The Brora distillery was built in 1819 by the Marquess of Stafford - the future first Duke of Sutherland, the same family whose monument crowns Ben Bhraggie above Golspie. He named it Clynelish. It produced Highland single malt for decades through a succession of owners. George Lawson and his sons took over in 1846. In 1896 they sold to Glasgow blender James Ainslie and his partner John Risk. In 1912 the Distillers Company joined Risk, and by 1925 they had taken full control. Through all those changes, the original Clynelish kept its name and its still-house intact, quietly making spirit beside the railway line that ran north up the Sutherland coast.

In 1967 the Distillers Company built a brand-new and larger Clynelish distillery just next door to the old one. When the new distillery opened in 1968, the original Clynelish was renamed Brora and the new building took over the Clynelish name. The two distilleries ran side by side as Clynelish A and Clynelish B for a while, until the new still-house had been properly bedded in. The name switch is one of the small confusions of whisky history: Brora the distillery is the original Clynelish, and Clynelish the distillery is the newer one. The whisky world has never entirely forgiven the marketing department for this.

Between May 1969 and July 1973, Brora produced a heavily peated whisky - much heavier than its usual lightly-peated Highland style. The reason was prosaic: a drought on Islay had cut supplies of peated spirit available to blenders, particularly Johnnie Walker. Brora was conscripted to fill the gap with phenol levels around 30 to 35 parts per million, comparable to Caol Ila and only slightly below Lagavulin. After 1973, Brora returned to its more delicate Highland style. But those few years of heavy peat created the casks that would become the most prized Brora releases - smoky, oily, and instantly recognisable when poured.

Brora was closed in 1983 during a broad rationalisation across the Scotch whisky industry. The casks went into warehouse, and as the years passed the closed bottlings drifted upward in price and reputation. In 2014 Diageo released a 1972 Brora 40-year-old at a retail price of £7,000 - at the time, the most expensive single malt they had ever released. By the time of the bicentenary bottling in 2019, Brora had become one of the most desired ghost distilleries in the world, casually changing hands at thousands of pounds per bottle. In October 2017, Diageo announced a reopening. Production resumed in 2021, and on 19 May that year the first new cask of spirit was filled - a moment captured in industry photographs that show the polished new stills throwing reflections across the still-house floor for the first time in nearly four decades.