Triple Distilled Communications

Resurrection Man

November 30th, 2022
In Cork Airport’s duty free there is a large screen showing adverts for Midleton distillery’s single pot still collection. The smooth-talking gent hosting the videos lavishes the Cork whiskeys with praise, and assures us that Midleton’s single pot still collection is the ultimate expression of the art.

In the decade since those videos were created, their host Peter Mulryan has had something of a change of heart. The author, producer, and presenter may have been the face of Midleton’s single pot still whiskey in 2012, but in the years since he has become one of the most vocal critics of what he sees as Irish Distillers Limited’s reformation of the definition of single pot still. He could have spent his time criticising from the sidelines, using the skills he honed in his decades working in the media to gradually force change. But instead of words, he chose action (and also words, but mainly action).

Mulryan put his money – and the money of his investors – where his mouth was and chased his dream of being a distiller. He chucked in his job with Ireland’s national broadcaster and opened a distillery – first in a lock-up in a rural industrial estate in west Waterford, then expanding to a converted hardware store in the sleepy village of Ballyduff a few miles away. It turned out that Mulryan and his team – several of whom worked on those single pot still videos with him – were quite good at distilling, as the Blackwater Distillery spirits have won multiple awards. The team are also quite good at business, as they landed massive supply contracts with supermarket giant Aldi. But Mulryan never softened his tone about the technical file, the State document which lays down the laws on Irish whiskey, and specifically, how to make single pot still (SPS) Irish whiskey.

Having written five books on Irish whiskey, Mulryan was well placed to point out what he saw as inaccuracies in the technical file, saying that he could find no historic mashbills which complied with the document’s requirement that the mash for SPS must contain a minimum of 30% malted barley and a minimum of 30% unmalted barley, with up to 5% of other cereals such as oats and rye added if required.

Writing on his distillery’s blog, Mulryan seethed about Midleton’s SPS whiskeys: “The official Redbreast website is even more confident: ‘this is the traditional way of making Irish whiskey since the 1800s.’ Except of course it’s all a load of horse manure. These whiskeys are not a reflection of anything, except perhaps corporate sleight of hand and a lack of oversight. If truth be told, the ‘tradition’ being celebrated here goes all the way back not to the nineteenth century but to October 2014.”

In numerous posts he used the phrase stolen heritage, gushed about traditional single pot still whiskey and its wild and varied mashbills, and worked with whiskey historians Fionnán O’Connor, Charlie Roche, and Will Murphy in digging up as many as he could. Mulryan then set about proving that SPS – the old, bold SPS as opposed to what he framed as the more modern, corporate IDL version (which he gives fair credit to as an excellent whiskey, it should be noted) – was a viable commercial product rather than a dusty relic reflective of palates now long dead. In a post on New Year’s Day 2020 he explained how between February and September 2019 they distilled more than 100 different SPS mashbills, the majority traced back to a specific distillery, date, or both, from 1824 to 1955. The recipes came from ‘just after the 1823 Excise Act (the foundation of the modern industry)’, right through the Victorian Irish whiskey boom.

“We’ve distilled outliers featuring 40% wheat, and 38% oat, but mostly that range of ‘other grains’ settled comfortably in the 20% – 25% band, with oat being predominant. All mash bills contained barley and malt, and all featured either oats, wheat and rye. Some have all five elements. However, not one of these real single pot still mashbills is compliant with the current Technical File. That’s not how we planned it, it’s just one of those awkward facts,” he wrote.

If this seems like a lot of work, you might well be right, as Mulryan added: “We could have spent 2019 churning out single malt, or compliant SPS, but we chose not to. As a result we only ran at close to 50% capacity. It was an expensive exercise, but we can now safely say there isn’t another distillery in the country/world that has dug into the SPS category as deeply as we have.”

Alongside the SPS missives were posts about their use of heritage grains, oats and green malt, along with pieces slamming a lack of transparency in Irish whiskey and an overabundance of brands built on sourced liquid – “We have the talent, but are downing in a sea of tribute acts” he wrote. Mulryan then went on to release a sourced whiskey named Velvet Cap (preceded by The Retronaut, a sourced, one-off 117-bottle release), along with procuring sourced whiskey stock for Aldi which was released under their Púca range. Ironically, for all Mulryan’s enthusiasm for clarity around sourced whiskey, this press release from Aldi doesn’t exactly make it crystal clear that Blackwater did not make the whiskey (the Blackwater online store, however, is clear on Velvet Cap being sourced).

But Blackwater’s main business was always making, not sourcing. During the pandemic they started a taster’s club where they experimented with spirits and flavour, sending out packs to fans with new spirits in each. They continued to win awards, and the technical file – once seen as the stone tablets of Irish whiskey – is about to be reopened for edits and adjustments, a move welcomed by Mulryan.

Much like their county neighbours Waterford Distillery, Blackwater have used a lot of highfalutin words like terroir, provenance, and grand cru (even their slogans are similar – Waterford’s motto is ‘where barley is king’ while Blackwater have ‘let the grain reign’). They both like a bit of sabre-rattling at ‘the big guys’ (neither are exactly little guys), and both have a lot of raw attitude. Mulryan’s jousting in the media even went so far as to claim that, unlike many others, he wasn’t in the whiskey business to make loads of money, something which may come as a shock to his investors.

All of this brings us to Blackwater’s first whisky (sic, natch), which comes to us burdened with great promise and even greater expectations. With typical bombast, the new releases come with a huge amount of detail on the liquid, but also have a hardback pamphlet titled A Manifesto For Irish Pot Still Whisky. Per the press release:

The Manifesto release is limited to just 1,000 numbered boxes, each containing 4 x 200ml single cask Irish whiskies. (Priced €250 & Delivery). Inspired by mash bills (recipes) from 1838, 1893, 1908 and 1915, this is a unique opportunity to taste the whiskies enjoyed by previous generations. Each one is different, representing a distinct time and a place. The whiskies in this Manifesto release cannot be labelled as pot still Irish whisky, nor can there be any allusion to it on the label; even though historically that’s exactly what these four whiskies were.

The four samples – and my notes on them – are:
- Dirtgrain Irish Whisky, Mash Bill #38 – 40% Laureate Barley, 40% Costello Wheat, 20% Gangway + Laureate. Aged in Apple Brandy Cask. 47.1% ABV – this one packs a punch. I drank these out of sequence – ie, I went by number rather than the layout here – and this one hit hard, big wallop of flavour, presumably from the cask. Raises the issues about using different casks in these samples – what is creating the different profiles here, the grain or the wood? Maybe the mashbills would shine most at new make stage?
- Dirtgrain Irish Whisky, Mash Bill #93 – 46% Laureate Barley, 35% Gangway + Laureate, 15% Husky Oat, 4% Peated Laurate Malt. Aged in Sherry Cask. 43.1% ABV – deepest colour of the four, sherry cask, mashbill from 1893, and a bit o’ peat, always an extra string to the bow of a young whisky. Mulryan makes the case that age does not always equate with quality, but I think a lot of people selling young whisky would make similar claims. I do think there is a cut off point beyond which whisky, like the rest of us, becomes a little less vibrant, but I think the youngest age for decent whiskies that I have had is about six years old.
- Dirtgrain Irish Whisky, Mash Bill #08 – 50% Gangway + Laureate Malt, 35% Laureate Barley, 15% Husky Oat. Aged in Bourbon Cask. 45.3% ABV – a light gold colour, the palest of the lot, it slithers out of the test tube like syrup. A startling viscosity. Citrus, candied orange peel, Juicy Fruits. Reminds me of a young Aultmore I have, despite the mashbill. Good youth, no rawness – but not a long finish.
- Dirtgrain Irish Whisky, Mash Bill #15 – 40% Laureate Barley, 30% Gangway + Laureate, 15% Husky Oat, 12% Costello Wheat, 3% Performer Rye. Aged in Rye Cask. 44.2% ABV – nose hard to dig out, palate also taking a while to present. Official notes say orange blossom and dark chocolate; for me there is more that malty flavour from dog biscuits – don’t pretend you’ve never eaten one. Rye cask here so a pop of spice. Pleasant if a little nondescript.
So what to make of this – I like the moxy. I like the manifesto and I’ve put it to the testo, and while the whisky is young, all hold promise. But that isn’t the same as saying that you should run out and buy this. But I’m not a whiskey nerd – I like the stuff, and I love tasting these whiskies, but this is not aimed at fairweather friends of Irish whiskey like me. The full Dirtgrain package is €250, featuring four 20cl bottles of the samples above, along with Mulryan’s mashbill Necromicon, and can be purchased now. There will be another batch next year, and the year after, and after that Blackwater will transition to more traditional releases. A taste of the past, that looks to the future.

