Springbank 25 Year Old Hunter Laing Kinship / Feis Ile 2018

To celebrate the completion of their Ardnahoe distillery on Islay in 2018, Hunter Laing released a second selection of six bottlings, following on from the original Kinship collection in 2017.

The 2018 Kinship collection was released exclusively to visitors of Islay's Feis Ile festival, and were available to buy at the Ardnahoe gift shop.

Feis Ile, also known as the Islay Festival of Music and Malt had humble beginnings. It traces it origins back to 1985 and the establishment of The Islay Festival Association after it was realised that an event celebrating Gaelic, music and culture would drive tourism to the island. The inaugural event was rtwo weeks of music, drama and workshops with ceilidhs, concerts and dances in the evening. The first whisky tasting took place as a festival event in 1990, and ten years later the island's distilleries began to be directly involved, organising their annual open days to coincide with it. Today it is one of the biggest events on the whisky calendar, annually drawing hundreds of revellers, and turning out an increasingly sought-after batch of limited edition whiskies like this.

The other five featured distilleries are Islay's Bowmore, Bunnahabhain and Laphroaig, and the islander's Jura and Highland Park. Casks were hand selected by Jim McEwan. This Springbank is one of 519 bottles drawn from a sherry butt.

Springbank distillery has been owned and operated by the Mitchell family in Campbeltown since 1837, and it one of Scotland's most revered distilleries. Following a brief mothballing between 1979 and 1987, upon the reopening the decision was taken to cease all sales to the blending industry and focus on its single malt sales. Today it is one of the only distilleries to malt, distil, bottle and mature whisky on the same site, and produces three distinct and highly prized single malts.