Crown Royal is the top-selling Canadian whisky in the United States, but Americans tend to not know a ton about it.
I recently spent a few days with the brand at its distillery in Gimli, on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, Manitoba drinking whisky, checking out the distillery, and learning a bit more about the brand.
Want to learn more yourself? Here are 10 pieces of trivia worth knowing about the brand:
1) Crown Royal was originally introduced in 1939 by Seagrams as a tribute to the royal visit of King George VI and his wife Queen Elizabeth.
2) Crown Royal was only available in Canada until 1964.
3) Crown Royal’s Gimli distillery was opened in 1968 as Calvert of Canada, a division of Seagrams.
4) The distillery grounds operated as a winery for Danforth Estates from 1974 to 1977.
5) Crown Royal started being distilled and aged on the grounds in 1991.
6) The company’s Gimli distillery currently employs roughly 76 employees across distillation, maturation, blending, and bulk shipping.
7) Crown Royal uses 300 metric tonnes of grain each day to make whisky, 80% of which is obtained from Manitoba.
8) The distillery has 50 barrel warehouses on site, which hold a total of 1.65 million barrels.
9) The distillery uses Canadian corn and malt from a local maltster in Winnipeg.
10) The Gimli distillery runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and is the only place in the world where Crown Royal is made.