New in!

An exciting release from @BlackDistillery that shines the spotlight on how grain, not the cask, can shape a whiskey. The manifesto box is all about recapturing whiskies lost to time.

€250 | https://t.co/YUHk2IRmhE pic.twitter.com/ZpSB5JGNtr
— Celtic Whiskey Shop (@Celticwhiskey) November 30, 2022
Lights, Camera, Macallan

November 26th, 2022

I like a The. Many of my blog posts are given titles with a ‘the’ randomly thrown in at the start, because I think it adds gravitas. In reality it makes everything I write sound like pompous waffle; The Glorious Now, The Pathfinder, The Slow Cut, The Quiet Corner. Scroll through this blog and you will be greeted with an array of bombastic titles opening on a The. Obviously enough I like a The in whisky too. There is a swagger to a The in a brand name – but it’s really something that needs to be earned. I’m not sure The Bells works. Maybe if they got Quasimodo in as brand ambassador.

The Macallan are the epitome of superlux – the Chanel of whisky, a magic brand that operates in a sphere beyond this mortal realm. While us chuds and morlocks bicker about whether a hundred quid is too much to spend on a whisky, The Macallan is selling random fusions of liquid and crystal art for tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds. Veblen goods or emperor’s new clothes, you decide, but they pull all of it off with confidence and style. Which makes their latest creation a little odd.

Everyone loves Four Weddings And A Funeral. Pre-fall fop king Hugh Grant, Andie McDowell not knowing if it’s still raining despite being absolutely drenched in the stuff, all the other very white and upper middle class characters whose names I cannot recall. A large part of its success is down to the wonderful direction by Mike Newell, who has a relatively low-key career despite bagging a Harry Potter and managing to coerce one of the most subtle on-screen performances from Al Pacino in Donnie Brasco (by subtle I mean not screaming about asses).

But Newell’s latest gig is a curious one indeed, as he has directed a short film/long ad for The Macallan. I wasn’t expecting it to be a bold visionary statement – Newell’s most recent big-screen venture was 2018’s painfully nondescriptThe Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – but I thought that the The Macallan might push the envelope a little. Reader, the envelope remains unpushed.

The mercifully short film is a mishmash of Monarch Of The Glen and a sort of tweed-clad Downton Abbey. Starring Emily Mortimer (who once starred in a little known Irish film called Last Of The High Kings opposite a then relatively unknown Jared Leto) in the lead role, the film tells the tale of how The Macallan became one of the first female-led distilleries in Scotland. Per the press release:

Janet Harbinson, known as ‘Nettie’ is a remarkable figure in The Macallan’s history. In 1918, just months before the end of the First World War, her beloved husband Alexander, who had been running the distillery at the time, sadly passed. Nettie was highly committed to the local community and following his death, she assumed control of the distillery as it was the best way to secure The Macallan for its employees and help the community.

Without setting out to do so, she also crafted The Macallan Fine & Rare 1926, which achieved legendary status after it fetched $1.9M at Sotheby’s in 2019. Several years on, it continues to be the world’s most valuable bottle of wine or spirit ever sold at auction.

Thanks for that Nettie, great job. I would suggest that whoever masterminded The Macallan becoming the key superlux whisky brand in the world probably deserves more credit, but that’s just my own begrudgery (great piece on how they did that here).

The film is striking because of its blandness – it feels painfully beige. Maybe having their wings clipped by the UK’s advertising standards authority over their deliriously pretentious Icarus ad – which looked like a pastiche ripped right from Zoolander – left them shook, but I doubt it. Everything about their operation – from the Tellytubby wonderland of their distillery to their presumably ironic grasping hands reaching around The Reach – says that safe isn’t normally part of their lexicon.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film is that the script was written by award-winning screenwriter Allan Scott, whose Hollywood hits include Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Don’t Look Now, Castaway and the excellent Netflix series, The Queen’s Gambit. The mindlowing part is this: Allan Scott is the pen name of Allan Shiach – a former chairman of The Macallan and great nephew of Nettie Harbinson. So you have someone who has helped craft some genuinely incredible work (Don’t Look Now for the love of Christ!) and is also so well connected to The Macallan that you would have to assume that they would be able to get something really remarkable over the line, and yet we end up with a short film that looks and feels – as one wag put it to me via DM – ‘like a fucking Hovis ad’.

Of course, I am looking at all this through the prism of Irish whiskey – a few years back I asked where is our Macallan. I don’t think we have an answer to that question just yet, although Midleton’s Silent Distillery releases were a good foray into the space of ultralux, super-rare whiskey. Ultimately Midleton’s strength – being the home of multiple styles and multiple brands in one very modern industrial setting – might also be its weakness in this instance; beyond the stocks from old Midleton, why pay €50,000 for a whiskey from the new distillery when you could buy a bottle of Jameson for €30? Maybe you can split the beams and have a superlux offering from the same place that creates so many mid range brands, but I don’t see it. I assume Bushmills is the one to watch – with oodles of heritage (not quite the four centuries they claim, but at least two) and a focus on one product – single malt – they should be ripe for it. The Bushmills, anyone? Perhaps some day we could even see a short film directed by time-obsessed auteur Christopher Nolan about why a distillery built in the late 1700s thinks it was built in 1608, but until then we will have to rely on our Scottish neighbours to lead the way in audiovisual self-indulgence. And in the meantime, here’s this:

Living on Milk and Alcohol 🧐🥴🤢#revenge #goats #goatsmilk #whisky #dispute #funny #fpl #laugh #animals #drfeelgood pic.twitter.com/EwtdGh5RPk
— Scott's Irish Whisky (@WhiskyScotts) November 19, 2022
Revelate

November 15th, 2022

There is an excellent substack by a food writer named John Birdsall that I subscribe to. He writes about food culture and history, rather than food itself, which is part of its appeal to me. As the old joke goes, I love food and rarely eat anything else, but I’m just not that into it. Not enough to read food blogs, or magazines, or books, and most of the cookbooks proudly displayed in my kitchen fall open to the single recipe I like in each (Rachel Allen’s Blondies in Bake being the most frequent flyer, as my cardiologist can attest). I dislike the word foodie as it implies that anyone who considers food as something other than fuel is an elitist berk – maybe there is a booze-enthusiast equivalent that doesn’t sound like a euphemism for pisshead (drinkie? liquorie? massive bore?), and maybe I am that – but a foodie I am not.

