This year, Dewar’s marks 180 years since John Dewar opened a merchant shop on Perth’s High Street in 1846. Anniversaries like this usually get told through the liquid, and there is a good story there, which I covered in a separate piece with Master Blender Stephanie Macleod. There is another side to it, though, and it lies in the careful preservation and stewardship of some iconic Dewar’s artifacts, and the collection itself is unlike anything else in the world of Scotch whisky.
Jacqui Seargeant has been the person looking after the Dewar’s archive for most of her career. She holds a Master of Arts in History from the University of Glasgow and a postgraduate degree in Archive Administration from the University of Liverpool, and she joined John Dewar & Sons in 1999 as Company Archivist. She is now Global Heritage Manager and Archivist, overseeing the historical collections across the wider portfolio, and in 2025 she was made a Keeper of the Quaich.
Talking to her, what comes across most clearly is that she does not only treat the archive as a place where the past is stored. She treats it as somewhere the company goes looking for its next idea.
Dewar’s Archive: Full of Voices & Bottles
At its most basic, an archive is a place where things are kept. Dewar’s has 180 years of paperwork, bottles, photographs, and objects behind it, and most people would reasonably assume the job is to keep all of it safe and in order. That is part of what Seargeant does, but the more interesting part of the work is understanding what the material actually says about the company that made it. She is a custodian of the same 180 years as Stephanie Macleod, working from a different standpoint.
Ask Seargeant which part of the collection tells her the most, and she does not point to the business records. “It is often a combination of material that tells the richest story, but if I had to choose, I would say correspondence and our bottle collection,” she said. The letters are the part that gives her the people. “The correspondence allows you to hear the voices of the people who built the business and understand how they thought, what challenges they faced, and how ambitious they were,” she said.
The bottles do a different job. There are more than 1,000 of them, running from the 1880s through to the present day. “This element is an amazing time capsule of the company’s blending prowess and identity through time,” she said. What the run of bottles shows is a company that was busier and more commercially restless in its early years than its reputation might suggest. “You realise how creative and innovative DEWAR’S was in the early days, with numerous blends produced for different markets, price points, and consumers,” she said.
One of those early products stands out. Dewar’s made a Toddy Whisky, sold on the understanding that it would be mixed with hot water, honey, and lemon rather than drunk neat. Alongside it sits the packaging record, with White Label going back to 1899, giving Seargeant a complete timeline of how the label has shifted over more than a century while staying recognizable.
When Archives Become Inspiration For The Future
This is where Seargeant’s view of the job separates from the storage assumption. “Archives are often thought of as places that preserve history, but for us they are also places that inspire the future,” she said. In practice that means the collection feeds brand education, packaging design, the visitor experience, product development, and new releases.
The clearest example is one Macleod tells from her side too. Working through the old blending books in the archive, Macleod found processes that led to the Double Double range, the four-stage ageing series that has become the most technically ambitious part of the Dewar’s lineup. “Our Master Blender Stephanie was inspired by processes in our old blending books which led to the creation of her award winning Double Double range,” Seargeant said.
That range went on to produce the Dewar’s 32 Year Old, named Whisky of the Year at the 2020 International Whisky Competition against both blends and single malts.
Her other favorite find works differently. “One of my favorite examples was discovering historical references connecting DEWAR’S to the origins of the Highball, a story that has since become an important part of how we talk about the brand around the world,” she said. The Highball has found a wide audience again in recent years, and the archive gave Dewar’s a legitimate claim to it.
That distinction is what she keeps coming back to. “The archive gives us knowledge and authenticity. It allows us to tell stories with confidence because they are grounded in real people, real events, and real achievements,” she said.
Tommy Dewar’s Publicity Machine
One of those real people was Tommy Dewar, who, looking at the material in the archive, was clearly a figure ahead of his time. “Tommy Dewar, in particular, was constantly experimenting with new forms of advertising and consumer engagement,” Seargeant said. It is the part of the collection that tends to surprise people most. “One of the things that continually surprises people is just how forward-thinking the Dewar family was,” she said.
