J HAIG & CO Haig Dimple 1890

Dimple Haig, or Dimple Pinch, first came to market in 1893 at a time when demand for blended Scotch whisky was expanding in all directions. The Haig family and their network of cousins dominated the industrial Lowland whisky scene and were supremely well-placed to surf the boom.

John Haig & Co was a founding partner in the Distillers Company Ltd and became fully absorbed into DCL in 1919, though it operated as a more-or-less separate company.

It was two of John Haig’s sons – Alicius and Hugh Vietch – that established Haig & Haig in 1888 as an export business, overseeing the sale of the company’s whiskies in the US. The brothers’ work in the lead-up to Prohibition established the popularity of Dimple in the US.

By 1939 the combination of the Dimple and Gold Label brand extensions made Haig the top-selling Scotch in the UK, while Dimple Pinch had recovered its pre-Prohibition sales in the States.

While the brand disappeared in the UK (until the advent of Haig Club), Dimple was stilling selling over a million cases by the millennium when its key markets were South Korea, Germany, Greece and the US.

In popular culture, Dimple was the preferred whisky of high school science teacher-turned drug lord Walter White, in AMC’s TV series Breaking Bad, which ran for five years from 2008.