One recent post of Birdsall’s that stuck in my head was about epiphanies in food writing – how it seemed almost compulsory that people had a lightbulb moment when they knew food and/or food culture was for them. I think we are all guilty of dreaming those moments into existence, of thinking about our paths to whiskey as ‘firsts’ rather than a long slow journey with no discernable start. Your memory of your first sip of Whiskey X that made you fall for the entire category is probably a distillation of various other, less romantic factors you edit from the showreel – I know I got into whiskey by sheer force of will and it was less about a sip sparking passion and more about the grim determination of thinking, right, this is going to be my thing.

Birdsall’s post made me realise that my own subconcious need for epiphanies in my work had left me feeling completely overwhelmed. It started to feel like everything I write should come with some oven-ready divine moment, and as a result I have written less and less. In 2015 I published 169 posts on the blog, in 2021 that figure had dwindled to eight. I started to look back at older posts and realised that not only were there no epiphanies of any kind, a lot of what I wrote was repetitive; I was like a bitter drunk at the bar, mumbling about the same five or six topics. Only writing about one specific drink was always going to be tough and can feel like you are treading water, which is why so many drinks blogs eventually fizzle out. But if you expect to find a revelation every time you write, you will never write at all.

Armagnac has provided me with neither revelation nor epiphany. I slouched into it after being steered towards Spanish brandy by Whisky Apocalypse (who sadly stepped back from blogging earlier this year). If, in years to come, this blog morphs into an armagnac-exclusive zone, I may try to reframe ‘my journey’ and cite my first taste of armagnac as an epiphany, but for now armagnac is merely something about which I am quietly enthusiastic. I have only had two bottles, both excellent, and both from the same source, Domaine Tariquet. There are a few fantastic posts on Camper English’s brilliant Alcademics about the drink, but this one includes photos of some of the Tariquet armagnac alembics in action.

An incredibly short synopsis – Amragnac, like Cognac, is a region and all armagnac must come from there; there are three sub regions/categories, and all are bound to a set list of grape varietals. Some wineries use pot stills to make armagnac but wood-fired (and often mobile) columns are more common; some wineries buy in the wine, some grow the grapes and produce the armagnac themselves. So basically, it’s a brandy. Big glass, roaring fire, good food, etc etc.

I shall confess, the Frenchness of it all appeals to me; I will never be a wine guy, but there is something about those vineyards, and battered stills fuelled by log fires fed by moustachioed chaps in braces, that fills me with joy. Does it suggest that I have a tedious stereotype of the French countryside stuck in my head, that I think they all reside in a rural idyll, crushing grapes by foot, living in thick-set farmhouses and eating duck confit? Why yes, it does, but I am also down with the fact that the fastest growing Irish whiskey brand in the world is fronted by someone who looks like an angry leprechaun, and that Irish whiskey’s success as a whole in America is quite possibly linked to a stereotype of Irishness; that we, like Jameson, are approachable and easy going. Stereotypes are lazy, but sometimes handy.

Think of armagnac as being to cognac what Irish whiskey is to scotch – a less celebrated, older sibling. But whereas Irish whiskey continues to demand excruciating prices, this French underdog offers affordable luxury.

I find myself reading about armagnac and thinking, well now, that’s interesting, or marvelling that you can buy a 20-year-old armagnac for eighty euro. My first foray into armagnac was the eight-year-old cask-strength (50.5%ABV) bas-armagnac from Domaine Tariquet bought from Fine Drams for less than fifty euro. The next was the 15-year-old, at a cask strength of 47.2%, priced at €69. Both are excellent, but the latter won the ISC Supreme Champion Spirit of 2022 award – the first time in the 27-year history of the challenge that the award went to an armagnac. I won’t bore you with my tasting notes – another weakness in my attempts to write about spirits – but the IWSC nailed it with this: A beguiling nose of candied citrus, dark chocolate, assorted cake, tropical fruit, and dry violet. There is a wealth of complexity from the oak and spice, with prunes and raisins. The length is enduring, with perfect alcohol.

Both brandy and armagnac hold great counterpoints to other dark spirits (don’t call them brown, it sounds weird); after a decade of drinking whisky it’s good to step away, recalibrate, ponder the sources of flavour, and come back with a slightly broader mind. Or maybe I’ll stay a while. We shall see.

_{There are some great factoids on Alcademics about Tariquet and their armagnac production which are well worth a read. Similarly there is a great intro to the spirit here.}
My Fellow Scarabaeinae…

November 8th, 2022
Whisky has been good to me. From the first time I wrote about it in a newspaper almost ten years ago, I have been on many amazing junkets at home and abroad, and I have been sent many bottles and a continuous supply of samples. This isn’t humblebragging, but it’s important to note that while I don’t work in the industry, I kinda work with it (or against it, depending on who you ask). I am whisky-biz-adjacent; think of me as one of those feeder fish, swimming alongside a whale and nibbling at parasites on its skin, or perhaps some sort of dung beetle. In short, I have my place in the ecosystem.

I reside in a hinterland, like most whiskey bloggers, coughing up the odd post and getting the odd freebie, but getting no closer than that. But even that role comes with a certain amount of responsibility. Nobody is sending me samples, bottles, or off on jollies because of my shining personality. They do it because they want coverage, and this behaviour is really nothing new. When I worked in a newspaper we were inundated with gifts, junkets, books, concert tickets. I have a very clear recollection of declining a four-day, all expenses paid trip to an electronic music festival in Copenhagen (The Bug was headlining!) as I simply couldn’t be bothered. That is how entitled and spoiled we were. So when we think about entitled social media influencers swanning around like they are demigods, please be assured that they are simply the latest iteration of a very old tradition. Influence used to be held by entities such as publishers, now it is held by individuals, and it’s a lot harder to enforce rules when you are dealing with multiple entities across multiple platforms in multiple markets. But hey, you gotta try, especially where booze is concerned.

The International Alliance for Responsible Drinking (IARD) is the body which oversees and decides the rules for influencer marketing in spirits. Last year they released the Influencer Guiding Principles – five specific rules that apply to any content involving influencers who work with beer, wine, and spirits producers. Of course the first task here is to figure out what is meant by working with and what is working for, along with what an actual influencer is. The IARD has a handy definition:

An influencer is an independent third-party endorser who shapes audience attitudes through blogs, posts, tweets, and the use of other social media including game streaming platforms.

I would suggest that this definition is so vague that it technically encompasses everyone with a social media account, or 99% of the people on the internet. Endorsing is what we do when we share our opinions on things – doesn’t matter if it’s a restaurant, a whisky, a politician. In my own definition, an influencer is at its lowest level, someone who got something for free because of their profile. Anything from that benefit-in-kind benchmark onwards is what I would call an influencer. That doesn’t narrow it down much from ‘everyone on the internet’ but it is headed in the right direction, as the IARD definition of influencer marketing draws a line between those offering thoughts or opinions on a product they paid for and those who either got it for free or are being paid in some way:

Influencer posts are considered marketing (instead of user generated content) when the influencer has received compensation through financial remuneration or there has been some form of editorial control by the advertisers (European Advertising Standards Alliance (EASA) definition).

So it’s not technically influencer marketing to get a bottle of whisky for free, but is it when the firm offers some form of editorial control – which again is a little vague. Is sending through the press release about the bottle editorial control, is saying ‘we hope you like it’? There are simple and gentle acts of persuasion that could fall under the banner of ‘editorial control’. I presume they mean a more formal, concrete version, like ‘share this at this time with this caption please’. But it goes to show that influencer marketing is only going to get bigger.

