The Largest Distillery in the British Empire?

What do you do with the following description: "The largest distillery in the British Empire"? I don't know about other people, but I turn it over in mind. It's an historical description, of course, since everyone except Lyndon LaRouche knows that the British Empire is a thing of the past. Still, distilling more whiskey and spirits than anybody else in that 19th-century world-spanning polity, the one-fifth of the globe that was pink, would have been a fairly impressive activity, if that's what the phrase means. I heard it used more than once to describe The Distillery district in downtown Toronto, a pedestrian-only mainly retail redevelopment of a massive former distillery.

Is it accurate? I didn't hear how being the largest was measured, but I did find out that by 1871, the Gooderham & Worts Distillery, which is what the establishment used to be called -- at other times it was Worts & Gooderham, apparently -- was producing 2.1 million gallons annually, and throughout the decade of the 1870s exported a million gallons a year to other parts of the Empire and the world. High Victorians, indeed.

Or maybe "largest" was measured in physical size. The site has 44 buildings totaling over 300,000 square feet on 13 acres. We arrived for a look at the complex late in the afternoon last Wednesday, just in time for a serious rainstorm, which added a touch of noir atmosphere to the brick streets and looming brick structures. But from under an umbrella, it was a little hard to appreciate their style, which I've read is called industrial Gothic. Impressively solid, I'd say. Something important was made here, the otherwise mute bricks say: Whiskey to get through those long Canadian winters, and to put Canada on the map among the whiskey-drinking nations of the Empire.

Either there's a serious monograph out there somewhere that quantifies how Gooderham & Worts was the "largest distillery in the British Empire," or that's the claim of a Victorian copywriter handed down through the decades unquestioned. Either way, Google the phrase in our time, and you'll see that it's still repeated often.

No whiskey has been made at the Distillery since 1990, but between then and the time it became a retail property in the mid 2000s, a number of movies were made there, more than 800. Famously (infamously, in Chicago), Chicago was filmed in Toronto, at the former Gooderham & Worts Distillery.

These days, no chain stores are allowed to lease space at the Distillery, so we visited some one-of-a-kinds, such as a clothing store named after Galileo and a coffee shop named after Balzac. I didn't quite understand the reasoning behind the choice of Galileo, but I do remember that Balzac's coffee-drinking marathons are part of literary lore.

Much, much more about the history and architecture of the place is here.