience is engineered around participation rather than passive observation, and the mechanics of it reflect Woven's core philosophy that blending should be demystified.
Kicking off with a highball at Brown's of Leith specialty coffee and spirits bar, Haze, guests then move through to the Blending Rooms to nose and taste individual whisky components from Woven's flavor library, experiment with combinations, and build their own blend under guidance from Woven's whisky maker and co-founder, Pete Allison. From there, the work of composition begins in earnest — the kind of measured, iterative tasting that professional blenders spend careers mastering, compressed into a guided session that gives novices an honest taste of the craft.
Once perfected, they bottle their blend, label it, and get to take home their own 100ml bottle, with the option to order larger-scale batches after the experience. The experience is finished off with a farewell cocktail. The Blending Rooms experience runs every Thursday and Friday for groups of six to eight guests. The blending sessions cost £55 (approximately $73 US). For an afternoon that ends with a bottle of whisky you built yourself, that's a price point that will catch the attention of any serious enthusiast.
Pete Allison on Why This Matters More Than It Might Seem
Co-founder and whisky maker Pete Allison has been the hands and nose behind Woven's blending table since the company launched, and his words around this announcement carry the urgency of someone who sees the Leith facility as a turning point — not just for Woven, but for the entire Scotch whisky category.
"For us, this step forward is much bigger than launching a new whisky experience — we want to help build a new future for Scotch whisky in Leith, the place where it first went out to the world," said Allison. "Leith was once the beating heart of the whisky industry, but over time blending became something hidden behind closed doors. We want to open that process back up again — and the Blending Rooms are the first step in that vision."
"By putting the blending process in the hands of novices and proving they can build incredible whisky, we are hoping to break down the barriers the industry has built around its craft. By the time the full facility opens in 2027, we hope it becomes a place where anyone can come and experience the future of whisky being built in Leith in real time."
Allison's framing of the target audience is pointed and refreshingly unpretentious. "This experience is for the makers — whether it's amateur experiments in coffee, making pizza at home or a long-term relationship with sourdough — the best thing about any craft is rolling up your sleeves and getting stuck in." That analogy is deliberate. Woven has always positioned itself at the intersection of craft culture broadly defined and whisky specifically, and bringing in people who make things with their hands — rather than just the devoted whisky nerd — is central to the brand's community-building play.
Brown's of Leith: The Right Address at the Right Moment
The choice of Brown's of Leith as the home for this venture is as much about symbolism as it is about real estate. Set within the former George Brown & Sons warehouse that was once a cornerstone of Leith's trading heritage, the building has been revived by a new generation of independent makers, with Woven joining neighbors including Civerinos, ShrimpWreck, and Haze in shaping a more creative, contemporary chapter for the neighborhood. Brown's of Leith opened in late 2025 within the former George Brown & Sons warehouse.
Gunnar Groves-Raines, who founded Brown's of Leith, made clear that this partnership represents exactly the kind of tenant the development was designed to attract. "We are honored to have Woven Whisky as part of the Brown's of Leith family," Groves-Raines said. "With over a century of industry and production on the Shore, Brown's is a perfect home for Woven's bright, contemporary approach to the traditional craft of whisky making and blending."
Groves-Raines added that Woven's presence "further strengthens the growing creative ecosystem around Brown's and Custom Lane — bringing together makers, producers and independent businesses connected by craft, collaboration and modern Scottish creativity." That ecosystem framing matters: Brown's of Leith isn't a single-brand destination, it's a creative campus, and Woven anchors its whisky identity within a wider culture of independent craft production.
Leith's Whisky History: A Story That Needs Telling
To understand why Woven's move to a permanent Leith blending facility carries such weight, you need to understand what Leith once was to the Scotch whisky trade — and how thoroughly that legacy was dismantled.
Leith was where blended whisky making was perfected nearly 200 years ago, and from where Scotch whisky first conquered the world. The port's geography made it inevitable: the port of Leith was once one of the busiest ports in Europe, which gave rise to much of the area being filled with around 100 bonded warehouses, to store whisky and facilitate easy transport. Those warehouses drew blenders like iron filings to a magnet, and the abundance of casks drew blenders, and Leith can be linked with many well-known names and brands from Andrew Usher — the father of modern-day blending — to the infamous Pattisons, to brands like Vat 69 and Bailie Nicol Jarvie.