The IARD’s five guiding principles (to which the Irish Whiskey Association and the Scotch Whisky Association have both signed up). They are:

1. Where available, all paid influencers must use age-affirmation mechanisms on digital platforms to prevent minors from seeing this content. Age-affirmation mechanisms on posts has not yet been adopted by all platforms and IARD members will continue to advocate for effective age-gating mechanisms on sites used by influencers. When utilizing those platforms where age-affirmation mechanisms for influencers are not yet effective, paid influencers should be aged at least 25 years and primarily appeal to audiences above the legal purchase age.

2. Influencers used in the digital marketing and advertising of alcohol should be vetted and, to the best of the producer’s knowledge, should have no reputational association with harmful use of alcohol, and should not feature posts that would not be compliant with the standards around irresponsible drinking behaviors outlined in our alcohol marketing codes.

3. For paid content, all influencers should have a written agreement with the beer, wine, and spirits brand or its agency, signed by both parties.

This should include:

a) Information linking to legal requirements relevant to national or regional context, or both

b) Disclosure guidelines – asking influencers to clearly and conspicuously disclose their link to the brand so that it is clearly presented as marketing content

c) Responsibility guidelines – asking the influencer to comply with the company’s responsible marketing code including ensuring that content does not condone or encourage illegal behavior or excessive consumption

d) Best-practice tools for influencers when engaging on social media platforms, for example, information on branded content pages and details on how to age restrict their posts

e) Feedback mechanisms so that influencers can flag any engagement or issues around responsible drinking with an agency or brand

For content featuring gifted products, influencers should be provided with clear terms of engagement that include disclosure guidelines and a requirement to follow the company’s responsible marketing code.

4. Influencer posts must be monitored by brands or their agencies for compliance and the influencer should fix or remove them within 72 hours if they are not compliant. If the influencer does not address issues within 72 hours of notification, or repeatedly posts non-compliant material, then we will reassess our relationship with them.

5. Brands should regularly audit and monitor campaigns for compliance.

And my typically incoherent thoughts on each:
1. Age gates – so a booze-based OnlyFans then? Honestly, how is anyone supposed to ensure no kids see the content – it’s the internet, if you want to protect our blessed innocents, maybe don’t let them online in the first place. I have four kids and the least of my worries is that they will be exposed to influencer-led alcohol marketing. There is a wild west out there and children are seeing things they never should, and, no, I’m not talking about Shit London Guinness. As for age gates, I have repetitive strain injury from clicking boxes to assure various sites that yes I am old enough to drink, and then some. Do we really think a 14-year-old is going to go elsewhere when confronted with one? Or will they giddily click through to The Forbidden Zone Of Delight that is the corporate page of a global drinks giant?
  
  As for influencers trying to focus their appeal on those above the legal drinking age, the clearest example of this notion gone wild is in what happened to the late, great Scotch Trooper, who took beautiful photos of Star Wars figures and bottles of scotch and landed himself in hot water for it. I would make the case that when it comes to using Star Wars figures in your booze content, you will mostly appeal to middle aged Comic Book Guys like me rather than my kids, who are all busy playing Fortnite.
1. Vetting influencers, best of luck with that. Maybe whoever owns Proper Number Twelve could do the same for their influencer in chief.
1. Contracts would be great and I assume that for larger campaigns involving serious celebrities/influencers, they are de rigeur. However, much of what I am concerned with here is the nano-influencer who has less than ten thousand followers on their social media channels, but creates high-value, highly targeted content. Should they get a contract and presumably a non-disclosure agreement with every free bottle they get sent? Certainly the bottles I receive never come with clear terms and conditions, nor do they appear to be in any way transactional. But I think most whiskey lovers know what’s up when they get a bottle/sample – you need to mention it somehow, and the brand would be very hopeful that this mention would be positive. Perhaps that is what differentiates influencer marketing with someone like me being sent a bottle – there are no guarantees that I, or any other blogger, will say anything nice about it.
1. Would a post, even one laden with errors, be of any relevance after 72 hours up? Is there any point in correcting it? If the influencer was big enough, the post will already have achieved millions of impressions in that time. And who is meant to contact them to tell them to edit the post? PR firms – who I assume do a lot of the influencer outreach/management stuff for drinks brands – won’t want to piss off the bigger accounts. It really smacks of self regulation, a system which has worked so well in the financial markets worldwide.
1. ‘It’s on you guys’.
If I could write rules for low-level whisky influencers it would be this – if you got it for free, say so. I just don’t think anyone can judge a product with absolute clarity and honesty when they didn’t pay for it. I look back on some whiskeys I have reviewed where I got the bottle for free and in retrospect I was too gentle on something that really didn’t deserve it. Why? I would say it was less about staying in with a brand and more about not wanting to be an ungrateful twat. Either way it was misguided. More recent reviews of free bottles have been a little less delicate about their failings, which really is as it should be.

Not paying for the whiskey you are reviewing is a crucial context and the one that applies to most of the whiskey folks that get labeled as influencers. It’s also important to just say thanks to whoever sent it to you, which is what I do when I get free stuff.

If you are being paid actual money to promote the whiskey than you need to clarify that you are, in fact, the same as a guy on the street wearing a sandwich board advertising a golf sale down a side street. We all gotta hustle but there’s a big difference between saying you like a product and literally working for the brand – although an obvious caveat here is that I don’t know of anyone who was paid to post anything about a whiskey, nor do I know anyone with a big enough following to even warrant that approach. Most of us are just happy dung beetles, just lovin’ life rolling our free balls of poop to a hole in the ground.
The Pathfinder

November 8th, 2022

The Cliffs of Moher as seen from the sea.

Why Ireland? Why would anyone want to holiday here? It’s overpriced, it’s wet, it’s miserable. The roads are in shite, the WiFi sucks, there’s nothing on TV. Why would anyone want to visit us at all? And yet, they do, in their hundreds of thousands, every year (bar pandemics). But among that vast throng, there is an increasing number who come here for a very specific purpose – whiskey. There are guided whiskey tours, but there is an increasing number of people who come here on self-guided trips; who will travel around the island visiting the distilleries and producers they want to. As Irish whiskey tourism is still in a relative infancy, we need to ask what works and what doesn’t for these visitors. So, taking the smallest sample possible – one person – ask is what I did.

According to a DNA test, North Carolina resident Hank Barnes is only 8% Irish, but he says it’s the 8% that matters most. His wife Connie, however, is firmly Irish American, with her family names being Doyle and O’Neill. The couple love Irish pubs (friends of theirs own one in Waxhaw NC named Mary O’Neills, if you’re ever in the area) and in 2014 they decided to holiday in Ireland. During that trip, Hank asked a bartender what whiskey he should drink, and was given a Redbreast. On his way home from that trip he bought five bottles of Irish whiskey from the Celtic Whiskey Shop. That was the start of a consuming passion.

As for what it was about Irish whiskey that appealed to him, it had less to do with flavour profiles and more to do with its status as a relative underdog: “I think what got me into Irish over others was that I like to be a contrarian (with boundaries). I don’t pick the well-known brands (for the most part); I look for things that are cool and different.”

The trips to Ireland have become an annual event for the couple, often with tickets to see an All-Ireland thrown in as they are both sports mad (they met playing volleyball and are avid fans of The Carolina Hurricanes). So while whiskey was a part of their trips to Ireland, it was not the sole motivation for them, as Hank explains: “While this trip was designed around whiskey, it was not a whiskey trip. My wife loves the people, but she is not a whiskey drinker (she’ll taste and sample but that is not her thing – Malibu Rum or Irish Cream is).”

