WRAPPING UP 2024 AT SPRINGBANK

As 2024 comes to an end, we would like to wish our friends a Happy New Year and give an update on what’s been happening at the distilleries this year, what the team has been up to, and what to look forward to next year.

LIMITED RELEASES

During the second half of 2024, there were a number of limited releases from our distillery. One batch, released in August, included our Springbank 18yo and Springbank 21yo. Our November batch included the Springbank 10yo Amontillado, Springbank 12yo Cask Strength, and Longrow 18yo.

Following into the new year, the next batch in February will include our Springbank 8yo Local Barley, Springbank 30yo, and Longrow 100 PROOF. These whiskies will be available to purchase through the usual retail channels.

COUNTDOWN COLLECTION

The third edition of our five-part Countdown Collection series, designed to commemorate Springbank’s journey towards its 200th anniversary, is set to be released early next year. This upcoming bottling will be a 30 Year Old Springbank matured in bourbon and sherry casks.

As with each edition in this series, it will be limited to just 500 bottles and available to purchase by Springbank fans all across the world. Stay tuned to our socials to find out more about this release…

With each Countdown Collection release, a prize draw will be conducted the following year for purchasers who have returned their prize draw stub from their certificate. We recently announced that the top prize in our upcoming prize draw for those who purchased the 2024 Countdown Collection 26yo bottling will again be a week on our whisky school.

See more information on this announcement and the runners up prizes here.

All those who have stored their bottle at the Distillery Shop in Campbeltown for collection will be automatically entered into this prize draw. The winners will be announced early next year!

SOCIETY BOTTLINGS

In October, we released the second Springbank Society bottling of the year, a Springbank 5yo 100 PROOF fully matured in Oloroso Sherry casks and bottled at 57.1% as a 70cl. This whisky was bottled for the Society to showcase the stark contrast in flavours when compared to the previous Springbank 5yo 100 PROOF fully matured in Bourbon casks, released in early 2023.

The upcoming Society bottling will be released early next year, so stay tuned!

TASTING PACKS

After great feedback, we have continued to make tasting packs which include a variety of the harder-to-obtain whiskies from our releases. Our second tasting pack release was sold in Summer 2024 and included samples from our February and June 2024 releases.

To accompany this, our Sales Team hosted an online tasting to guide viewers through the drams and answer any questions they had. Catch the replay on our Facebook or YouTube Channel.

Earlier this month, we launched our most recent tasting pack sets which were offered to Society members first before the general public sale.

The lineup for these tasting packs:

Springbank 18 Year Old 46% (2024) – 2cl

Springbank 21 Year Old 46% (2024) – 2cl

Kilkerran 16 Years 46% (2024) – 2cl

Springbank Amontillado Cask Matured 55% (2024) – 2cl

Springbank 12 Years Cask Strength 56.2% (2024) – 2cl

Longrow 18 Year Old 46% (2024) – 2cl

The next online tasting for this tasting pack release will be held on Thursday, 30th January 2025 at 7pm (GMT). Catch it live or on replay via our Facebook, Instagram and YouTube Channel.

We hope you can join us! 🥃

PRODUCTION TEAM’S DISTILLERY UPDATE

– Findlay Ross, Director of Production

As another year draws to a close, we are left asking ourselves how the year has passed by so quickly? I’m reliably told ‘it’s an age thing’ but it truly doesn’t seem like 11 months ago we fired everything back up at Springbank following our Christmas holidays, and it certainly doesn’t feel like we should be in our last week of production at Glengyle as I write this!

As always we have had our usual split of 34 weeks of production at Springbank followed up with 12 weeks of production at Glengyle, and this has been one of the smoothest years in recent memory in terms of minimal disruption due to equipment issues or all the usual gremlins that come with operating a 196 year old distillery. We have put a real focus on preventative maintenance and expanding the range of servicing and auditing that takes place on site in recent years, and we feel like this has contributed greatly to making sure old pieces of equipment are flagged up and repaired or replaced before we get to the catastrophic failure stage.

Summer temperatures remained much closer to historical spring and autumn temperatures, which really aided in the maltings – allowing us to keep temperatures in that 16-20 degrees celsius range which is optimal for producing well modified malt. it is probably the only positive thing I can think of about the ‘summer’ we were handed in Scotland this year!

In terms of spirit output, we have fallen slightly below our target of 264,000 LPA at Springbank as we filled 252,000 LPA into casks. One of the contributing factors to this was the fact we received much more barley from our local farmers this year which allowed us to do 3 weeks of local barley production rather than 1, where the malt only yielded an average 369 LPA/T. The plus side is we will have more local barley to work with in future years, something which I know will be well received by almost everyone.

As things stand we have produced around 81,000 LPA at Glengyle with 2 fillings left to go for the year – a smaller week of highly peated Kilkerran to allow us for one week of our triple distilled expression. Glengyle has had an eventful year as we celebrated it’s 20th anniversary via multiple events, the highlight of which was undoubtably a black-tie dinner enjoyed with our suppliers and customers across the business, followed up the next evening with an unforgettable concert in which legendary Scottish band ‘Travis’ played to a raucous crowd of invited local and not so local guests.