Leith itself has a rich history of whisky blending, being a former epicenter of the industry and home to historic blends such as MacKinlay's and Bailie Nicol Jarvie. That heritage collapsed over the course of the 20th century as consolidation reshaped the industry, production migrated north and west, and the bonded warehouses that once lined the waterfront fell silent. What remained was memory and infrastructure — the bones of a trade that had long since moved on.
Woven is planting a flag on those bones. Based in the old Biscuit Factory — which itself is right next door to the site of the former Bonnington Distillery, and shows some classic architecture of bonded warehousing — Woven are part of a new wave of blending and distilling in Leith. The new Brown's of Leith facility represents a deliberate escalation of that founding instinct.
Who Woven Is — and How They Got Here
To fully appreciate the significance of this facility, it helps to understand just how far Woven has traveled in a short time. Founded in 2020 by friends Pete Allison, Duncan McRae, and Nick Ravenhall, this group of mild-mannered mavericks are on a mission to bring blends blinking into the limelight from their studio in an old biscuit factory in Leith, Edinburgh.
The early days were as lean as you'd expect from any scrappy startup. In the early days, the team didn't even have money for a blender. "Duncan and I initially started with honestly just a pipette and putting together combinations in a glass," Allison has recalled. That extreme simplicity — a pipette, a glass, and a ruthless focus on what was in front of them — has remained the philosophical foundation of Woven's blending methodology even as the scale has grown.
Inspired by Compass Box, the pioneering Scotch whisky makers founded in 2000, Woven aspired to something more fun and less industrialized than the commercial blends snugly occupying the market. The parallel is apt: Compass Box, founded by American John Glaser in London, carved out a category of artisan blending that had previously been invisible to consumers, and Woven has picked up that baton in Leith with a distinctly modern vocabulary.
A Flavor-First Philosophy With No Geographic Limits
Woven are independent whisky makers based in Leith — the town where blending was perfected nearly 200 years ago. Rather than build a distillery, they treat the world's more than 2,000 distilleries as an artist's palette, sourcing from makers worldwide who share their obsession with flavor, weaving together expressions that push the boundaries of creativity in whisky making.
That borderless approach has produced some genuinely unconventional releases. Their WXC expression was named World's Best Flavoured Whisky at the World Whisky Awards 2026, a collaboration that brings silky, fruit-forward Scotch whisky together with bright, tropical Colombian coffee, made in partnership with London's Assembly Coffee Roasters. Their Hemispheres expression brings together Scotland and New Zealand, marrying a Manuka-smoked distillate from a New Zealand maker with Scottish single malt.
Their Superblend is a blend of whiskies of different origins, starting with Scotland but spanning a new breed of distillery from England, Germany's largest single malt distillery, an experimental project in the USA, and a maverick Irish producer — each cask chosen solely on flavor, free from all geographical constraints.
All of these influences converge in their studio in Leith, guiding decisions each day as the team works to change perceptions of what blended whisky can be. They source some of the best whiskies from across the world — but once those samples hit the blending table, they're all equal. Quality is judged through a single lens: the liquid's ability to contribute to the experience being created.
A Track Record That Speaks for Itself
The accolades have accumulated steadily. Drinks International ranked Woven No. 35 in its World's Most Admired Whiskies list in 2023 — a remarkable achievement for a company that was only three years old at the time. Woven has built its reputation through award-winning limited releases, new-world discoveries, and the relationships built along the way — distilling everything learned since founding the company five years ago. Whisky Magazine's Christopher Coates noted of an early offering that it delivered "a degree of complexity not common in most blended Scotch Whiskies at similar price points."
The portfolio reflects a relentless curiosity. Allison and the team seek out phenomenal casks from across Scotland — sourcing some spirits as young as five years old and others into their forties — but once those samples hit the blending table, nothing matters except the liquid itself and how the taste can help create the perfect whisky for the experience they are working on. Their HOMEMADE expression employs an abnormally high malt content of over 70% and a double act of sherry-seasoned cask finishes to create a full and vibrant profile.
What the Leith Facility Means for the Industry
It's easy to look at Woven's Blending Rooms announcement and see it primarily as a tourism play — another whisky experience in a country already crowded with distillery tours. That reading would miss the point entirely.