While whiskey tilted the compass on this trip, they were also keen to take in the sights, as Hank explains: “I think it would be as interesting to highlight the other things you can do around distilleries. For our trip, we probably spent less than 10 hours of it focused solely on whiskey (not counting all our pub time). They were some of the best parts, but the Cliffs (Sliabh Liag, Moher, and Kilkee) might have been even better. We also met some interesting people and even had a sheep farmer back my car up about ¼ kilometre on a narrow road so he could get a truck and trailer full of sheep past – then we could continue our trip to a waterfall.”

Connie on Cliffs pic.twitter.com/rR1tRcb09f
— Hank Barnes (@Barnes_Hank) September 25, 2022

When planning on where to visit, social media played a role – during the pandemic Hank started sharing whiskeys, picking up more bottles, and tweeting about it all. He started chatting online with some brand owners, connections cemented with real world interactions at Whiskey Live Dublin in June. As a consultant with Gartner, Hank travels to Dublin often, so when a meeting in the capitol was scheduled for September, he planned his whiskey journey around that.

“I asked Connie, “You ready for another trip?” And it went from there. The start of planning was that we needed to visit Sliabh Liag, JJ Corry, and WD O’Connell (if the timing worked for them). We also wanted to go places we hadn’t been before. We also planned a few stops along the way to break up the driving. We had never been to Donegal (it was amazing) so that was the start. Sligo seemed like a good place for a night. We then went to Lahinch (after the Cliffs), a night (somewhat disappointing) in Shannon, and then Clonakilty. We added them to the list because I love their whiskey and their brewery collaborations.

“We also stopped in Kinsale for a few hours. I’m in the Blacks Brewery and Distillery Founders Club so that was a good idea. We ended in Dungarvan to see Daithí O’Connell and team before heading back to Dublin for a night or two before heading home.”

Friends, Cliffs. And Waterfalls…some of our memories on our last day pic.twitter.com/PlbdEDYgQ1
— Hank Barnes (@Barnes_Hank) September 24, 2022

Anyone familiar with a map of the Republic of Ireland will note that they pretty much hit all corners, from the far northwest to the deep southeast, with numerous hostelries in between – so how was the Irish whiskey representation in pubs and restaurants?

“Mixed. There are some places that are great – Darkey Kelly’s in Dublin, The Sky and The Ground in Wexford, Thomas Connolly in Sligo – but others were a mixed bag. Most of the pubs in smaller towns had a very limited selection and not many from their local distillers, merchants, or bonders. Hard to gauge awareness of staff, as I have too much awareness, but I was definitely (and hopefully not annoyingly) sharing that with others, trying to get them to try the local options.”

As for the idea of a whiskey tourism guide, one which covers all whiskey offerings, pubs, historical sites, distilleries, Hank says there is space for a single point of information for it all: “I think there is a spot for a more unified guide. You get some from Irish Whiskey Magazine (and their site) — Serghios reached out to me on Twitter and we ended up spending some time together talking whiskey; that was a great thing in Dublin. You get some info from Barry Chandler and the stuff he is doing around the Stories and Sips Club, which I am a member of. The Irish Whiskey Society of the USA has some too. But it is all over and you have to know and remember where to look.”

As for the idea of Ireland as a rip-off destination, it is an undeserved title, says Hank: “With the dollar versus the euro, no issues with prices. Lodging in Dublin was a challenge to find a reasonable place (it was worse for the work part of this trip), but we did.”

So what advice would Hank give to a whiskey fan coming here?

“First, make sure your trip is not all about whiskey. There is so much more to Ireland. But for the whiskey parts, go to some of the unexpected places. If you are hardcore, try to get to know the people behind it before you go. James at Sliabh Liag basically gave us a personal tour. The JJ Corry experience was minus Louise, but Caroline and Eric were fantastic. Daithí made time for me and we were his first visitors at his new place (and I stole a brief amount of time on his rowing machine so I could say I rowed in a rackhouse).

“Second, I’d recommend a car. You can explore so much more. We discovered Mahon Falls by accident when we had a little extra time.

“Third, what I really learned is how much work the whiskey business is. We see the end product and the external presentation (including standard tours). Those support the business, but aren’t the business. For our special visits, I left with a great appreciation and a concern that I had interrupted their work and made more work for them — hopefully we did not out stay our welcome. Keep that in mind as founders and teams are sharing their time with you.”

The experience of the Barnes may not be typical of every whiskey tourist who comes here, but therein lies the challenge for the Irish tourism board – how do you cater to people who look at a map with 42 points all across it and then randomly join them, criscrossing back and forth? How do you build a coherent package to whiskey lovers who want to explore Ireland as well as Irish whiskey? Do you highlight places of interest between all these producers, do you map whiskey pubs, what defines a whiskey pub? Ireland isn’t Campbelltown, Islay, or even Speyside – our whiskey producers all over the country (aside from four big guns in Dublin city – Pearse Lyons, Teeling, Roe & Co, and Dublin Liberties) and many don’t do tours per se, although many welcome fans like the Barnes. Perhaps a single unified guide isn’t needed, given that there is no single archetype for Irish whiskey lovers. But in the years ahead, if all goes according to plan and our glorious resurrection continues, we will need to think about how we map Ireland for whiskey lovers.
The Slow Cut

November 6th, 2022

A bust of Sir Henry Morton Stanley sits beneath a portrait of Daniel O’Connell.

Sir Henry Morton Stanley had quite the life. Born into poverty in 1841, he became a journalist, explorer, soldier, author and politician, before dying at the relatively young age of 63. He is possibly best known for the utterance ‘Dr Livingstone I presume?’ at the climax of his search for the Scottish explorer David Livingstone, but there is another, darker event from his time in Africa that is less well known.

Stanley led the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, one of the last major European expeditions into the interior of Africa in the 19th Century. It became notorious for the deaths of so many of its members and the trail of disease left in its wake, but there was one especially grim event for which it is best known. An Irish naturist named James Sligo Jameson – scion of the whiskey empire; son of Andrew Jameson, and grandson of John Jameson – refused to believe cannibalism took place within the tribe they were staying with. He called their bluff by handing six handkerchiefs over to a member of the party who said they would arrange it. But it wasn’t a bluff.

What happened next became a significant scandal in Victorian society. The Emin Pasha expedition struggled onwards after the incident, but Jameson never made it home – he succumbed to blackwater fever and died in what is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1888 aged just 31. Little wonder that Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness was partly inspired by the Emin Pasha expedition, with its exploration of human cruelty, imperialism and what civilisation actually looks like.

I am standing in the tremendously civilised drawing room of Lakeview House in County Kerry, staring at a bust of Sir Henry Morton Stanley sat atop a sideboard. Maurice O’Connell, whose home it is, is explaining that the famous explorer was godparent to a forebear of his wife, Francesca. It seems like a fortuitous connection given that it is whiskey that brought me there. But this is a place, a family, with many stories to tell, although very few of them are as soaked in blood and whiskey.

Sir Maurice and Lady Francesca O’Connell outside Lakeview House.

Everyone who has been through the Irish education system knows the name of Daniel O’Connell. The Liberator, as O’Connell is known, and after which Maurice O’Connell’s whiskey is named, was a thorn in the side of the British establishment as he fought for Catholic emancipation (he also denounced slavery in the US and met with Frederick Douglass in Dublin) in the 1800s.

