From John Campbell at Laphroaig;

I am aware I have not written to you for a while (I have been very busy, but I know that’s a poor excuse. However it is true!)

We have just completed our biggest and best Feis Ile. This is the week long festival of “Malt and Music” that our island of Islay puts on every year. During the festivities we held two big events.

The first was our first ever Friends of Laphroaig “Gathering”. Hundreds of “Friends” from all over the World donned their special Wellington Boots and joined us on their plots for a toast to “The Friends”. Later that evening we held a “Ceildh” (Party) in our barrel filling store. We shot a small film of it if you would like to get a flavour of the event: http://www.laphroaig.com/tv/channel2_prog8.asp.

A parallel “Gathering” was also held in Korea! Indeed so popular was it that I have had many requests for regional “Gatherings” to be organised. We will now be holding one in New York later in the year – more to come soon!

Two days later was our “Open Day” which was our biggest and best yet, with special tastings, games, cooking with Laphroaig demonstrations, boat trips and much more. We were also privileged to have two musical friends play in our courtyard Bridgid and Butch from America who entertained us with some beautiful “Blue Grass” music. Again we filmed all the activities, so if you would like to see what went on and hear the music you can watch it on Laphroaig TV.

I blogged live during the event with some fun competitions on our new Facebook site www.facebook.com/laphroaig. We now have over 24,000 members on our page making it very active, so if you have a Facebook account and have not joined our Laphroaig page yet I would love to meet you there. It does allow you to keep up with everything that’s going on.

As you may know we do film local islanders who have a special connection with Laphroaig and we have two new ones to show you. The RNLI is the UK’s Lifeboat rescue operation which of course is so important to us as islanders, and a strong fishing community. The RNLI is extraordinary as it is entirely run via charitable donations from the public. Indeed it is our permanent Friends of Laphroaig charity. As such I thought you would like to meet the skipper and his boat. Simon Brooking (our US Ambassador) took time off from his open day duties to meet him and his beautiful boat. Again, you can view it on Laphroaig TV.

And keeping with our nautical theme we also interviewed our local Lobster fisherman Kevin Campbell – notice his surname – yes it’s my younger brother! Of course there are some fantastic sauces that go with our local dishes of Scallops, crabs and Lobster so as you can guess Kevin and I have has some wonderful meals in the past. If you would like to meet Kevin and watch as I going lobster fishing on film then you can see us on Laphroaig TV.

I will write to you in a month or so to tell you about this year’s Laphroaig Live event. But for now I am going to keep it a secret!

Sláinte,

John Campbell

Visit Laphroaig Distillery at www.laphroaig.com