The Beast of Dufftown

Mortlach has a reputation as the Beast of Dufftown. It is the most singular distillery in Speyside, and its 2.81-times distillation gives it a meaty depth that no other Speyside house has. You do not pour Mortlach as an afterthought to a meal. The meal is built around it. For two years, that is what I did with a room.

The Mortlach story took place in two rooms. It began at Shin’Labo, which hosted the malt’s Malaysian launch in September 2022. It grew into the Mortlach Room at MeatMore, the steakhouse and cocktail bar in Bukit Bintang that gave the malt a salon of its own from August 2023 until 2024. Both rooms have since closed: MeatMore in 2024, and Shin’Labo the same year. The active partnership is over.

What I learned from it is still with me. A properly aged single malt can lead a plate. The umami that comes from a long distillation is part of a dish’s structure. And ageing, which is the willingness to wait for something while it is being made, applies to a slab of beef just as it does 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 still, in the years after the Excise Act. George Cowie joined in 1853, under John Gordon, and helped build the workforce that gave the distillery its early character. His son Alexander Cowie had a scientific education, and he devised the very unusual 2.81-times distillation that Mortlach still uses today. Nowhere else in Scotland does it.

Together with the distillery’s traditional worm tub condensers, the 2.81 process makes a spirit with unusual thickness and a meaty weight. The maison’s own description of it became my reference point in the kitchen: Whisky’s Best Kept Secret.

Where it began: Shin’Labo and Mortlach, September 2022

Mortlach launched in Malaysia at Shin’Labo in September 2022, and Loop Me covered it at the time. Shin’Labo was a yōshoku room (Japanese craft, French technique, Malaysian terroir), and it gave the malt’s umami a language straight away. That launch dinner started the conversation that later shaped a dedicated room: meat-led courses, ageing at the centre of the kitchen, and the malt as the main voice at the table.

The launch earned the trust that made a dedicated room possible. Eleven months passed between the Shin’Labo launch and the Mortlach Room at MeatMore. That was long enough to test the working relationship and short enough that the conversation never stopped.

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. The primary source is the official media alert ROOTS PR issued from Kuala Lumpur that day (“Mortlach Introduces Its First Dining Room In Malaysia @ MeatMore”). MeatMore opened to the public in October 2023, and the Mortlach Room was part of its plan from the start.

How the room was set up:

• Capacity: twelve guests.
• Featured expression at launch: Mortlach 12 Year Old as the house pairing, with limited editions at the higher reserve. The most notable was the Mortlach 30 Years, 2024 Special Release, chosen by the maison and me together.
• Signature dish: the Mortlach New York Strip, USDA Prime sirloin aged thirty-five days, served with the Mortlach 12.
• Minimum spend: RM 5,000.

The Mortlach Room sat at the heart of MeatMore. The restaurant ran a single-zone counter ageing cabinet by Precision UK, built into custom cabinetry, with ageing at 15, 35 and 90 days across whisky-aged, butter-aged and kombu-aged programmes. Inside that operation the room rested on three things: a focused pairing programme, cuts offered only when the season allowed, and the partnership as a form of teaching.

Beyond the ageing programmes, the maison gave me barrel wood from its casks to smoke with. The wood that had shaped the spirit came back to shape the meat. So the partnership passed on more than knowledge from maison to chef: actual wood from Mortlach’s casks ended up in my cooking.

The room followed the hospitality MeatMore had taken up across the venue: omotenashi, the Japanese culture of wholehearted, anticipatory service, which Free Malaysia Today named in its piece of 27 October 2023. Like the Hennessy Salon at Enfin and the Krug Chef’s Table before it, the Mortlach Room was one of my rooms within a restaurant. It was dedicated and carefully made, and it is 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

When Shin’Labo closed in December 2024 and MeatMore in 2025, the active Mortlach partnership ended with them. What I took from it into the brand work, the conservation work and Serumpun Sarawak is the practice of ageing: waiting for something while it is being made, and having the patience not to hurry what comes after.

The partnership has ended. What it taught me has stayed.

The Archive: alternative frames

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