This isn’t the first time that Daniel O’Connell’s name has been linked to a drinks brand – his son Daniel Jr started a brewery and released O’Connell’s Ale, which The Liberator hoped would overtake Guinness, an ascendancy family who he despised, describing Arthur Guinness as a ‘miserable old apostate’. But Daniel Snr was not a pintman, which might explain his closeness to the Powers family, specifically Sir John Power of the famed John’s Lane Distillery (Power laid one of the foundation stones in Glasnevin Cemetery for the O’Connell Monument). In a curious counterpoint to Francesca O’Connell’s link to the European expeditions in what was then the Belgian Congo, Daniel O’Connell was held in such high esteem by the people of Belgium for his support of their drive for independence, that after they became independent of the Netherlands there was a movement to have O’Connell installed on the throne. Instead, the Belgian people installed Leopold, whose son, Leopold II laid claim to the African nation and whose grotesque abuses there were enabled by the likes of Sir Henry Morton Stanley.

Maurice O’Connell is a great great great grandnephew of Daniel O’Connell. There is a lengthy history of the family on the Wayward website which shows that when they weren’t fighting for equal rights for the Irish, the O’Connells were smuggling booze and defying various authorities. Wayward as they were, they still managed to land themselves a baronetship, meaning Maurice O’Connell’s full title is Sir Maurice James Donagh MacCarthy Patrick O’Connell, 7th Baronet, and hereditary Lord of the Manor of Ballycarbery Castle. It’s a weighty title but one he wears lightly – he is an aristocrat with a small a, and says the title has closed as many doors as it has opened for him.

Lakeview is just one of the ancestral homes of the O’Connell clan – they also resided in Ballycarbery Castle near Cahersiveen in the 1600s, before moving to Waterville. Derrynane House became the family seat and over the centuries was expanded significantly. It now resides in the hands of the Office of Public Works. Lakeview is, by comparison, a compact and bijou residence but its setting is equally spectacular. Passing through the bustling village of Fossa you would hardly know it is there, but at the end of a long tree-lined driveway the house sits beside Lough Leane, the largest of the Great Lakes Of Killarney. If you are looking for a hideaway, this would be the place (FYI – you can rent it at certain times of the year for €12,000 a week).

Lough Leane as seen from Lakeview House.

There is a lengthy profile in the Irish Independent of both the house and its owners which details some of the family’s more recent history: The eldest of six, Sir Maurice grew up in Lakeview and his parents farmed the 100 acres that make up the estate. Educated first in Kerry, Maurice then went to boarding school in Scotland (there is a faint Caledonian air in the accent still) before attending Ampleforth, one of the top private Catholic boarding schools in the UK. There his business acumen started to show itself as he was briefly suspended from school for running a clandestine taxi service ferrying school chums to and from the local pub.

After graduation, he focussed on property investment in the UK, displaying a keen eye for areas ripe for gentrification. As for the whiskey enterprise, he had been looking for a project to keep him busy when he was in Ireland (he also resides in the UK). A seed was planted when he purchased a pub mirror advertising O’Connell and O’Flynn Galway Bay Irish Distillery in an antique store 20 years ago. It later transpired that no such distillery ever existed – the brand was dreamed up by a firm that made pub mirrors for Irish bars. A cynic might say that hypothetical distilleries have been the foundations of many modern Irish whiskey success stories, but O’Connell wanted to build a brand with foundations that would withstand the test of time. This was about legacy as much as enterprise. In 2016 plans for a distillery were briefly considered – they had the barley, they had the story, but the estate was not big enough to create a solely single estate whiskey distillery. There would need to be more to the business.

There are two strands to Wayward thus far – 300-year-old stone buildings (a well-travelled great-uncle named them The Houses Of Contentment, a codeword for brothel in Asia) to the rear of Lakeview have been converted into whiskey warehouses with space for blending and bottling (one of the blenders he uses is John ‘five regions’ McDougall of Worts, Worms, and Washbacks fame). This is where The Liberator brand releases are born. Mature whiskeys are being aged, blended, and bottled here, and those have made up the releases thus far.

O’Connell explains the make-up of some of them: “The Port ‘n’ Peat is a blend similar to our core Liberator Small Batch Double Port (42% malt in tawny and 58% grain of which half was finished in ruby port casks) with the malt element increased with the addition of 5% peated malt (Great Northern Distillery’s very tasty 2016). We’d been playing with using the peat to highlight the port finish and 5% was the sweet spot where neither overpowered the other. The batches were essentially the same group of casks.”

As for their later Storehouse Special, the Malt x Moscatel: “This was a 56% cask strength six-year-old double distilled malt from Great Northern finished in really fresh moscatel sherry (not wine) casks for seven months. I got a bottle of the exceptional sherry last year and had to buy the casks.”

A cask maturing at Lakeview.

Alongside this, Lakeview Estate’s own barley has been harvested and distilled at Dr John Teeling’s Great Northern Distillery, casked and returned to Lakeview to mature. These will be specifically marketed as Lakeview whiskeys. There are plans for a boutique distillery within the Houses Of Contentment, but that will come down the road (2024 is the provisional ETA). For now the output consists of sourced matured stocks, while in the background are new-make pot still and malt that they commissioned from seven distilleries around Ireland, the contract distilling at GND of homegrown barley, and a lot of emphasis on the impact of terroir from both the sky and the ground.

I am a microclimate sceptic. I don’t tend to subscribe to the notion that a warehouse in Location A will produce a very different whiskey from a warehouse in Location B – unless those locations are wildly different points on the globe (eg, Kentucky versus Cork). Perhaps there is a difference in maturation between the warehouses of Bushmills and those of Midleton but I narrow the eyes when I hear claims of microclimates within provinces creating points of difference between whiskeys.

O’Connell is a staunch advocate of the microclimate, claiming as he does that the unique location of Lakeview offers a climate not enjoyed by other parts of Kerry (worth noting that as far back as 2012, Dingle also worked the microclimate angle when discussing maturation). However, if you were to make a claim of microclimate in any part of Ireland, the south west is where you would do it – with the highest mountain range in Ireland greeting the North Atlantic Drift, Kerry is a prime spot for pockets of unseasonably warm, humid weather (and enthusiastic levels of rainfall).

Sir Maurice breaks down the sample he sent me: “The Lakeview Single Estate Whiskey sample you have was distilled by Great Northern Distillery on 12th March 2019 to our 50/50 mashbill, using barley grown in our Hilly Field and harvested on 28/29 August 2018. The barley was delivered to Athgarrett Malt the next day and small batch malted in January. Some 23 casks were filled that first year, initially into first fill bourbons. After three months, most was transferred into NEOC casks [New Era Oak Cask is a proprietary cask type from ASC Cooperage in France] – Premier Cru Bordeaux casks that have been hand shaved and retoasted.

“They returned to our storehouse to rest. We felt the nose needed something so 10% was finished in an ex-peated malt cask for three months. We’ve been cutting this to bottling strength (46%) over six months compared to our usual six weeks but still shorter than the two-plus years in Cognac where the tradition originated. This will be released as a 250-bottle Coming of Age Release priced at €195.”

