Blackmill Distillery®

Why is our distillery called Blackmill ?

According to legend, in the olden days, when Črnomelj was only a village with no name or a castle, there by the Lahinja River lived a wealthy but mean miller named Stonič. One day, a fairy from the Gorjanci Mountains, dressed up as a hunched-over old woman, visited him and asked him to give her a scoop of his white flour for her sick son. The stingy stonyhearted miller gave the stranger some stale black flour and laughed evilly: “Here you are, old woman. Take home this flour, white as snow.” The fairy went back to Gorjanci to bake some flatbread for her son but when she returned to the fairy castle, she saw that the mean miller had tricked her. She went back to the mill, threw the black flour into the hopper above the millstone, and cursed the miller and his mill with these words: “May your millstones forever and ever mill only black flour.”

Lo and behold, from now on the millstones of the mean miller Stonič ground each and every grain into black flour, even if the farmers had brought the finest wheat to the mill on the Lahinja River. The miller went broke and eventually died of sadness, and the village by the Lahinja became a town known as Črnomelj, which roughly translates as Blackmill, because only black flour came out of the mill that had been owned by the stingy miller.

Our distillery is on the right bank of the Lahinja near the old town centre.