Independent spirits retailer Master of Malt and luxury design agency Studio Minerva have launched The Islay, a new super-premium Scotch whisky brand built around a continuous single cask model believed to be the first of its kind. The range is available to buy on Master of Malt.
The Islay marks the first product collaboration between the two companies. It is also the first time female-founded Studio Minerva — whose clients include Laphroaig, Bushmills, Courvoisier and Brugal — has created a brand of its own.
Rather than telling Islay’s story distillery by distillery, the brand celebrates the island as a whole, focusing on the shared character of tropical fruit, minerality and a backbone of peat.
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The debut collection comprises three expressions curated by Dr. Samuel J. Simmons, Master of Malt’s head of whisky. These are the 16 Year Old Basalt ($135/£99), the 20 Year Old Red Sandstone ($205/£149.95) and the 30 Year Old Quartzite ($685/£499.95), each bottled at 46.3% ABV.
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The brand’s continuous single cask model reinvents the traditional single cask format. Every bottle is still drawn from a single cask, but when one cask is finished, the range rolls on to the next — retaining the same name, age statement and strength.
The result is a permanent, always-available range with the individuality of a single cask, where no two batches are quite the same.
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READ THE STORYEvery cask is distilled and matured on Islay. Each whisky is brought down to 46.3% ABV by slow reduction, a two-week process the brand describes as a dying art in Scotch.
The partnership began with a chance meeting between the two teams at an industry event.
Coral Harker, managing director of Studio Minerva, said: “We’ve spent a decade building brands for other people, and starting one of our own has always been the dream. The timing was never quite right. Then we met Master of Malt and the fit was there straight away, and The Islay certainly won’t be the last brand we build together.”
Harker added: “All of our favourite whisky brands start their story with a distillery. We started our story with the geology of the island.”
Explaining the decision not to name individual distilleries, Sam Simmons, head of whisky at Master of Malt, said: “Few places inspire devotion like Islay. It’s a place of pilgrimage for whisky lovers… That’s why we made a deliberate decision not to name them. This is a celebration of the island as a whole, as a place, not a hunt for individual names.”
Simmons said each cask was selected to be “as honest as possible,” adding: “The character comes from the place itself.”
Islay is home to several of Scotland’s most celebrated distilleries and is renowned globally for its peated single malts.
