Join the SMWS Flavour Hunters
Whisky festival season is just around the corner, and the SMWS is taking our passion for flavour to the next level with our very own Flavour Hunter ‘festival within a festival’, teasing taste buds across Scotland and around the world.
Finally, whisky festival season is back – and to celebrate, The Scotch Malt Whisky Society is holding our very own Flavour Hunter festival to focus on whisky’s regions through a flavour lens, with events, tastings and celebrations both at home and with our family of international members.
We’ll be back in person at the Spirits of Speyside festival, the Campbeltown Malts Festival and of course over the sea at the Queen of the Hebrides for the Islay Festival, with exclusive bottlings from each of these regions. But we’ll also be celebrating both the Highland and Lowlands in May, with special festival ‘Rare Release’ single malts from those whisky regions.
It’s going to be a bumper month of in-person and online whisky adventures, and flavour hunters can take part wherever they are.
The Whisky
We wanted to make sure that as many of our members as possible – whether they are physically present at the festivals or not – could get to share the experience in their glasses, wherever you might be. With that in mind, we’re taking a different approach this year with our exclusive range of ‘Rare Releases’ festival bottlings, creating a series of six small batch single malts that we’ll be able to share in greater quantities across our global membership than we could ever hope to do with bottlings from a single cask.
All six whiskies are single malts from an individual distillery, bottled at their natural strength and across a range of flavour profiles. We’ve been able to work with a wide variety of cask types to nudge our recipes in the right direction as well, and these small batch single malts are great examples of how that variety of wood types also helps to give us an infinite number of flavours to play with.
Our Rare Release festival bottlings will be released throughout the month.
- Friday 29 April: Distillery 36 Speyside Rare Release
- Friday 6 May: Distillery 5 Lowland Rare Release
- Friday 13 May: Distillery 19 Highland Rare Release
- Friday 20 May: Distillery 93 Campbeltown Rare Release
- Friday 27 May: Distillery 3 Islay Rare Release/Distillery 53 Islay Rare Release