Talk:List of historic whisky distilleries

Initial queries

Part of the reason I created this article is that I often seemed to encounter claims about the historical importance of some distillery, and I especially had difficulty sorting out what seemed to be confusing or conflicting claims – typically about which distillery is the oldest one in some category or just how much the history of distilling in the region can be claimed as the history of one particular distillery. I'll now take this opportunity to ask the community a few questions.

• Is it a good idea to have such a list?
• Should it be formatted in some other way?
• Should it be moved to List of historic whisky distilleries, since only whisky distilleries are included? (or should some non-whisky distilleries be added?)
• Is there too much overlap with the List of distilleries in Scotland? How should we deal with that overlap?
• Should it include distilleries that have no article that discusses them (at least beyond a brief mention) on Wikipedia?
• Can we prevent the list from becoming too long and confusing to read?
• Should there be some separation in the list between currently operating and non-operating distilleries?
• If so, what should we do in cases where there is an operating distillery at a location, and perhaps it has the same name, but it has no ownership continuity (and perhaps also no continuity for the building and equipment) with the original distillery, or where there is a distillery using the name but not at the same location, or where the facility is now only a tourist attraction or a warehousing site rather than a commercial distillery?
• Should it include companies as well as distilleries? (In some cases there are historically important companies that have not always used the same distillery.)

—BarrelProof (talk) 18:22, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

What is the inclusion criteria? Aren't all distilleries techincally historical distilleries? It really needs an inclusion criteria to be useful otherwise it's just what people want to put here. Canterbury Tail talk 19:15, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

That's a pretty tough question. As a start, I would suggest that if the distillery is in Ireland or Scotland, it should have a founding date before about 150 years ago to be considered historic. Even with that threshold, there could probably be a pretty long list. In the United States and Canada, I'd say it needs to be at least 60 years old. There was so much disruption in the U.S. market between about 1910 (or even earlier, due to the Prohibition movement – 1910 is when the Jack Daniel's distillery became illegal to operate) and 1945 (when whisky production was allowed to resume after World War II) that there are very few older than 1910 that we would know much about, and the history of the market basically had to start over from scratch (and the history of Canadian whisky was strongly affected by its relationship to the U.S. market, so the same timeframe applies). In Japan, of course, there are only a few whisky distilleries – about 9 currently operating and perhaps only two of those are more than 60 years old (Yamazaki and Yoichi, founded in 1923 and 1934), and I suggest including only those two, at least for now. In most other countries, I think 60 years would also be a reasonable cutoff; I don't think we should include something opened just a few years ago simply because it's the one of the first distilleries that have existed in a particular country or is one of the oldest that have remained in operation there. —BarrelProof (talk) 20:33, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

I think I will move this to List of historic whisky distilleries, since I think the list would be too confusing if it included non-whisky distilleries. —BarrelProof (talk) 05:25, 24 September 2019 (UTC)