Springbank distillery has stood on Longrow Street in Campbeltown since 1828, founded by the Mitchell family on the site of an earlier illicit still and still owned by their descendants today. It is one of only three working distilleries in what was once the whisky capital of the world, and the only one in Scotland to carry out the entire process — floor malting to bottling — on a single site.
This 15 Year Old Rum Wood is a limited release matured in ex-rum casks. Springbank's link with the Caribbean is no marketing flourish; the Mitchells were heavily involved in the rum and whisky trades of the nineteenth century, and the city's harbour once shipped spirit across the Atlantic in volume.
The nose opens with brown sugar and banana skin, salted caramel and that quiet coal-smoke note — Springbank still fires its stills with a combination of oil and direct coal heat — which marks the house spirit out from its neighbours. The palate is oily and broad, demerara sweetness folding into tropical fruit, a clear coastal brine and the slow build of soft peat from the two-and-a-half times distillation. The finish runs long, saline and tobacco-tinged.
Rum casks can flatter or smother a whisky, but Springbank's robust, slightly funky new make takes the wood in stride. There is integration here rather than novelty, and the bottling — non-chill-filtered, natural colour, cask strength — leaves nothing dressed up. A characteristically uncompromising release from a distillery that does little else.
