How a Poor Scottish Boy Created Johnnie Walker
The Johnnie Walker founder story begins with a 15-year-old Scottish boy who used his late father’s inheritance—£417 from the sale of the family farm—to open a tiny grocery shop in Kilmarnock, Scotland. John Walker was a teetotaller who never drank the whisky he blended, yet the John Walker Kilmarnock whisky he quietly perfected in a small back room would become the world’s best-selling Scotch whisky brand in history. He died a modest shopkeeper in 1857, never knowing that his son Alexander would invent the iconic square bottle and build a global luxury whisky empire, and that his own tea-blending skills [See More…]
