Campbeltown & Islands MasterClass | Belfast Whiskey Week 2021

Name: Belfast Whiskey Week 2026
Start: 2026-07-24
End: 2026-08-01
Location: Belfast

Filed: 30 Jul 2021
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/21/636

There are corners of the whisky world that feel less like a category and more like a tír — a territory with its own weather, its own character, its own stubborn sense of self. On the 30th of July 2021, Session 71 of Belfast Whiskey Week brought that territory vividly to life, gathering whisky lovers for a MasterClass devoted entirely to the singular drams of Campbeltown and Scotland's island distilleries. Six fifty-millilitre samples, one glass, and an afternoon given over entirely to the uisce beatha of Scotland's maritime edges.

About This Event

This tasting includes 6 x 50ml Samples & Glass and will take place on the 30th @ 15:00.

This tasting comprises of:

Highland Park 22yo
Cadenhead's Jura 11yo - 1/600 55.2% d.2009 b. Spring 2021
Hazelburn 13yo
Cadenhead's Glen Scotia 18yo
Arran Single Cask 1999 - Bourbon #88 - 100/204 56.9% d. 19/07/99 b. 16/02/2015
Springbank 9yo

Tasting packs will be posted out to you, but may not arrive in time for the tastings. If you wish to collect the pack in Belfast to ensure you have it in time, please contact grace@belfastwhiskeyweek.com after you order.

Looking Back

Campbeltown is a town that could fill a book of seanchas — once the whisky capital of the world, now home to just a handful of distilleries, each carrying that history with quiet, salt-abraded dignity. Pair it with the islands — Orkney, Jura, Arran, and beyond — and you have a line-up that speaks in sea spray and peat smoke, in sherry wood and slow Atlantic air. Session 71 understood this instinctively. The curation wasn't just a flight of drams; it was a considered argument for a particular kind of whisky — complex, coastal, and deeply unhurried.

The selection itself was exceptional. Highland Park 22-year-old opened proceedings with the gravitas you'd expect from Orkney's greatest export — honeyed, heathery, and threaded through with that characteristic Viking soul. A Cadenhead's Jura 11-year-old followed, bottled at 55.2% from a 2009 distillation and released in Spring 2021, one of just 600 bottles in existence: the kind of independent find that makes a MasterClass worth every penny. Hazelburn 13-year-old — Springbank's unpeated expression from the Longrow stable in Campbeltown — brought a gentler, almost contemplative register, before Cadenhead's Glen Scotia 18-year-old reminded the room that Campbeltown's oldest working distillery still has plenty left to say.

The Arran Single Cask 1999, drawn from Bourbon cask number 88 and one of only 204 bottles, was something of a highlight — distilled on the 19th of July 1999 and bottled on the 16th of February 2015, it carried the kind of biographical precision that independent bottlings do so well. At 56.9%, it was generous and unguarded, the sort of dram that rewards attention. The session closed with a Springbank 9-year-old: young, yes, but Springbank is one of those distilleries that seems to start interesting from day one, its combination of partial peating and triple distillation producing something that defies easy comparison. For those who had been following the wider festival programme — perhaps joining us for the Bushmills History MasterClass in Session 83, or taking in the Bushmills Causeway Collection — Session 71 offered a genuinely different register: rawer, wilder, further from the familiar.

Delivered as a tasting pack posted directly to participants — with the option to collect in Belfast for those who wanted to be certain of having their samples in hand — the session reflected Belfast Whiskey Week's commitment to making premium whisky education accessible, wherever you were tuning in from. The format suited the subject matter, too. These are whiskies you sit with. You don't rush a Springbank or a Highland Park 22. You give them the time they've already waited, and you listen. If you're curious about how the wider 2021 programme mapped the full landscape of Irish and Scotch whisky, our Whiskey Map gives a sense of the breadth of what we covered that year.

Session 71 was, in the end, a love letter to the periphery — to the distilleries that operate on headlands and in former fishing towns, that bottle in small runs and age in sea-facing warehouses. Slàinte mhath to everyone who raised a glass that July afternoon. The drams were worthy of the duchas they carry.