Independent spirits retailer Master of Malt and female-founded luxury design agency Studio Minerva have together launched The Islay, a new super premium whisky brand and a love letter to the famed Scottish island, built around a continuous single cask model believed to be the first of its kind in Scotch whisky.

The Islay is the first product collaboration between the two category leaders, and the first time Studio Minerva – whose clients include Laphroaig, Bushmills, Courvoisier and Brugal  –  has stepped out from client work to build a brand of its own. The collaboration began with a chance meeting between the two teams at an industry event, where they bonded over a shared love of the spirits industry, Islay and building interesting products. 

Rather than telling Islay’s story distillery by distillery, as whisky brands typically do, The Islay tells a single, united story of the island as a whole, celebrating the shared character its whiskies are known for: tropical fruit, minerality and a backbone of peat. The debut collection comprises three expressions, 16 Year Old Basalt (£99), 20 Year Old Red Sandstone (£149.95) and 30 Year Old Quartzite (£499.95), curated by Dr. Samuel J. Simmons, Master of Malt’s Head of Whisky, and bottled at 46.3% ABV. Each expression is distinct, but all are recognisably related.

What sets The Islay apart is its continuous single cask model. A traditional single cask is a numbered, limited run that disappears once it’s gone. The Islay reinvents this: every bottle is still drawn from a single cask, but when one cask is finished, it rolls on to the next, same name, same age statement, same strength. The result is a permanent, always-available range with the individuality of a single cask, where no two batches are ever quite the same.

Every cask is selected for being true to the island rather than for anything done to it afterwards: distilled and matured in situ on Islay, never married with other casks, never colour-added and never chill-filtered. Each whisky is then brought down to 46.3% ABV by slow reduction, a two-week process that is now a dying art in Scotch. Larger producers skip it for efficiency and smaller ones often can’t afford the time.

Coral Harker, Managing Director, Studio Minerva, said:

“We’ve spent a decade building brands for other people, and starting one of our own has always been the dream. The timing was never quite right. Then we met Master of Malt and the fit was there straight away, and The Islay certainly won’t be the last brand we build together.”

“All of our favourite whisky brands start their story with a distillery. We started our story with the geology of the island. The stone shapes the water, the water shapes the peat, and all of it ends up in the glass, on a timeline that began millions of years before anyone thought to distil anything. That’s the story we’ve built The Islay around.”

Sam Simmons, Head of Whisky, Master of Malt, said:

“Few places inspire devotion like Islay. It’s a place of pilgrimage for whisky lovers, people who fall in love with it, return to it, even permanently ink its name on their skin. And the island carries far more than any single distillery does. That’s why we made a deliberate decision not to name them. This is a celebration of the island as a whole, as a place, not a hunt for individual names. The provenance is all there for anyone who wants to find it, the coordinates on the bottle, the cask code on the label, but the point is Islay itself.”

“Every cask I’ve chosen is an embodiment of the island. 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.”

The Islay launches today and is available to buy on Master of Malt. For on and off-trade enquiries please contact Maverick Hi@maverickdrinks.com