What Woven is doing at Brown's of Leith is infrastructural. Groves-Raines confirmed Woven is also planning a new bonded warehouse within the building — which means this isn't just a visitor experience bolted onto an existing operation. It's a full relocation of Woven's production infrastructure into a purpose-built home, with the visitor experience woven directly into the working fabric of the blending house. That integration of production and public access is rare in the Scotch whisky world, where most brands keep the making strictly separated from the marketing.
Blends make up 85% of the global Scotch whisky market, yet the craft blending segment — the kind of small-scale, flavor-obsessed work that Woven represents — remains largely invisible to most American whisky drinkers who associate Scotch prestige almost exclusively with single malts. A permanent Leith facility that actively teaches visitors how blending works, and lets them do it themselves, is a meaningful push against that perception gap.
Woven's long-term ambitions extend even further. The company has stated its goal of establishing blending houses in multiple locations worldwide, understanding where certain flavors come from geographically in order to create local products that reduce the movement of liquids, making countries around the world less dependent on importing foreign produce. The Brown's of Leith facility, then, is a flagship in a model they intend to replicate — a proof of concept for a new kind of whisky operation that is simultaneously local and global.
A Neighborhood Reborn
There's a broader story unfolding in Leith that provides the backdrop for all of this. The neighborhood has been undergoing a cultural reinvention for years, shifting from a post-industrial waterfront to one of Edinburgh's most creative quarters. The site has been revived by a new generation of independent makers, with Woven joining Civerinos, ShrimpWreck, and Haze as part of its growing food, drink, and creative community.
That creative density matters. Allison's workspace at the old Biscuit Factory was already surrounded by a cross-disciplinary community: Woven's neighbors included fellow distillers Edinburgh Gin and Old Poison Distillery, Walkie Talky Brewing, a hot sauce company, and even an eyewear brand that makes its products from hemp. The new Brown's of Leith location extends that logic into a grander, more intentional setting — one where the whisky blending operation sits alongside restaurants, coffee bars, and creative businesses in a building that wears its industrial heritage on its sleeve.
For American whisky tourists making the trip to Scotland, Leith has historically been an afterthought — a suburb of Edinburgh you pass through on the way to a Highlands distillery. Woven's new facility is part of a growing argument that the Shore deserves its own pilgrimage.
How to Experience It
For those looking to get in while the Blending Rooms experience is still in its intimate early phase, the logistics are straightforward. Woven's new Blending Rooms experience, where guests blend and bottle their own whisky, is running now as the first phase of the vision, with groups of six to eight taking part every Thursday and Friday. The small group size is not incidental — it's what makes Pete Allison's personal guidance possible, and it's what keeps the experience closer to a working session than a tourist attraction.
Priced at £55, bookings for the first blending experiences are open now. That covers the full arc of the session: the opening highball at Haze, the guided blending work, the bottling and labeling, and the farewell cocktail — plus a 100ml bottle of your own creation to take home, with the option to scale up your recipe afterward if it turns out you've got a knack for it.
The full two-floor facility, with its complete blending operations, tasting space, and lounge bar, remains on track for a 2027 completion. Between now and then, Woven will be running sessions in the space that will eventually become the permanent home of their craft — meaning visitors in the next year have the unusual opportunity to experience the operation in transition, before the scaffolding comes down and the destination opens in its finished form.
The Bigger Picture
Woven Whisky has, in five years, done something genuinely difficult: built a brand around blended Scotch that feels current without being gimmicky, that is rooted in history without being backward-looking, and that has attracted a following among exactly the kind of younger drinkers who are supposed to be turning away from the category. Woven's borderless approach is just one example of their commitment to breaking down barriers in whisky, with a community-minded approach that is creating a new experience of whisky and challenging traditional tropes about where it comes from, how it's made, and even who it's for.
The Leith facility is the physical manifestation of everything Woven has been arguing for since those early sessions with a pipette and a glass. It places the art of blending — long hidden, long undervalued, long overshadowed by the cult of the single malt — back at the center of the Scotch story, in the very neighborhood where that story began. Whether you're a seasoned collector who has spent years building a shelf of single malts, or someone who's simply always been curious about what actually goes into making a great blended whisky, Woven is building a place in Leith that says: come find out for yourself.
