The Islay Jazz Festival, held every September across the island's distilleries, has been hosted in part by Lagavulin since the festival's beginnings in the late 1990s. Each year the distillery selects a small parcel of casks — sometimes a single cask, sometimes a small vatting — and bottles a strictly limited edition for sale only at the festival and from the visitor centre. Numbers are tiny, often a few hundred bottles, and they routinely sell out within hours.
The cask choice is not fixed. Over the years bottlings have come from refill American oak, first-fill bourbon, sherry hogsheads, and the occasional finishing experiment. Ages have varied from young teenage spirit through to whisky in its twenties. The unifying thread is that the cask is always chosen by the Lagavulin team and bottled at cask strength, undiluted and unchillfiltered.
That makes any single review of a Jazz Festival bottling slightly meaningless: there is no fixed recipe. What can be said is that the distillery has, year after year, used the festival as a chance to release casks it considers worth showing off, and the standard has stayed remarkably high. The base distillate — that slow, oily, deeply phenolic spirit from the pear-shaped stills — provides the constant.
The Jazz Festival bottlings have become collectables almost by accident. They were intended as souvenirs for visiting drinkers and musicians; the secondary market has long since taken over. For anyone lucky enough to be on Islay in September with a ticket and patience, they remain one of the more honest ways to taste Lagavulin's working stocks.
