You find an enthusiastic team... maybe an existing whisky club... with a leader with strong industry links.... and put a plan together!
The Southport Whisky Club was founded in 2017, it meets at Remedy and has regular tastings led by industry representatives and brand ambassadors. Over time they've built up a great relationship with many distilleries.
At the beginning of the lockdown, back in March, they had a number of tastings planned, but instead of cancelling they turned them virtual like many other clubs and groups did. As lockdown continued they began to think about hosting a whisky festival in the same way, it had been tried before but rather unsuccessfully.
The club had an extensive range of contacts and a few clever ideas on how the festival would work. In early May a plan was hatched and they got to work. All of the distilleries they approached were happy to get on board and they quickly filled all the slots they had for a weekend's festival. Once the wider industry heard what was going on more distilleries asked to get on-board, some were able to be accommodated but some had to be politely refused.
The key points of the plan were:
- Hold the festival virtually using Zoom.
- Each distillery would have it's own 'slot' in the timetable - and SWC managed to persuade some leading lights from the industry to run the sessions.
- Tasting sets for the festival would be 'free' when you purchased any full sized bottle from that distillery's range.
Rather than asking the distilleries, many of which were closed, to source and produce the tasting packs, the club planned to bottle and label them all themselves - a small army of volunteers was needed! As the orders started piling in, and the whisky started arriving, they began to realise what a daunting job this would be!
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| Bimber delivery. Photo: Chris Lodge |
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So who did they manage to get onboard? Only some of the best loved distilleries and independent bottlers in the industry:
The team also managed to arrange some unique limited edition Festival Specials:
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| Photos: @TheWhiskyImage |
The timetable for the Festival was:
Each session was run on Zoom
@onekv introduced the festival
Each session felt like a Masterclass - some were jokey and funny, some included technical details of distilling - we even had PowerPoint presentations and talk of spreadsheets!
I've linked all of the sessions videos here from the Festival but you can see more information about each session on the Southport Whisky Club website here!
The Compass Box session was led by Jill Boyd
The Tomatin session was led by Scott Adamson
The Paul John session was led by @ShiltonAlmeida
The Spey session was led by @WhiskyWeegie
The Glen Scotia session was led by @Iainmca67
The Hunter Laing session was led by Andrew Laing
The Victor & George session was led by @onekv with support from @TheGeorgeMichie,@Ibon_Mendiguren & Jill Boyd
The blind tasting samples turned out to be:
The Glengoyne session was led by @gdundas
The Douglas Laing session was led by Fred Laing
The Morrison & Mackay session was led by Niel Hendriksz
The Distell session was led by @JulieannWhisky & Stephen Woodcock
The Bimber session was led by @thedramble
An amazing festival organised by a bunch of passionate whisky lovers - can't wait for next year's!
The festival wasn't just about whisky though... Victor managed to show of a small selection of his hat collection too.....
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