Speyside, the heart of Scotland’s whisky industry, is drowning in rain right now. Roads are closed, fields are lakes, and rivers are raging. Yet beneath the chaos, something remarkable is happening. Distillers who were forced to halt production during the record-dry summer of 2025 are now capturing this winter’s deluge to protect themselves when the taps run dry again.
The same landscape that nearly broke them last year is being rewired to save them next year.
From Crisis to Breakthrough
In 2025, the UK recorded its hottest and sunniest year ever. Rivers in Speyside hit their lowest levels in decades. Several distilleries, including some of the biggest names, had to pause mashing and distillation for weeks. The financial hit ran into millions. One senior industry source called it “the wake-up call we couldn’t ignore.”
That wake-up call has turned into action.
Instead of praying for rain that arrives all at once and vanishes just as fast, distillers and landowners are now deliberately slowing the water down, storing it in the soil and releasing it slowly through the dry months.
Leaky Dams Are the Secret Weapon
Across the hills above the River Spey and its tributaries like the Tromie and the Fiddich, hundreds of simple wooden barriers, known as leaky dams, have been built in the last 18 months.
These are not big concrete walls. They are low, gappy structures made from logs and branches pinned across small streams. When heavy rain hits, they hold water back just long enough for it to spill over slowly and soak into the ground rather than tearing downhill in a brown torrent.
The result? Less flooding downstream in winter. Higher groundwater and river base flows in summer.
One Speyside estate manager told me: “We used to watch the water race off our land in hours. Now it stays for weeks. The difference in July river levels is already visible.”
Peatlands and Wetlands Do the Heavy Lifting
Leaky dams are only part of the story.
Thousands of hectares of degraded peatland are being restored across the Speyside catchment. Blocked drains, re-wetted bogs and new wetlands are all acting like giant sponges.
A single hectare of healthy peatland can hold up to 1,000 tonnes of water. Multiply that across the upper Spey catchment and you are talking about billions of litres stored naturally, ready to drip-feed rivers when the sun beats down.
The Cairngorms National Park Authority reports that some restored sites are now holding water for three to four months longer than they did five years ago.
Whisky Giants Throw Their Weight Behind It
Major players are putting serious money in.
Chivas Brothers (owner of Glenlivet, Aberlour and others) has committed £2 million to catchment restoration projects. Diageo, which operates 28 malt distilleries including Lagavulin and Talisker, has similar programmes running across its sites. The Macallan opened its new distillery in 2018 with water stewardship built into the design from day one.
These are not PR stunts. Licences to abstract water from rivers are getting stricter every year. The companies know that if they don’t secure summer water naturally, regulators will simply turn the tap off.
Proof It Works Beyond Whisky
The science backs it up.
A 2024 review of natural flood management projects across Britain found that well-designed interventions consistently cut flood peaks by 10-20%. In some smaller catchments the reduction reached 50%.
More importantly for drought, the same measures increased dry-weather river flows by up to 30% in monitored streams.
The Eddleston Water project in the Scottish Borders, one of the most studied in the country, showed that leaky dams and riparian tree planting kept rivers flowing for an extra six weeks during the 2018 drought compared to nearby untouched catchments.
A Model for the Whole Country
What is happening in Speyside right now is the clearest real-world example yet that Britain does not need to choose between flooding and drought.
We can have both problems at once, or we can fix both at the same time by working with nature instead of against it.
No new reservoirs. No massive engineering bills. Just timber, spades, and a change in mindset.
The whisky industry, of all unlikely pioneers, is showing how to turn a winter of misery into a summer of security.
And if Scotland’s most water-hungry industry can secure its future by storing rain in the hills, then so can everyone else.
