I hope my festive season letter finds you well.

It is the time of year when I look back on some of our highlights – and what a year it has been! We reached two major milestones: It was the ‘coming of age’ for the Friends of Laphroaig as we celebrated our 18th birthday at this year’s Feis Ile and, just before we reached our 18th birthday, the 500,000th plot was taken! Our Cairdeas special bottling this year also commemorated the FOL 18th birthday.

The Distillery
I am pleased to say that we had a record year for distillation, so it’s hats off to the whole team – please toast them, they deserve it! Indeed it was also a record for visitors to our distillery with over 17,000! Many if not most were Friends of Laphroaig making their pilgrimage and claiming their “rent” – a dram of our finest of course. What really pleases me is that both these records have meant that we have had the pleasure of recruiting four more local islanders to our team, two working in distillation and production and two in the Visitor Centre. It’s great to be able to do our bit in these difficult times.

Islay
Talking of our island community, may I thank all of you who participated in our monthly charity auctions on the website. You raised £5,000 which went to the Islay Museum for the installation of a temperature controlled environment – very important for some of the more delicate artefacts. If you would like to read more about this there is a picture and link on our facebook page.

Friends of Laphroaig Tartan
As you know we ran a competition this year to design the official FOL Tartan and we had 5,000 entries! The winning entry has now been hand made and you can see a picture of of our winner Patrick McCoy wearing the new kilt on our facebook page. The first items for sale have now been made at the Woollen Mill; they are a tartan scarf with the FOL logo embroidered on it and a beautiful blanket/throw. If you would like one they are now on sale in your online shop. We will be adding other FOL tartan merchandise in 2013.

Laphroaig Live Germany
In late September we had our annual ‘Laphroaig Live’, which this year came from Nürnberg in Germany and broke all previous viewing records around the World! I hope you all enjoyed it (any of you who did not see it at the time can view the recorded show at www.laphroaig.com/live). It was terrific fun comparing our classic 10 year old Laphroaig with two other peated single malts from the Highlands (Ardmore) and Ireland (Connemara), but perhaps the most unusual aspect was tasting a special German ‘Smokey’ beer that had been matured in Laphroaig Quarter Casks.

Friends of Laphroaig Christmas trees
Some of you will recall that this Spring we had to extend the original FOL Plots area as we had run out of land – indeed we had been placing plots in the nearby fir tree wood. Earlier in the year we expanded the FOL area and this has meant that the wood is now free of plots. As a result we have therefore been able to donate two of your Christmas trees to the local community in Port Ellen, and have taken one for ourselves which now has pride of place in the courtyard outside my office!

All that is left for me to do is to wish you Seasons Greetings from myself and all of us here at Laphroaig. I hope you have a great holiday and a superb Hogmanay.

Slàinte,

John Campbell
Distillery Manager, Laphroaig

Visit www.laphroaig.com to join the Friends of Laphroaig; it’s free!