Feis Ile - The Islay Festival

Whisky education from Whisk(e)y Advent 2025 (2025-12-23). Summary below; full write-up with sources and images: calendar/2025-12-23.qmd.

A 10-day annual celebration of Islay whisky hosted by the island’s distilleries. Ardbeg typically releases a special festival bottling (this year, Smokiverse, made with high-gravity distillation).

Verbatim source text

Reproduced from calendar/2025-12-23.qmd (Whisk(e)y Advent 2025).

Every year, a massive 10-day festival happens on in island of Islay in a celebration of scotch whisky.

Fèis Ìle (“The Islay Festival”) is hosted by a lot of the Islay distilleries we’ve seen this December, as well as a few we’ve yet to try. To mark the occassion, Ardbeg Distillery typically releases a special bottle–this year, that was the Smokiverse. They’re experimenting with what they call high-gravity distillation, which draws on beer brewing techniques to create a malted barley concentrate for fermentation.