In 1822, King George IV broke protocol – the first reigning monarch to visit Scotland in nearly two centuries, legitimizing Scottish whisky. In 1824, George Smith broke ranks by founding The Glenlivet legally, one of the first legal Highland distilleries after the Excise Act opened the market. And in 2026, a brand ambassador is breaking every assumption about what a whisky person looks like. Amber Beange doesn’t fit the image – which is precisely why she’s the one rewriting it.
“We don’t know exactly,” Amber Beange shrugs about the origins of The Glenlivet – the Speyside distillery she represents in Vietnam as brand ambassador. “Illegal distilleries didn’t keep records.”
That Pioneering Spirit
In August 1822, King George IV arrived in Scotland for a state visit. He asked to try a drop of the infamous Glenlivet whisky – an illegal dram which he drank anyway.
For all the mystery that shrouds its founding, George Smith’s move to take The Glenlivet to legal status in 1824 was a turning point. He didn’t care what the smugglers thought. He didn’t care that he was stepping out of line. He paid the taxes and distilled and sold openly. And, it turns out, his whisky was so good that people came to him instead of the smugglers.
That pioneering spirit – to live original – still guides the distillery today. It even guides Amber.
To Live Original Too
She left Scotland to come here on the kind of wild adventure George Smith would likely have approved of. He’d carried two flintlock pistols, a gift from the Laird of Aberlour, to protect himself and his distillery when the illegal distillers threatened to burn both down. He wasn’t afraid to show he meant business.
Right now, Amber’s holding one glass of The Glenlivet, as the audience settles in, in her masterclass, showing, in her own way, she means business too.
She remembers walking into the distillery visitor centre, where she’d started as a guide, age 18, one last time before flying out, seeing her teammates lined up and hugging them all. “Such a surreal moment,” she remembers. They had made her; now she was leaving to make The Glenlivet live somewhere else.
It still lives in her mind as well.
It’s The People
“Speyside looks like hills and mountains and winding roads, and villages where everyone knows everyone,” she smiles. “It smells like wet grass after it’s just rained, or dewy green forests.”
Naturally, she adds, “it tastes of whisky.” Even though whisky is, she admits, an acquired taste. “I hated whisky when I started drinking it,” she says flatly. Something shifted. But it wasn’t a single dram that changed her life – although she thinks she can change anyone else’s with the right one, like The Glenlivet 12 that’s honeyed and bright, with fruit and vanilla notes and a malty core.
For her, it was always the people. The team at the distillery would pull her into social gatherings, pour her something and talk her through it. Not lecturing – just sharing what they loved. It happened enough times, with enough people who genuinely cared, that eventually she got it. And she became a fan for life.
“So, when I look back at the start of my career in whisky, it’s not the drams that I remember,” she says. “It’s the people. The people helped shape my love for whisky.”
Breaking It All By Existing
She wanted to be a brand ambassador since she was 16. It meant seeing the world and talking about something she was passionate about. Every year she would watch the new ambassadors come into the distillery for training and tell the team: that’s gonna be me one day. She said it with such certainty that nobody questioned whether she meant it. “I manifested it, I guess,” she nods.
Whisky brands work a certain way. There’s a look – male and mature. There’s a voice – technical and almost robotic, designed to keep whisky elitist and inaccessible. And there’s an assumption about who belongs at the table and who doesn’t.
Amber walks into a room and breaks all of it by existing.
“I think so many people have this fixed idea of what a whisky drinker looks like,” she says. “And then I walk in, and everyone is shocked and surprised. I love that. It gives me an opportunity to change the narrative a little bit and challenge the assumptions about whisky.”
She is not trying to make whisky younger, she muses. She is trying to make it approachable. There’s a difference. One is marketing. The other is just honesty – the idea that if you enjoy it, it doesn’t matter how you drink it.
When she was working the distillery tours, people would ask her, again and again: “Do you actually drink whisky? Do you actually like whisky?” As if the answer weren’t obvious.
“I don’t know how I would answer that other than, ‘Yes, I drink whisky,'” she says.
Every Decision Echoes In How The Glenlivet Tastes Today
She made a challenge of the difficult questions. Ones about the distillery’s fermentation temperatures and copper still design. If she didn’t know, she’d find out from someone who did.
The Glenlivet’s signature smoothness and fruity character come from specific choices: slow distillation in their signature lantern-shaped stills, water from the springs that run through Speyside, and a deliberate approach to what gets kept and what gets discarded during distillation. She learned the history of the valley because it was written into the product itself – every decision George Smith made in 1824 still echoes in how the whisky tastes today.
For example, when distilling whisky, you end up with three layers: harsh stuff at the start, clean liquid in the middle, and heavy oily stuff at the end. Most distilleries keep the middle and some of the edges. The Glenlivet keeps only the cleanest middle 18 to 20 per cent and the rest is repurposed. By the mid 1800s, that ruthlessness had produced something the distillery was noted for — a spirit with pineapple notes, that was bright and floral, a style that broke decisively with the heavier, dense spirits the smugglers had been making. The more she understood the craft, the easier it became to explain why the details mattered.
The Commitment To Doing Things Properly
A few years in, someone posted a YouTube video of her entire tour online. She watched it back and heard herself reciting technical specs like a robot – “barley, water, yeast” strung together with no life behind it. She was humbled completely.
But humility is a great teacher. What changed wasn’t confidence in herself – it was understanding The Glenlivet’s actual story. George Smith’s decision to go legal when everyone else smuggled. The choice to make something smooth and fruity when other distilleries were harsh. The commitment to doing things properly: the water, the stills and what gets kept and what gets recycled. Once she understood that history – the real decisions behind the product – she didn’t have to perform technical specs. The brand did the talking for her. She just had to know it.
When she decided to move to Vietnam a little over a year ago, she was nervous. Speyside is the only place she’d ever lived. But leaving that and flying to Southeast Asia showed she was serious about stepping out of her comfort zone. George Smith did it in 1824. And she did it too.
Helping The Curious Access The Glenvliet Brand
‘Live Original’ became her actual philosophy, not just a slogan. She says it when she breaks things or when things go sideways – a shorthand for the decision to move toward discomfort instead of away from it.
But mostly, her default setting is sincerity. And that goes for helping the curious here access the brand. The Glenlivet’s signature smoothness and fruitiness make the older expressions – the 15 Year Old, the 18 Year Old – shine neat.
Sipped alone, they reveal depth. There’s dried fruit, warm spice and complexity. But the younger expressions, the Founder’s Reserve and the 12 Year Old mix well. A Whisky Sour is approachable, she reckons. A Highball is easy. She’d even, personally, add ginger ale, lemonade or even cola.
Like George Smith, who didn’t care what the smugglers thought, she doesn’t care what the gatekeepers think. “As long as you’re enjoying it, that’s what matters,” she decides. And you can picture the founder nodding along.
Drink responsibly.
