The Beast of Dufftown

Mortlach is, by reputation, the Beast of Dufftown — Speyside's most singular distillery, distinguished by a 2.81-times distillation regime that gives it a depth of meatiness no other Speyside house carries. It is not a malt that decorates a meal. It is a malt that frames one. For two years, I built a room around exactly that proposition.

The Mortlach chapter unfolded across two rooms. It began at Shin’Labo, where the maison’s launch in Malaysia was hosted in September 2022. It matured into the dedicated Mortlach Room at MeatMore, the steakhouse-and-cocktail-bar that gave the malt its own salon at Bukit Bintang from August 2023 to 2024. Both rooms have since closed — MeatMore in 2024, Shin’Labo also in 2024. The Mortlach partnership is now a closed chapter on the public record.

What endures is what the partnership taught me. That single malt, properly aged, can be the protagonist on a plate. That the umami a long-distillation regime imparts is not an accent but a structural element. That the discipline of ageing — the willingness to wait for what is being made — applies as much to a slab of beef as to a cask of spirit.

The Mortlach distillery — a short history

Mortlach was founded in 1823 as the first legal distillery in Dufftown, on the site of an older illicit operation in the years after the Excise Act. George Cowie joined under John Gordon’s stewardship in 1853 and helped establish the workforce that defined the distillery’s early character. His son Alexander Cowie, drawing on a scientific education, devised the very unusual 2.81-times distillation process that is still in use at Mortlach today — and used nowhere else in Scotland.

Combined with the distillery’s traditional Worm Tub condensers, the 2.81 regime produces a spirit of unusual thickness, weight, and meatiness. The maison’s own line for it is the one I came to read against in cooking: Whisky’s Best Kept Secret.

Genesis — Shin’Labo × Mortlach, September 2022

The Mortlach launch in Malaysia took place at Shin’Labo in September 2022, recorded by Loop Me at the time. The yōshoku room at Shin’Labo — Japanese craft, French technique, Malaysian terroir — gave the malt’s umami an immediate vocabulary. It was the launch dinner that began the conversation that would eventually shape a dedicated room: meat-led courses, ageing as the operating discipline, the malt as the central voice rather than a pairing accessory.

It was the launch that earned the maison the trust to build a dedicated room. Eleven months separated the Shin’Labo launch from the dedicated Mortlach Room at MeatMore — long enough for a working relationship to be tested; short enough that the conversation never paused.

The Mortlach Room at MeatMore — Malaysia’s first (29 August 2023)

Malaysia’s first dedicated Mortlach dining room opened at MeatMore in Bukit Bintang on 29 August 2023 — confirmed at primary-source level by the official Media Alert issued from Kuala Lumpur on that date by ROOTS PR (“Mortlach Introduces Its First Dining Room In Malaysia @ MeatMore”). MeatMore opened to the public in October 2023; the Mortlach Room was structural to the venue from inception, not retrofitted.

How the room was built:

• Capacity — twelve guests
• Featured expression at launch — Mortlach 12 Year Old, the resident pairing; with limited-edition expressions added at higher reserve. Most notably, Mortlach 30 Years, 2024 Special Release sat at the room’s reserve, co-curated between the maison and me
• Signature dish — the Mortlach New York Strip — USDA Prime sirloin, aged thirty-five days, paired with the Mortlach 12
• Minimum spend — RM 5,000

The Mortlach Room sat at the heart of MeatMore’s wider architecture. The restaurant ran a dedicated single-zone counter cabinet by Precision UK, fitted into custom cabinetry, holding a 15 / 35 / 90-day ageing ladder across three programmes — whiskey-aged, butter-aged, kombu-aged. Three pillars defined the Mortlach Room within that wider operation: a focused pairing programme, cut exclusivity governed by seasonal availability, and partnership-as-pedagogy.

Beyond the ageing programmes, the maison made barrel wood from its casks available to me for smoking. A quiet circularity — Mortlach’s terroir, having shaped the spirit, returning to shape the meat. The partnership became pedagogy made material: not just knowledge transferred from maison to chef, but actual material from the maison’s casks finding its way back into my cooking.

The room operated under the wider hospitality discipline MeatMore had adopted — the Japanese culture of Omotenashi, wholehearted anticipatory service — which Free Malaysia Today named explicitly in its 27 October 2023 piece. Like the Hennessy Salon at Enfin and the Krug Chef’s Table that preceded it, the Mortlach Room sits on the public record as one of my room-within-a-restaurant chapters: dedicated, considered, and now closed.

At MeatMore, we are proud to be a harmonious community that practises the culture of Omotenashi and enjoy ‘meat cooking’ as a ritual. We are extremely excited to be sharing our ethos and expertise in the area of meat ageing as well as curing with liquid gold such as Mortlach.

James Won · Mortlach × MeatMore Media Alert, 29 August 2023

What stayed after the rooms closed

After MeatMore closed in 2024 and Shin’Labo also in 2024, the Mortlach partnership in its active form ended. What I carry forward — into the brand work, into the conservation work, into Serumpun Sarawak — is the discipline of ageing. The willingness to wait for what is being made, and the patience not to rush what comes after.

Some collaborations end. The discipline they impart does not.

The Archive — alternative frames

More frames from the Mortlach Room shoot at MeatMore — kept here for the record, for any guest who wants to look a little longer before leaving the page.