Feb. 2: Littlemill + Glen Scotia Tasting with Master Distiller Iain McAllister...

On February 2nd, starting at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern, we're hosting a major online tasting of rare releases from the closed lowlands Littlemill Distillery, plus rare bottles of Glen Scotia Campbeltown Single Malt Scotch. Here’s the short version of what the event will feature:

• Glen Scotia's Master Distiller Iain McAllister as our guest speaker

• A tasting of several rare Glen Scotia bottlings, including our two new barrel picks, which we're honored to say are 2 of only 4 Glen Scotia private barrels to come to the US in several years

• Gary Mills from the Loch Lomond Group will also be joining us from Scotland as a guest speaker. He is their brand ambassador and one of the last leading authorities on the Littlemill Distillery, that closed in 1994

• Two old dusty official Littlemill releases -- a 17yo and a 8yo (see pictures below), and

• Perhaps biggest of all, we're proud to announce that at this event we'll be tasting Drammers Pick #63 -- the Littlemill Private Cellar Reserve official bottling, aged 27 years. To date, it has only been available in the mid-$3k to mid-$4k per bottle range, and only 50 bottles remain. We've worked out a special opportunity so that our members (and onlyour members) can get one of them for significantly less.

Whew, that's a lot to unpack -- hard to believe we're able to squeeze it all into one event! More details below, and we hope you can join us.

Cheers,
Drammers Club

Ok, let's dig into that a little bit -- for the Glen Scotia part of the event, we're honored to welcome back Iain McAllister, the Master Distiller of Glen Scotia, and someone we're very fortunate and grateful to call a dear friend of the club. Having Iain join us alone would normally be one of the highlights of our year, and we've had the privilege of welcoming Iain as a guest speaker a few times in the past, where, among other things, he and the team at Loch Lomond honored us by letting us choose two private barrels of their whisky for our club -- two of only 4 private barrels they've allowed out (in the US at least) in the last few years. And as humbled as we were then, that's all doubly-exciting now that the distillery was just named Distillery of the Year by the Scotch Whisky Association! We'll have the bottles from these barrel picks (one peated and one unpeated) in hand this Thursday, so this event was designed in part as a party to celebrate their arrival. Of course, while we're at it, we threw in 5 other Glen Scotias to taste along side them.

So we'll be tasting 7 Glen Scotia expressions in all, including the 2020 Campbeltown Malts Festival Limited Edition bottling (and a group of us will be going to that festival in May -- see details at the bottom of this email if you're interested in joining. Also included is a special distillery-only single cask that Iain McAllister generously gave us when we visited his distillery in August, plus an unreleased heavily peated Glen Scotia that we had left over from our event with him last year, plus two bottles generously donated by Forbes and the team at Loch Lomond -- another distillery exclusive single cask, released in October of 2017, and a fun old 17yo dusty official GS bottling (plus of course our 2 Drammers Exclusive Glen Scotia barrel picks).

As for the Littlemill piece of the event. This is a separate event that we've been working on for a long time now. In April of 2019, Loch Lomond announced the startling newsthat new historical evidence had been found that strongly supported the claim that Loch Lomond was the first licensed distillery. Specifically, it said that:

"new evidence has come to light following the discovery of the local Justice of the Peace’s records for Dumbarton, dated 2 November 1773, which state that ‘Robert Muir of Littlemiln’ was granted the first ever license by the Government of King George III to “retail ale, beer and other excisable Liquors.” Additionally, in 1772 accommodation was built next door to the distillery to house the Excise officers who represented the King – and ensured any distillation was duly recorded and the relevant taxes calculated and paid."

That's obviously a big deal, so a few days later we reached out to Loch Lomond to ask if we might do a Littlemill event celebrating this exciting news. Everyone was interested, but the issue was how would we get enough samples to make it doable -- Littlemill is very hard to come by, and what does exist is often very expensive. One member very generously offered two rare bottles from their private collection, which we'll be tasting on Feb. 2nd (a 17 year old expression and an 8 year old, both distillery bottlings). So, obviously that's an exciting start, but that only got us to two pours. We needed a headliner for what at the time was being planned as a stand-alone event. Even a single bottle would seem to be beyond our budget for an event, so what to do? That stumped us for a while, but over a year and a half later, we conceived of combining this with the Glen Scotia barrel arrival party for one epic tasting (Loch Lomond is the parent company for both). Then, all we needed was a headliner. Which brings us to our next bit of excitement.…

Drammers Pick #63 - Littlemill Lowlands Single Malt Scotch
Private Cellar Reserve, Aged 27 Years

There are only 50 bottles of this left (out of an initial 500), and obviously it's not a "barrel pick" in any conventional sense, (it has been available in the US for a bit now, often retailing in the mid-three to mid-four thousand dollars per bottle range). But when, as part of our exploration of how to set up a Littlemill event, we were given the opportunity to secure a special offer that our members (and only our members) would have an opportunity to buy one of these last 50 bottles at a lower price than had ever been offered in the US before, we jumped at it -- $2,899/bottle + tax. Obviously it's a big jump up in price from any other Drammers Picks we've done, but then again with a quick search online you'll be able to easily confirm that most who are selling it are selling it for literally thousands of dollars more per bottle. It comes in the case you see above, including a mini sample of the liquid and a commemorative piece of cask from one of the barrels they used to make it.

So that'll be our headliner for one seriously epic event. In total, we'll taste 7 expressions of Glen Scotia with Iain McAllister, plus 3 expressions of Littlemill with Gary. And we're incredibly grateful that they've agreed to join us at what will be starting at 1am their time (so we'll try to not go too crazy on the length of the event, or at least their portion of it). The event is priced (at cost) at $175/person for Drammers Members, and $200/person for Drammers Observers.

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