We continue to progress and plan for the future in multiple ways, not least in developing and promoting staff, and we were delighted that long serving Production Supervisor Robert McGarrie accepted his promotion to the position of Assistant Production Manager where he will work closely supporting Production Manager Gavin McLachlan and the wider department.

Our future planning also included further progress on our new bottling and dispatch facility, with foundations poured and progress made on preparing the ground for the erection of the 3 separate areas that will make up the facility.

We look back at 2024 fondly and look forward to 2025 where we plan to improve the site further by upgrading the kiln burner at Springbank to one that can run on LPG and with a higher degree of modulation, as well as refurbishing all the stills at Springbank in September 2025, after many years of dedicated service have started to take their toll on them!

We hope you all have a great festive period and look forward to seeing you on site in 2025!

ONLINE SCOTCH WHISKY AWARDS

On Saturday, 2nd November, fifteen staff from various departments within our company met in the Washback Bar to tune in to this year’s Online Scotch Whisky Awards Ceremony.

Watch the live stream here. We are delighted to have won 1st place awards in following categories for 2024:

Best Value Whisky – Kilkerran 12yo
Best Blended Malt – Campbeltown Loch

Findlay Ross, our Director of Production, spoke to Roy and Ralfy on the live stream to accept both awards and thank them on behalf of J. & A. Mitchell. On another note, as we have previously won the Best Distillery Award three times in a row from 2021 to 2023, we are happy to receive our first Trifecta Award! All three award certificates are now proudly displayed on the wall of our Washback Bar at the Distillery.

MALTS FESTIVAL 2024

In May, we hosted our Springbank and Kilkerran Open Days as part of the 2024 Campbeltown Malts Festival and besides the poor weather, everyone had a great time!Relive the memories here with these two videos by our very own Bar Manager, David Wood, who documented the entire week on camera!

Watch here:

SPRINGBANK OPEN DAY 2024 – VIDEO

KILKERRAN OPEN DAY 2024 – VIDEO

The dates for our festival next year have already been set:  Monday 19th to Saturday 24th 2025.

Springbank Open Day – Thursday, 22nd May 2025
Kilkerran Open Day – Friday, 23rd May 2025

If you wish to be added to our mailing list for Springbank / Kilkerran / Cadenhead’s festival events, then please email festival@springbank.scot and you will be notified when further information is available.

We hope to see you there! 🥃

SOCIETY ‘ON TOUR’

During the second half of the year, we embarked on our Springbank Society European Tasting Tour from August to October. These 16 individual tastings across 11 different countries helped us bring the Society to our members and let attendees taste new & upcoming releases before anyone else in the world!

Andrew’s journey across Europe took him to meet Society members in:

Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, France, Norway, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Poland & Sweden. It was great to share these special drams with our most loyal fans, the Springbank Society members! Thanks to everyone who attended. We plan take the Society on more tasting tours in the future!

20TH ANNIVERSARY OF KILKERRAN

To round out this year’s celebrations for Kilkerran’s 20th Anniversary, we decided to host a number of special tastings in the UK, Taiwan, Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany to showcase everything that Kilkerran has to offer!

As a thank you, the majority of these tastings were hosted with retailers who have backed Kilkerran since the very beginning. Then on Friday, 15th November, we hosted a very special tasting in Campbeltown’s Town Hall and welcomed 120 guests from all over to taste Kilkerran whiskies from major milestones throughout the years, followed by a tasty buffet from Argyll Bakeries.

📸  Photo credit to John McFadyen (Website)

On the night, attendees entered the hall and were given an arrival dram of our flagship Kilkerran 12yo and then six pre-poured whiskies were waiting for them at their tables. Of the tasting lineup, one of the whiskies was our new Kilkerran 20yo Single Cask aged in Fresh Madeira for 10 years, then Refill Bourbon for 10 years.

Guests then noticed a small piece of card, with the word “RESERVE”, where they could write their name on the back and reserve a bottle before it went on sale exclusively in the Distillery Shop, the following morning.

📸  Photo credit to John McFadyen (Website)

We hope you have enjoyed celebrating Kilkerran’s 20th Anniversary as much as we have! Now it’s time to start planning for Springbank’s 200th Anniversary in 2028… 🎉

MERRY CHRISTMAS & A HAPPY NEW YEAR

From everyone at J&A Mitchell, we would like to thank you for your continued support this year. Whether that be drinking our whisky, travelling to our distillery, or simply telling a friend about us, we greatly appreciate it.

If you are planning a visit over the festive period, find our end-of-year opening hours on our Facebook and Instagram.

Finally, we all recently headed up to the Glengyle Distillery to pose for our annual Christmas Jumper Day photos! Have a fantastic time over the festive season and we hope to see you in 2025!

Sláinte Mhath 🥃

Springbank Distillery, 9 Bolgam Street, Campbeltown, Argyll, Scotland, PA28 6HZ