Crown Royal

Crown Royal is a blended Canadian whisky, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. The brand is currently owned by Diageo, who purchased it when the Seagram portfolio was dissolved in the year 2000.It is the top-selling Canadian whisky in the United States

History of Crown Royal

The reigning monarch King George VI, afflicted with a deeply painful root canal, asked his wife Queen Elizabeth to devise an elixir to sooth his recently placed crown. She tasked Samuel Bronfman, President of the Seagram Company, with the creation of a quality elixir to be packaged in a crown-shaped bottle and dressed in a distinctive royal purple bag to be presented to the king. Like the packaging, the name chosen for the product was intended to reflect the quality of the spirit and as a play on words for its original intended use, a marketing concept that quickly caught consumer attention. It was available only in Canada until 1964.

Today, Crown Royal is produced solely at the Crown Royal distillery at Gimli, on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. It was also produced in Waterloo, Ontario until the plant there closed in 1992. Daily production of Crown Royal uses 10,000 bushels of grain and requires 750,000 imperial gallons (3,400,000 L; 900,000 US gal) of water. The whisky produced at the Manitoba distillery is stored in 2 million barrels, stored in 46 warehouses, over 5 acres of land. The whisky is then blended and bottled in Amherstburg, Ontario.

2006 sales of Crown Royal amounted to over US $500M.

In January, 2007, production of Crown Royal was nearly interrupted as a result of a labour dispute at the Gimli distillery. Fifty-two of the 53 workers at the Manitoba distillery, members of United Food and Commercial Workers Canada Local 200D, voted on January 23 to strike as soon as February 1. However, subsequent negotiations resulted in approval by nearly 75 percent of the workers, the night before the strike deadline, of a new three-year contract.