The Pot Still on Hope Street, a few blocks up from Central Station, is one of the finest whisky bars in the world and a beloved Glasgow institution — a family-run pub whose gantry carries well over a thousand bottles, and whose staff pride themselves on finding every customer their perfect dram. It has been a pub since 1867, though it has not always borne this name; its transformation into a temple of whisky is a more recent chapter in a long and continuous history of Glasgow drinking on the same spot.
A Pub Since 1867
The Hope Street premises has always been a pub, under a succession of names and families. The first recorded tenant was John Hill, a wine and spirits merchant, in 1867; the McCall family became the first owners in 1886, when it traded as McCall’s Bar, and several generations of McCalls ran it into the early 1960s. Tennent Caledonian Breweries then took over, refurbished the pub, and added the back lounge in 1971. The bar was run by Tennent’s managers until 1981 — a century of continuous trade before its most famous era even began.
The Whisky Bar Is Born
The Pot Still name, and the pub’s identity as a whisky bar, arrived in 1981, when the Waterstone family took over — father-and-son team John and Paul — and started the whisky collection with over 300 bottles on the gantry. The Storrie family, who followed, increased the stock past 500 and won a string of national whisky-bar awards through the early 2000s, cementing the Pot Still’s worldwide reputation as the whisky bar to visit in Glasgow. Since 2003 it has been in the hands of the Murphy family, who have carried the tradition on — and past a thousand bottles — winning whisky-bar-of-the-year honours repeatedly and surviving the pandemic to keep pouring.
Glasgow’s Finest Interior
The pub the whisky sits in is a treasure in its own right. Described by CAMRA as ‘Glasgow’s finest pub interior’, the Pot Still occupies the ground floor of a three-storey tenement built in 1860 and handsomely remodelled in 1892–3 — a warm, wood-panelled, gantry-dominated Victorian room that feels exactly as a great whisky bar should. Its homemade pies are nearly as celebrated as its drams; together they make it a pub as comfortable as it is serious, which is the Glasgow ideal.
The Pilgrims’ Bar
The Pot Still’s reputation now draws whisky pilgrims from across the world, who work their way through a gantry of well over a thousand bottles under the guidance of staff whose knowledge is part of the institution — the sort of place where a customer asks for ‘just one’ and stays for the afternoon. The whisky is famously well chosen and fairly priced, the rarities kept alongside the everyday drams rather than locked away; and the pub’s home-made pies and toasties have become nearly as celebrated as its whisky, filling the warm, wood-panelled room with the smell of proper pub food. It is a working local and a global destination at the same time, and manages, remarkably, to feel like neither a tourist trap nor a museum — just a very good Glasgow pub that happens to keep the finest whisky collection in the city.
The Dram Capital
The Pot Still’s achievement is to have become world-famous without ceasing to be a proper Glasgow pub. Whisky pilgrims travel from across the globe to work their way through its gantry, guided by staff whose knowledge is part of the institution; and yet it remains a family-run local on Hope Street, unpretentious and welcoming, where the point of a thousand whiskies is not to show off but to share. It earns its place in this chapter as the great whisky bar of a city that helped teach the world to drink the stuff — the dram capital of Glasgow, on the same corner since 1867.