Wince all you like at that price, but most of the upcoming releases are already spoken for by those who tried it at Whiskey Live Dublin back in June – so there are many out there who are willing to pay. O’Connell realises that this young whiskey is a work in progress: “I’m being careful to say that I don’t feel that this is the final product (my view is that some more time in the cask will make it the exceptional whiskey it can be) but we wanted to release some now to start a conversation about whether where a spirit is matured – ‘maturation terroir’ for want of a better phrase – affects ageing. It obviously does for extremes but I believe our Kerry microclimate does too and we’re putting this release out there to see if others agree that this tastes beyond its age and beyond other three-year-old pot still releases. “

“We’ve been measuring our temperature and humidity for the last four years and attached [above] is a graph for the last two showing we have a ‘maturation season’ (defined loosely as less than seven degrees celcius from which spirit interacts with wood) of 10.5 months versus six months in Speyside, for example, together with high humidity. In addition, the ‘four seasons in an hour’ Killarney weather, from the collision of Gulf Stream, mountains and lakes, equates to frequent changes in pressure governing spirit/wood interaction.”

Sir Maurice O’Connell with his new whiskey.

The bottle design was inspired by a bottle of D’Orsay perfume that had sat in Lakeview House for decades, and while it may not win favour with mixologists looking to slap it into a speed rail, it’s an elegant first release. The liquid feels older than its years, but smooth and flavoursome. Fresh notes of fennel bulb and light citrus make way for velvet aniseed, coffee, figs, and dark fruits. It’s good, new, fresh. We can argue about why that is – is it the slow cut, is it that Lakeview grows great barley, that GND make great whiskey, good wood, microclimate, or all of the above – but in the end it is meaningless because it passes the only test that really matters. It tastes good.

As for the Jameson connection to Sir Henry Morton Stanley, it doesn’t seem to bother the current custodians of the world’s biggest Irish whiskey brand, as they held a massive party in Lakeview’s Hilly Field recently. Perhaps the relationaship would change should Wayward whiskey start to cannibalise their market, but until then there is peace in the Kingdom.

Delighted to offer our barley planted Hilly Field as the #venue for this awesome event by our friends @jamesonwhiskey – their US guests were suitably #wowed by the vision of @NineyardsEvents the place and by #Kerry. #events #location #DMC #Killarney pic.twitter.com/KOAM91SUAt
— Wayward Irish Spirits (@wayward_irish) September 20, 2022

_{Blended and bottled on the Estate at 46% ABV, just 300 numbered bottles of the Lakeview Single Estate Irish Whiskey Coming of Age Release are available from Celtic Whiskey Dublin, James Fox Dublin, Carry Out Killarney and Irish Malts. RRP is €195 with a 40ml miniature bottle included.}
Cerberus

September 6th, 2022
In August 2018, the Irish Independent reported that Irish Distillers Limited was planning to build another distillery. Citing the rapidly growing demand for Jameson, it detailed an internal announcement in IDL that another distillery was to be built, with locations such as Youghal and Waterford mentioned.

It was not the most surprising claim – Irish whiskey sales were rocketing, and there had been the 2013 €100m investment at Midleton which doubled production capacity to 64m litres of pure alcohol a year, a 2017 €10m further investment at Midleton, and earlier in 2018 IDL had bought Eight Degrees Brewing, a craft beer producer in North Cork, to service their Jameson Caskmates range. So they were expanding at pace, year after year. With the speed of growth in Jameson, building another distillery made sense. Or maybe it didn’t.

The day after the piece in the Irish Independent, then Irish Distillers CEO Conor McQuaid went on radio to pour cold water on the claims; speaking on Newstalk’s Breakfast Business, McQuaid said that the Indo’s report was “somewhat premature” and that “there’s no definitive plan at this point in time”. However, later that same day, IDL issued a press release stating: “We are currently examining all options to increase our production capacity to meet projected demand and building a new distillery is one of them”.

Now, four years on, we know what they are building, and where.

Six years ago, a farm on the outskirts of Midleton came up for sale. It was prime land, for farming or for development. As it was so close to the town, part of the farm was included in the Midleton town development plan, meaning a 45ac parcel was zoned industrial while the 3ac around the farmyard was zoned residential, with a further 50ac zoned for amenity. You could farm it, you could build on it, you could just sit on it and see what happens. Interest in the auction was high. After an intense bidding war, there could only be one winner – Irish Distillers Limited. The lands were adjacent to their massive distillery operation, and the Dungourney river – from which the whiskey is made – runs through the farm, and occasionally over it: In January 2016, the river burst its banks and flooded the area just outside the warehouse complex of IDL. Perhaps that was why they wanted the land – to keep their interests safe. Or perhaps they wanted to just grow some barley and leap aboard the terroir train; sixteen acres of the farm were described as ‘top class limestone lands’ while the bigger 119ac portion was made up of ‘good and mixed ground with 111ac split equally between tillage and grass’. Either way, the entire farm was bought as a single lot by Irish Distillers for €2.29m – or €17,000/ac. But sizeable firms like IDL rely on a certain amount of goodwill from neighbours – nobody wants to end up in a Bull McCabe situation with any locals, so they entered negotiations with local groups and individuals who wanted to buy some of the lots, and thus the local GAA club got beautiful new grounds.

This map shows the lands now owned by IDL – all within the blue, red and yellow lines.

I had daydreams that IDL would build a new distillery outside of Midleton – that they would stick a lovely modern distillery out in west Waterford somewhere, a modernist beauty like the one Pernod are building in China. I had also hoped they would build a distillery solely for making single malt – although they do make what they call ‘small quantities’ of single malt (small relative to their capacity as a superproducer) in the main plant, it feels like relying on Bushmills for malt spirit might not be a great long-term plan. Brexit continues to create a lot of uncertainty for firms on both sides of the border, which presumably is part of the reason Bushmills built their first column still, as they had relied on Midleton for all their grain spirit up to this point. Midleton takes new-make malt from Bushmills and casks and matures it in Cork. I can remember having a chat with a member of the IDL team when they released the Method & Madness single malt in which they kept calling it Midleton malt, and I kept saying, but it was distilled in Bushmills, so it’s Bushmills malt. Perhaps we were both right (and wrong).

But one thing I was definitely wrong in was my idle thoughts about where the new distillery would be built and what it would make. Here’s a lightly edited press release:

Irish Distillers announces €250 million investment plan for new distillery in Midleton
- The new distillery is expected to be operational in 2025
- Once operational, it will create up to 100 new jobs for east Cork
- The new distillery will be situated on a site adjacent and connected to Midleton Distillery and will generate circa 800 construction jobs over three years
- The new distillery will be a carbon neutral operation, facilitated by the implementation of new and innovative MVR (Mechanical Vapour Recompression) technology to reuse waste heat and the use of biogas produced on site.
Cork, 5th September 2022: Irish Distillers, producer of some of the world’s most well-known and successful Irish whiskeys, has today announced it will invest 250 million euro to build a new distillery in Midleton Co. Cork in order to meet demand and ensure the necessary future production capacity for its portfolio of Irish whiskeys globally. The distillery will produce some of the world’s most well-known and successful Irish whiskeys, including Jameson, Powers, Redbreast, Midleton Very Rare, the Spot family and Method and Madness.

The new distillery will be situated on a 55-acre site adjacent and connected to the world-famous Midleton Distillery.

Subject to a successful planning application and meeting all licensing requirements, the new distillery will distil pot still and grain whiskey with grain intake, brewing, fermentation, and distillation facilities incorporated into the new 55-acre site.

The new distillery is expected to generate up to 100 highly skilled new jobs for the region over time once the distillery is operational in 2025, and circa 800 jobs during the construction phase.

