Crabbies

📍 Leith, Scotland
🔗 https://crabbiesgingerbeer.com/

Crabbie’s is a Scottish brand that was traditionally known for its green ginger wine and blended whiskies produced at John Crabbie & Co’s premises in the Leith area of Edinburgh, Scotland. The company has since changed its name and its business is unrelated to the original. The brands were bought by Halewood International Ltd and are presently best known for ginger beers manufactured at Halewood’s plant in Liverpool.

Crabbie traces its founding to 1801 when Miller Crabbie was a merchant in Edinburgh. The business was inherited by his son John Crabbie who went on to found John Crabbie & Co. In the mid-19th century, John Crabbie acquired a former porter brewery located between Yardheads and Great Junction Street in Edinburgh’s port of Leith. Over the ensuing years the premises were extended mainly to provide bonded warehouses for Crabbie’s whisky business. The company was also engaged in gin rectifying and the production of fruit-based cordials. Of these, Crabbie’s was best known for its green ginger wine which continued to be made in Leith until the 1980s when John Crabbie & Co was acquired by another Leith distiller and blender, Macdonald & Muir, and production of green ginger wine was transferred to Broxburn, West Lothian.