The company produced one of the earliest cinematic advertisements for a drinks brand, and it put up what was the largest mechanical advertising sign in Europe in the early 1900s. Both were expensive bets on formats that barely existed yet.
The point is not that Tommy Dewar invented anything that came after him, but that the instinct behind the work has stayed the same while everything around it changed. “The channels may have changed, but the desire to create memorable experiences, tell compelling stories, and connect with consumers in unexpected ways has been part of DEWAR’S DNA for generations,” said Seargeant.
15,000 Items, 200 on Show
Most of what Seargeant chooses to put on display ends up at Dewar’s Aberfeldy Distillery in Perthshire, the Highland home of the Dewar’s blend and of Aberfeldy single malt. The archive is a substantial part of what visitors come for, and it has been since the doors opened.
When the visitor centre launched in April 2000, an interactive archival museum was there from day one, and a new heritage exhibition arrived in 2023 to mark 125 years of Aberfeldy single malt. I visited in June 2024, and the historical material is not a side room you pass on the way to the stills. It runs through the whole experience.
The scale of the collection makes editing unavoidable. “The collection has more than 15,000 items in it, yet you only see about 200 in the museum at any one time, so we must be very selective, and we can change displays to keep them fresh,” Seargeant said. What reaches the museum floor is a fraction of what she looks after.
The test she applies is whether something still says anything. “We look for stories and objects that reflect enduring values such as quality, craftsmanship, and innovation,” she said. Those themes hold up across the full 180 years, which is what makes them useful as a filter.
Plenty stays in the boxes, and not because it lacks interest. Some pieces are there to explain a moment rather than to be revived, like a celebratory telegram the company received during its centenary celebrations in 1946. Others are simply enjoyable.
The archive holds a 1930s Dewar’s picture disk gramophone record and an automaton advert from the same period that moves when you press a button, both of which were at the cutting edge when they were made. “The goal is partly to recreate the past, but also to help people understand where the brand has come from while continuing to move it forward,” Seargeant said.
Seeing The History of Dewar’s In Person
What struck me on the tour was how much of the archive is put within reach rather than kept behind glass at a distance. In the distillery museum, there is a replica blending room, fronted by a shelved wall of old trade samples that Dewar’s would once have used to test combinations. Among them are a Macallan distilled in 1919, a St. Magdalene from 1924, and a Dalmore from 1909, three names that carry very different weight now than they did when someone shelved them as working stock.
Standing in front of that wall is the moment Seargeant’s point about knowledge and authenticity stops being abstract. The bottles were not collected to be impressive. They were kept because someone needed them, and they survived because the company kept hold of its own working material for long enough that it became history.
The First Award of 1,500
With a collection this size, picking a favorite is not a fair question. So I put it to Seargeant a different way, asking which single item she would point to for someone who has never explored Dewar’s before, and what it would tell them. She goes to the beginning. “I would probably choose the company’s first award certificate and medal from 1886,” she said. It was the first of more than 1,500 the company would go on to collect, the run that makes Dewar’s the world’s most awarded blended Scotch whisky.
What she likes about it is what it was for. “John Dewar established a company based on quality; his early blends were aimed at the well-to-do who expected the best,” she said. His sons carried the same approach forward. “His sons continued that ethos of going the extra mile to make our products stand out from the crowd, which continues in the company to this day,” she said.
The awards all live in the archive, which is where Seargeant’s thinking about the whole collection comes together. “All of the awards are kept safely in our archive collection because they are the result of everything we do today, the external validation of the dedication to quality and innovation which spans generations,” she said.
Dewar’s at 180: Still Worth Keeping
Eighty years separate John Dewar’s first medal from the telegram that marked the company’s centenary, and another eighty separate that telegram from the anniversary Dewar’s is marking now. All of it sits in the same collection, looked after by someone whose job is to keep it in order and to know what is in it well enough to recognize when something becomes useful again.
That is what 180 years of history looks like in practice. The old blending books produced a modern range, the historical references gave the Highball back its provenance, and the medals still explain what the company was set up to do. Seargeant’s work makes sure those things stay findable, which is how the past keeps earning its place in the present.
Read the full article at Inside the Dewar’s Archive, Where the Past Keeps Producing New Whisky
