A wine and spirit business that took a blender’s name.

Bell’s traces its roots to Perth, the city on the River Tay. In 1825 Thomas Sandeman set up as a wine and spirit merchant there, according to The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, and that business is the one that eventually took the Bell name. Arthur Bell joined it as a young man: ScotchWhisky.com’s company profile dates his arrival to 1840, while the Oxford Companion says he joined as a traveller in 1845.

Bell rose quickly. In 1851 the owner, James Roy, offered him a partnership in the renamed firm of Roy & Bell, ScotchWhisky.com says, and the reference book Whisky Opus (2012) dates Bell’s first blending of single malts, in pursuit of a more consistent whisky, to the same year. When Roy retired in 1862, Bell ran the business himself. By then he had appointed what ScotchWhisky.com describes as London’s first full-time whisky agent; English Wikipedia puts the London appointment by 1863 and calls him the first known whisky maker to take that step.

For decades the blender kept his own name off the bottle. According to ScotchWhisky.com, the company name first appeared on a label in 1904; English Wikipedia attributes the long delay to Bell’s modesty.

The next generation came in around the turn of the century. ScotchWhisky.com says Bell made his eldest son, Arthur Kinmond Bell, a partner in 1889 and that his second son, Robert Duff Bell, joined in 1896; English Wikipedia puts both sons in the partnership from 1895. The sources agree that in 1900 the business passed to the two brothers, with Arthur Kinmond running the home market and Robert the overseas trade, according to English Wikipedia.

The early twentieth century brought setbacks and structure. A fire in 1919 destroyed the company’s Canal Street bonded warehouse in Perth and nearly all its stock, ScotchWhisky.com records, and in 1921 the business was incorporated as a limited company. The slogan most associated with the brand, the Scots farewell “Afore ye go”, has been used since 1925, English Wikipedia says.

Distilleries, Leith and a decade at the top.

Like most blenders, Bell’s needed its own malt. In 1924 the company bought the No. 1 Excise Bond in Leith, the port of Edinburgh, which became its main bottling site until 1967, according to ScotchWhisky.com. With the end of Prohibition in the United States, it moved into distilling: it bought P. Mackenzie & Co. and with it the Blair Athol distillery at Pitlochry and the Dufftown distillery on Speyside, a deal ScotchWhisky.com dates to 1932 and English Wikipedia to 1933. In 1936 it added Inchgower, bought from Buckie town council.

During the Second World War leadership passed from the Bell family to the company accountant, William Govan Farquharson, who became chairman and stayed as managing director until 1968, ScotchWhisky.com says. Bell’s became a public company in 1949, according to English Wikipedia.

The brand’s biggest run came under Raymond Miquel, who succeeded Farquharson as managing director in 1968 and later became chairman. English Wikipedia says Bell’s was the best-selling whisky in Scotland by 1970 and in the United Kingdom as a whole by 1978, and credits marketing that paired the whisky with mixers. ScotchWhisky.com puts the company’s share of the UK blended Scotch market at about 35 per cent in the late 1970s, and English Wikipedia cites a similar figure for 1980. The company opened the Pittyvaich distillery in Dufftown in 1974, bought the Lowland distillery Bladnoch in 1983, and in 1984 acquired the Gleneagles Hotels group, according to the same sources.

Independence ended in 1985. Guinness launched a hostile takeover bid while Miquel was in Chicago, ScotchWhisky.com says, and after a contested campaign the bid succeeded; The New York Times reported on 24 August 1985 that shareholders had backed it. Guinness then went on to buy the Distillers Company and, in 1987, combined it with Bell’s to form United Distillers, English Wikipedia says. In 1997 Guinness merged with Grand Metropolitan to create Diageo, which owns Bell’s today.

Blends, blenders and big brands.

The seven brands in this group are all blended Scotch whiskies: Dewar’s, J&B, Ballantine’s, Grant’s, Bell’s, Teacher’s and Cutty Sark. Blended Scotch brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that still carry a founder’s or merchant’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a hotel bar.

A blended Scotch brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single distillery than by a label, a name and the style of the blend, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its blending and bottling or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its whisky is actually blended and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its whisky is blended and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Diageo blend with a Blair Athol heart.

Under Diageo, Bell’s is bottled at the company’s Shieldhall plant in Glasgow, English Wikipedia says. It names Blair Athol as the main component of the blend, alongside malts from Dufftown, Inchgower, Glenkinchie and Caol Ila; Pittyvaich, the distillery the company opened in 1974, was part of the blend until 1993. English Wikipedia, citing Diageo, lists the brand’s leading markets as the United Kingdom, Portugal, Spain, the Nordic countries, Brazil and South Africa, and, citing Statista data from 2022, places it among Britain’s best-selling whiskies, just behind The Famous Grouse.

The brand’s best-known object is its bell-shaped decanter. Collectors’ and auction listings record Bell’s whisky filled into bell-shaped Wade porcelain decanters, including Christmas editions in the 1990s; from 2001 the Christmas decanters celebrated Scottish inventors, with Alexander Graham Bell in 2001, James Watt in 2002 and John Logie Baird in 2004, according to the same listings. The founder’s name has travelled in other ways too: a yellow floribunda rose called ‘Arthur Bell’ was named after him in the early 1960s, English Wikipedia says.

Advertising has leaned on humour as well as heritage. In November 2016 The Scotsman reported a Bell’s Christmas television campaign starring the actor Matt Berry as his comic character Steven Toast.

The name needs care online. Bell’s Brewery is an unrelated American beer maker in Michigan.

For a design guide, Bell’s shows how a merchant’s surname, a Scots farewell and a decanter shaped like the name can carry a blend from a Perth shop to a global drinks group for two centuries. Compare The Famous Grouse, another blend with Perth roots, and Dewar’s, the blend John Dewar began in the same city. For this guide we use Perth amber, cask brown and claret with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bell’s’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.