*Coral Harker of Studio Minerva and Dr Sam Simmons of Master of Malt have created The Islay*

Master of Malt and Studio Minerva have launched a new whisky brand built around a continuous single cask model, where the names will remain but the casks behind them will keep changing

There is a very simple reason single cask whiskies inspire such obsession: however good they are, there can only ever be so much of them. A cask might produce a few hundred bottles, perhaps rather more or rather less, and once they have been drunk or squirrelled away into collections, that particular whisky has gone.

Master of Malt and Studio Minerva have decided to turn that limitation into the basis of an entirely new brand.

The Islay launches with three whiskies, a 16 Year Old Basalt at £99, a 20 Year Old Red Sandstone at £149.95 and a 30 Year Old Quartzite at £499.95, all bottled at 46.3% ABV. What Master of Malt calls a continuous single cask means those three names and age statements are intended to stay permanently in the range, while the actual casks behind them will change.

When the first Basalt sells out, another 16-year-old single cask from Islay will replace it. It might come from another cask at the same distillery or from somewhere completely different on the island, but it will still be Basalt, still be 16 years old and still be recognisably Islay in character. Red Sandstone will continue at 20 years old and Quartzite at 30 on exactly the same principle.

If that initially sounds slightly confusing, it’s because it is. But it becomes more interesting the longer you think about it. Independent bottlers have been selling whisky without revealing the distillery for years, so there is nothing particularly strange about asking someone to buy an unnamed Islay single malt, while blenders have built cult brands where drinkers return because they trust the house, the blender and the flavour rather than because a particular distillery happens to be written across the front of the bottle.

*The bottles, the years, the names, the ABV will all remain why the liquid will change*

The Islay sits somewhere different again. It isn’t blending different whiskies together to create a new product with a consistent recipe, but neither is it selling the traditional romance of one named distillery and one specific cask. It is asking people to trust The Islay as the brand, and the Basalt (or the Red Sandstone or Quartzite) as the product, even though the Basalt they buy in two years’ time might not be the same whisky they are drinking today.

That means something has to hold the whole thing together and, for Dr Sam Simmons, Master of Malt’s head of whisky, that is Islay itself.

He has built the first collection around what he sees as the underlying character of the island, with tropical fruit, minerality and peat running through the range even as the balance between them changes with age.

“Every cask I’ve chosen is an embodiment of the island,” he said. “They’re selected to be as honest as possible: raw earth, single cask, no finishing, nothing that gets in the way. The character comes from the place itself.”

For Simmons, Islay is almost sacred territory. He describes it as a place of pilgrimage for whisky drinkers and, speaking at the launch, said he “gets goosebumps simply talking about the place.

“Few places inspire devotion like Islay,” he said. “It’s a place of pilgrimage for whisky lovers.”

Studio Minerva has taken that devotion and moved the story away from the distillery buildings altogether, naming the range after the geology underneath them. Basalt references the island’s volcanic rock, Red Sandstone its sedimentary formations and Quartzite the rock transformed through enormous heat and pressure. These geological ‘expressions’ are what makes whisky from Islay so unique.

“All of our favourite whisky brands start their story with a distillery,” said Coral Harker, managing director of Studio Minerva. “We started our story with the geology of the island.”

Harker and her team normally build drinks brands for other people, with work stretching from Diageo to Coca-Cola and, rather more relevantly here, Laphroaig and Bowmore, so The Islay is also the first time they have stepped across the line and created one of their own.

“We’ve spent a decade building brands for other people, and starting one of our own has always been the dream,” she said. “The timing was never quite right. Then we met Master of Malt and the fit was there straight away.”

Harker emphasised that the intention was not to remove every trace of where the whisky came from. The coordinates of the distilleries featured can be found on the bottles for anyone who wants to do a little detective work, but the emphasis has deliberately been shifted towards creating a product that can appeal beyond people already deeply committed to one distillery or another.

From the elegant bottle shape to the white space on the packaging and the clear, clean design, she said the aim was to appeal to a broad, unisex audience of luxury buyers rather than only the established whisky crowd. That could work particularly well with newer drinkers who don’t yet have the obsession, knowledge or commitment to individual distilleries that has traditionally driven much of the single cask market.

