The founder "Long-legged John" McDonald was a tall, proud fellow. Perhaps because of this, in 1825, he was chosen by the Lochaber chieftain to build a legal distillery near Fort William at age 27. Initially the distillery produced only 200 gallons per week, but its reputation spread far and wide, even reaching Buckingham Palace. In 1848, Buckingham Palace acquired a cask to be opened at the 21st birthday celebration of the Prince of Wales. After the "old gentleman" passed away, the distillery passed to his son Donald Peter McDonald. Though not as flamboyant as his father, Peter laid a solid foundation for the distillery's future success. Peter expanded and renovated the distillery, with several buildings still standing today. By 1864, the distillery's whisky output was 10.5 times that of his father's era. In 1877, the distillery employed 51 workers and marketed its product as "Long John McDonald's Finest - Ben Nevis Pure Highland Malt Whisky." The following year, he designed and built another larger "model distillery" at the mouth of the River Nevis, operating in conjunction with its sister distillery. Ben Nevis Distillery boasted "the largest single malt still in northern Scotland" (the malt floor was so spacious it could easily accommodate 3,000 people), a huge carpenter's shop, an entire street of "workers' cottages," and a "warehouse and shop" connected to the distillery's private harbor and dock. The distillery employed a total of 200 workers. Peter McDonald died in 1891, and the business was passed to his son, but the "whisky boom" soon became a bubble. Ben Nevis Distillery ceased production in 1908 and never reopened. However, the distillery's warehouse was not demolished until the mid-1990s, when it was converted into refugee housing. The distillery continued to operate intermittently. It was sold in 1941 to Canadian entrepreneur Joseph Hobbs, who spent £20,000 on it and, on the same day, sold the distillery's stock to Train & McIntyre for the same price! He only resumed production in 1955, installing a continuous still beside the pot still, concrete fermentation tanks, and a new malt handling system. Production continued until 1978. In 1981, Hobbs' son sold it to Long John International, the spirits division of Whitbread plc. Whitbread modernized the distillery, completing the work in 1984. With the whisky trade in decline in the late 1980s, Long John was forced to sell in 1989, and Whitbread itself was taken over by Allied Lyons the same year, merging into Allied Distillers. The distillery's new owner was Nikka Whisky Distilling Company, founded by Masataka Taketsuru, who had the honorific "Father of Japanese Whisky" and had trained in Scotland after World War I.

"Long-legged John" McDonald of Ben Nevis was a man of action. Legend has it he once fought off a band of excise men attempting to raid his private still using only a sturdy shillelagh, earning their lasting respect for his defense of "legitimate distilling." Between 1884 and 1885, while Ben Nevis's two distilleries combined produced 260,000 gallons, Macallan made only about 40,000 gallons, Glen Grant 140,000, and The Glenlivet fewer than 200,000. By 1889, one newspaper declared Ben Nevis "nearly double the size of its nearest competitor." During Prohibition, Joseph Hobbs made a fortune smuggling Scotch from Canada to the United States. One of his main clients was Teacher's, for whom he shipped 137,927 cases of "Highland Cream" to San Francisco via Antwerp aboard the repurposed Canadian warship HMCS Stadacona. His other vessel, the SS Ocean Mist, is now a permanently moored floating restaurant in Leith (see also Glenlochy). Shortly after WWII, Hobbs purchased Inverlochy Castle from Lord Abinger, initially intending to convert the dilapidated former military barracks into a distillery. Lord Abinger's wife was Marguerite Steinheil, former mistress of French President Félix Faure, who died in her arms in 1899. In 1908, she was embroiled in a more sordid scandal—found tied to a bed (not very securely) next to her strangled husband and asphyxiated mother-in-law. Acquitted of all charges, she married Lord Abinger in 1917 and lived, as John Julius Norwich wrote in The Times (January 2014), "an irreproachable life" thereafter. Inverlochy Castle is now one of Scotland's finest hotels. Hobbs pioneered the "new blend" technique, marrying malt and grain whiskies before maturation. When asked which malt he used, his reply was reportedly: "Oh, whatever's handy!" By the 1950s, Dew of Ben Nevis had become a budget blend. For all these fascinating tales, the distillery itself was long neglected. Whisky Magazine described it as "a decaying West Highland tractor of a place."