On Friday we launched our first ever Local Edition – a bottling that is exclusively available to buy in Campbeltown – hence the Local Edition name.

For our first Local Edition we actually managed to bottle a local whisky as well! (Well technically more than one as it is a 7yo Campbeltown blended malt so it contains more than one whisky from Campbeltown – and I can assure you it does, I just can’t tell you the percentages!)

For this release we only bottled 66 bottles from the cask. 66 bottles really isn’t enough to share out round all our markets though so we decided to do it as a local edition that will only be available from Halls (by the bottle) and the Ardshiel Hotel (by the bottle and the dram).

Why only 66 you might ask? Well, it’s nothing to do with the newly launched Kintyre 66, that’s just pure coincidence. The actual reason is that we have just bottled a cask of 16yo Jamaican Rum from Clarendon Estate and the cask was way too good not to use for re-racking. Looking at the casks we own we thought that the hogshead of Campbeltown malt we had would be an ideal candidate for being finished in a rum cask. The thinking being that the funky Campbeltown whisky style would go quite well with the funky Jamaican rum. Then comes the tricky bit! The Jamaican rum was in a barrel and you can’t fit a hoggie into a barrel! So, end result, we’ve bottled off 66 bottles of the Campbeltown malt as is and we’ll bottle the Jamaican rum finished one at some point in the future.

We had intended at one point to bottle the whole of the 7yo Campbeltown cask as a local edition but bottling a whole cask for people coming to Campbeltown during the Covid times didn’t seem like a sensible option so this gives us the best of both worlds – we get to bottle some whisky we really like – and we also get to see how the rum cask will influence it! We’ll hang on to a bit of stock ourselves though (as well as a bit of the rum) so that we can do a Rum, original Campbeltown malt and Jamaican Rum finished Campbeltown malt tasting one day.

We hope to see you all again soon in Campbeltown and to make sure you plan your journey in the best possible way make sure and check out Explore Campbeltown and download the Discover Campbeltown App on Apple or Android.