Master of Malt understands from its own sales data that younger, or newer, whisky drinkers are less likely to remain loyal to one distillery and more willing to try something different. Drinks by the Dram, which sells single measures and mixed packs that allow people to explore before investing in a full bottle, has seen double-digit growth, while the retailer’s Mystery Drop (that has borrowed more than a little inspiration from Thompson Bros’ Mystery Malt releases) has seen its first three editions sell out almost immediately.

*Master of Malt owner Justin Petszaft with head of whisky Sam Simmons*

Master of Malt, and its owner Justin Petszaft, is increasingly willing to experiment with ideas that might be snubbed or overly interrogated by the more traditional end of whisky trade. If they have a chance of bringing newer and, dare we say, younger audiences into the category. I’m all for it.

Speaking to another major online whisky retailer, who I asked to dig into its own numbers produced much the same conclusion: buyers are becoming increasingly distillery agnostic and more interested in finding something different and new.

At up to £500 a bottle, however, The Islay is operating firmly at the premium end, where asking someone to part with that sort of money without caring too much about exactly where their whisky was distilled is quite a bold move.

Luckily, the actual liquid is exceptionally good.

Simmons explained that the three whiskies are not intended to operate as a deliberately constructed flight, with one engineered to lead neatly into the next. Each stands on its own, while ageing changes how those familiar Islay characteristics come through, with some of the more obvious peatiness fading over time and leaving more of the minerality underneath.

There is also no pretence that each replacement cask will taste exactly like the last one, because that would rather defeat the point of using single casks in the first place. The aim instead is to choose excellent individual whiskies that still feel sufficiently at home within the Basalt, Red Sandstone or Quartzite identity.

That selection is where Master of Malt gives the project real credibility. Rather than simply working through whatever ageing stock happens to be sitting in its warehouse, Simmons has the expertise and freedom to go looking for casks specifically suited to what they are trying to do. Master of Malt says every whisky is distilled and matured on Islay, never married with other casks, never coloured and never chill-filtered, with each release chosen because it expresses the island rather than because something has been done to disguise or reshape it afterwards.

Having tasted all three at the launch, held as part of the Master of Malt Whisky Showcase and hosted, in the interests of full disclosure, by Yours Truly, the quality of that first selection is not really in question.

They were everything I hoped they would be, with peat present throughout but fading in power with age. The 16-year-old was light, bright and fruity, the 20-year-old silky, creamier and softer, while the 30-year-old was elegant, with light wisps of peat coming through alongside a touch of sherry. All three kept that saline minerality and peaty character Simmons sees as essential to an Islay whisky.

Among the room, the 20-year-old seemed to be the biggest hit, proving once again that age does not automatically mean better. However the Islay peatiness had mellowed the most in the oldest dram leaving something particularly elegant yet robust underneath that I found hard to put down.

Perhaps the more interesting test comes when these first casks disappear. Will people simply buy the next Basalt because they loved the first, or will collectors immediately want to know whether they own cask one, cask two and cask three? Currently without edition numbers that might also prove a challenge.

Will each replacement become an unofficial new edition even if Master of Malt doesn’t present it that way, and will somebody who paid almost £500 for the first Quartzite be happy buying the next one on the strength of the name alone?

There is already a facility on the website for buyers to enter their bottle code and discover the details of their particular cask, so nobody is being asked to abandon provenance altogether. The more interesting idea is whether that provenance can become secondary.

Continuous single casks are inevitably going to require some explaining, particularly at these prices, because first movers tend to spend rather more time defending and defining an idea before everyone else decides it was obvious all along.

The strongest argument for The Islay, however, isn’t really the terminology, the geology or even the rather lovely bottles. Simmons has started with three very good whiskies and Master of Malt appears willing to keep searching for equally good ones rather than compromising simply to keep the range going.

If they can maintain that standard, perhaps people will eventually stop trying to work out which distillery made The Islay and simply want to know when the next in the continuous cask brand is being released. And based on these first three, I very much hope they do.

The Islay is available now from Master of Malt