Alastair Day

Alasdair Day was born in July 1965, and from the start, his life carried a detail that fits the way he later approached whisky. He entered the world in Norwich, England, where his father worked as a dentist, but the family returned to Scotland when Alasdair was still an infant. As an adult, Day’s academic path ran through science. He graduated from the University of Glasgow with a BSc (Hons) in Botany. He then built a long, practical career in the food industry. It was work that was technical, supply-chain heavy, and relentlessly focused on consistency. Early on, he grew mushrooms for a living. From there he moved into fresh produce, traveling widely to source fruit and vegetables for the UK market. Later, he worked in the dairy industry, including a chapter centered on cheese, a stint that stuck to him long enough to earn a nickname among friends. In all, Day’s food-industry career spanned nearly 25 years.

The pivot into whisky came through family history. Day’s great-grandfather, Richard “Dickie” Day, ran a business in Coldstream, Berwickshire, in the Scottish Borders, that combined a licensed grocer, beer brewing, and whisky blending. The roots of that business stretched even further back to the grocery firm J&A Davidson in 1820; Dickie had joined the enterprise in 1895, eventually taking it over in 1923. The family “cellar book” carried that history forward into the 21st century. The ledger contained Dickie Day’s business accounts and, crucially, a record of his blend recipes from the turn of the century. When Alasdair inherited that book from his father, it gave him something rare: specific formulas tied to a real place and a real business. It also gave him the idea that he might be able to turn his great-grandfather’s chronicles into a real plan that provided a beginning for his own entry into whisky over a century later.

Using that starting point, In 2012, Day wrote a business plan aimed at establishing a small distillery. That process brought him to Bill Dobbie. The partners first met in November 2013, then co-founded R&B Distillers Limited six months later. Day’s role became central; that of co-founder, and ultimately the operating mind behind distillation. Their first major project was the one that made the company’s name real: bringing legal whisky production back to the Isle of Raasay. The build moved from plan to ground in June 2016, when work began on the site, and the distillery opened in September 2017. Day and Dobbie built not just as a plant, but a destination; an integrated distillery and visitor experience housed in Borodale House, a Victorian villa adapted into a whisky hotel and visitor centre. 

Using that starting point, In 2012, Day wrote a business plan aimed at establishing a small distillery. That process brought him to Bill Dobbie. The partners first met in November 2013, then co-founded R&B Distillers Limited six months later. Day’s role became central; that of co-founder, and ultimately the operating mind behind distillation. Their first major project was the one that made the company’s name real: bringing legal whisky production back to the Isle of Raasay. The build moved from plan to ground in June 2016, when work began on the site, and the distillery opened in September 2017. Day and Dobbie built not just as a plant, but a destination; an integrated distillery and visitor experience housed in Borodale House, a Victorian villa adapted into a whisky hotel and visitor centre. 

From the start, Day positioned Raasay’s whisky around deliberate production choices rather than marketing gloss, and his signature approach centers on producing peated as well as unpeated spirits. He then matures them in a defined set of cask types, most prominently ex-rye casks, chinkapin oak casks, and ex–Bordeaux red wine casks, then marries those strands into a unified house style. He described fermentation as a major lever for flavor, with runs that extend to three to five days, designed to build the dark-fruit character that Day aims for. In November 2020, R&B Distillers released its first Isle of Raasay Hebridean single malt Scotch whisky. That release closed the distance between an idea of reviving an island’s distilling history, and a finished product that could stand proudly on its own in the wider Scotch market.

Beyond his birthdate, little personal information on Alasdair Day has been made public. But what is clear, is that his whisky life had become a continuous line: a botany graduate who learned commercial discipline in food production through to a talented distiller and blender.  That background and drive co-founded a modern island distillery from the ground up, then defined its flavor through unique and wise process decisions that could be repeated year after year.

Sources:

  1. Companies House, “Alasdair Macdonald Day: personal appointments”, find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk

  2. Companies House, “R&B Distillers Ltd (SC483145) overview”,find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk

  3. Scotch Whisky Magazine, “Five Minutes With: Alasdair Day, R&B Distillers”, Gavin D. Smith,  23 November 2017

  4. The Scotsman:Food and Drink, “Meet the Distiller: Alasdair Day, Raasay Distillery”, Sean Murphy, 9 June 2015

  5. London Spirits Competition (blog), “Alasdair Day, Co-founder at R&B Distillers…”

  6. Bartenders Business, “12 Questions… Alasdair Day”,  Aakriti Rawat (interviewer), 22 August 2022 

  7. Isle of Raasay Distillery official website, raasaydistillery.com

  8. ScotchWhisky.com, “On the Road: Skye & Raasay”, Dave Broom, 5 October 2017

  9. Port Magazine, “A Journey To Raasay”, 7 April 2018, https://www.port-magazine.com/food-drink/ajourneytoraasay/

Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee

Borodale House