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Fellow Drammers!
On Saturday May 9th starting at Noon Pacific / 3pm EST in the US (and 20:00 in Scotland), you’re invited to join us for a very special tasting of extremely rare Glen Scotia whiskies. The timing is not a coincidence — one of our favorite times of year is fast approaching — the Campbeltown Malts Festival! Every May, a group of us Drammers make the journey to Campbeltown to celebrate with our friends at the Glen Scotia Distillery (among others!), and we come back with a treasure trove of exclusive bottles that you can only try if you visit the festival in person……or join this online tasting!
And our guest speaker for this event is especially exciting — Loch Lomond’s Master Blender Michael Henry. He is responsible for overseeing the entire Loch Lomond portfolio, including their Glen Scotia and Loch Lomond distilleries, and he teaches masterclasses each year at the festival. This will be our first chance to welcome him to a Drammers event, and we couldn’t be more excited. Michael has been with Loch Lomond group for over years, and started his career initially at the Bushmills distillery before working in the beer world for many years. He has been at the blending helm as Glen Scotia has risen to be one of the most awarded distilleries in Scotland, and has created some especially innovative releases like the Victoriana release, which we’ll get into at this event. For this event, we wanted to take this opportunity to pick Michael’s brain and also try some of these rare Glen Scotia bottlings that we’ve been sitting on since the 2025 festival. Check out this lineup, 10 expressions total — and we can confidently say, you will almost certainly never get another chance to try any of these:
2025 Campbeltown Malts Festival - Glen Scotia Dinner Bottling 2025. Each year, the festival hosts a kickoff dinner, which sells out instantly and only 100ish people are able to attend. A special single cask is selected for the dinner, and everyone goes home with a bottle. We save our bottles to share with you for our annual online Glen Scotia event! The 2025 bottling was a 10yo, 1st Fill Oloroso Hogshead, distilled 2014, bottled 2025. Cask #23/374-9. 55.7% abv.
2025 Campbeltown Malts Festival - Glen Scotia Distillery Exclusive Bottling. Similarly, they also release a single cask that is only available at the distillery the morning of Glen Scotia’s big festival day (this year it’s Wednesday, May 20th). The 2025 distillery exclusive bottling was a 15yo, Rechar Hogshead single cask. Yield: 275 bottles. 53.8% abv. Note: This is not to be confused with the larger commercial release (Glen Scotia also puts out an annual bottling for the festival which is available worldwide, which is lovely, but different and far less limited).
Glen Scotia - Archives 22yo 1st Fill Oloroso Hogshead Cask 21/177-1, 54.1% abv, 1 of 30 bottles. One of the first things we do when we arrive to Campbeltown is race to the gift shop to see what special goodies they’ve put out in honor of the festival. In 2025, they released ONLY 30 BOTTLES of this special “Archive” bottling. Naturally we snapped up two of them for this tasting. :)
Glen Scotia - Archives 11yo Double Cask Sherry Finish. 1 of 24 bottles. 54.2% abv. This was the other Archives bottle they rolled out last year, and even more limited in quantity.
Distillery Exclusive Cask - 20/329-15 11yo Refill Demerara Rum Finish. Distilled 2013, bottled 2024. Cask #20/329-15. Yield: 243 bottles. They had a few other special distillery-exclusive releases on hand, that we couldn’t pass up.
Exclusive Cask 24/1074-56 (11yo, First Fill Bourbon / Bordeaux Red Wine / Refill US oak). Distilled 2013, bottled 2025. Cask #24/1074-56. Yield: 299 bottles. 58.4% abv.
Exclusive Cask - 24/68-6, 1st Fill Bourbon / then 1st Fill Oloroso Hogshead. 9yo, yield: 154 bottles. Distilled 2015, bottled 2025. 53.6% abv
Glen Scotia 18yo - unlike the ones above, these last three are available in stores, but that makes them no less exciting!
Glen Scotia Victoriana - arguably Michael’s biggest accomplishment yet in his esteemed career. We’ll get into the remarkable innovations that went into this bottling at the event.
Glen Scotia 10yo - We’ll use this as a welcome dram as we’re introducing everyone at the beginning of the call!
We hope you can join us! The event will take place over Zoom (Zoom Link / Meeting ID: 818 5999 6248 / Passcode: 050926). Please let us know if you have any questions.
Cheers,
Drammers Club