Irish Distillers recently announced plans to invest €50 million to fund projects aimed at transforming Midleton Distillery into a carbon neutral operation by the end of 2026 by leveraging breakthrough emissions reducing technology to reduce energy use. In line with Irish Distillers’ ambition, the new distillery will also be a carbon neutral operation. The new site will also incorporate various environmental projects which will be developed in order to enhance biodiversity and protect local wildlife.

An expanded distilling capacity is expected to increase Midleton Distillery’s requirement for barley and malted barley by up to 50%, which the company intends to source from Irish farmers.

The Irish Distillers project team is partnering with engineering and architecture consultancy firm Arup on the initial design and with Harry Walsh Associates on the planning application. Irish Distillers is engaging with all relevant stakeholders and consulting with community groups in the locality as part of the pre-planning process. A planning application is expected to be submitted to Cork County Council towards the end of 2022 and, if successful, construction will commence in 2023 with plans for the distillery to be operational in 2025.

The distillery will also employ innovative Mechanical Vapor Recompression (MVR) technology which will see a closed loop system capture, compress and recycle waste heat in the distilling process. Renewable sources of energy, including green hydrogen and biogas will be used to power the distillery. Irish Distillers has partnered with local experts at EI-H2 to explore opportunities to source green hydrogen and carried out extensive research in partnership with MaREI, the SFI Research Centre for Energy, Climate and Marine, hosted by University College Cork, to determine the biomethane potential of the by-products of distillation and design the required anaerobic digestion process necessary to produce biogas. Irish Distillers will also partner with StanTech on wastewater treatment and biogas production.

In addition to its commitments to eliminate scope 1 and scope 2 emissions across both distilleries, Irish Distillers has also committed to working with suppliers on projects and initiatives to reduce scope 3 emissions across all areas of its business including raw materials, dry goods, transportation, logistics and freight.

So they are building another distillery, which is incredible if you consider the Garden Stillhouse has six 75,000-litre stills, and the Barry Crockett Stillhouse has four of equal size (rare pic of the inside of the Crockett building here). So that’s ten enormous stills going at it 24-7. Besides that there is the column still(s) of which there are five according to Whisky.com. That page also goes into the various styles of pot still whiskey made in Midleton, for this is not a monotonic entity – they produce all Jameson, all Powers, all Redbreasts, all the Spots, all Midleton Very Rare, and presumably all Paddy – although IDL sold the brand to Sazerac in 2016 and Sazerac since bought Lough Gill Distillery to house the brand, I assume full production has not left Midleton just yet.

Beyond all those brands, Midleton releases single casks, Method & Madness, and a bit of whatever you’re having yourself. In short, Midleton Distillery is less a one-man band and more of an orchestra.

The news of the new distillery – which, if the concept art is right, will have a sizable column still and nine pot stills – comes off the back of a bumper year for Pernod Ricard. In their FY22 results announced last week, sales grew by +17% organically, totalling €10,701m, but with Jameson recording 10.4 million nine-litre cases in the period, an organic net sales growth FY22 +24%. This means that within the Pernod Ricard spirits stable, Jameson is second only to Absolut’s 12.4 million cases.

On an earnings call on the day of the announcement, Pernod Ricard CEO Alexandre Ricard spoke about Jameson, saying that it was becoming a ‘cult’ brand in India, before praising its remarkable success: “I would just like to stress the excellent performance of Jameson up 24% with a three-year double-digit CAGR of 12%. We’ve broken the 10 million case milestone for Jameson this year, which is just amazing with the fastest growth rate in 30 years for the brand. Double-digit growth in the US with a very successful launch of our innovation, Jameson Orange, but I’d like to stress as well, the success of the internationalisation strategy of Jameson with growth accelerating to 38% outside of the US with great performance in India, as I mentioned, but South Africa as well, Nigeria and many, many other markets across the world. And I’d like also to underline the very strong performance of Jameson Black Barrel up 43%.”

Pernod Ricard had been under pressure from activist investor Elliott Management, so presumably this has eased off some of that. Or not. The Drinks Business has a different spin on the Pernod results, making it clear that the firm is not closing the gap on Diageo as they should: “Only a month ago, Diageo revealed organic net sales growth of up 21.4%, for the same 12 months, again with strong double-digit growth across all regions. Its organic operating profit grew by 26.3%, again with growth across all regions. Against this background, Diageo’s shares have fallen by about 7% this year, while Pernod Ricard’s are down by about 14%. Diageo’s share price stands at about 21.5 times forward earnings predictions while Pernod Ricard’s are valued marginally lower at 22 times.”

And while the domestic press may crow about Jameon’s record run, Diageo’s flagship Johnnie Walker brand sold twice as much in the same period – Johnnie Walker organic net sales grew 34% this year, surpassing 21 million nine-litre cases. A lot done, more to do, as the old political slogan says.

For the rest of the Irish whiskey category the results from Pernod were a reminder that what we call the Irish whiskey resurgence is still very much centred on one brand – Jameson makes up between 60% to 70% of all Irish whiskey sales worldwide. Then there is one very large market now closed off for an indefinite period:

More Irish whiskey was being sold into Russia than I would have thought – quite a hit to take https://t.co/SnbUiscpwn pic.twitter.com/sFievLhgjX
— Bill Linnane (@Bill_Linnane) July 13, 2022

Then there was the Shanken interview with IDL’s global marketing manager Brendan Buckley, which contained great news about various brands doing well and some worrying noises like this: “Next year is going to be a funny year between the geopolitical situation, a likely global recession, and the impact of inflation. We don’t know what will happen. One of the big topics being discussed across the industry is how everybody is going to put through some big price increases next year because of rising costs. For example, our deep-sea shipping costs have tripled.”

Yikes. He also described Redbreast 12 as a ‘steal’ at its current price so you might want to get thee down to Waitrose and start grabbing bottles.

So another distillery for Midleton, which has been the home of Irish whiskey for four decades now – not that you’d know it, given that Jameson only took Bow Street address off the labels in the last few years. I would contend that most Irish punters don’t know, or possibly care, just how important Midleton Distillery is. Bow Street, for all its tourism bells and whistles, is an animatronic corpse. Midleton is where Irish whiskey lives and breathes. Long may that continue.
Scottish Fiction

August 25th, 2022

I have a thing for Scotland. I’m not sure where it came from, but my dad probably had a lot to do with it. He loved history, especially Irish and Scottish, and would often talk about the general injustices meted out to the Scots by our common enemy. He viewed Scotland as being another Ireland (but never saw Ireland as another Scotland) and fostered in me the improbable notion that there is an unspoken kinship between our people, some ancient celtic bloodline that bound us. In retrospect, I think at least some of his affinity for the Scots was their Not-Englishness – born in the early years of the Irish state to the children of Famine survivors, he was a product of his times. But he also just liked the Scots. It was as simple, pure, and utterly nonsensical as that; all natives of Scotland were deemed to be ‘good eggs’ by him. Dennis Nilsen, Ian Brady, Edward Longshanks, The Scunner Campbell – a great bunch of lads.

So I grew up with a fondness for Scotland that was firmly in place long before I first visited the country in the Nineties. I’ve eulogised Edinburgh on this blog many, many times, but my love for the city isn’t based on any real understanding of it. It’s a series of brief encounters with the place, spread over several decades. I show up, eat, drink, and be merry, then leave. The roadworks never bother me – although I would question why they appear to be taking longer than the completion of La Sagrada Familia but with less impressive results – and neither does the high cost of living. I’m just a tourist, there for a good time.

So while I always jump in with a frighteningly enthusiastic ooooh I love Scotland any time the country gets mentioned, the fact is I know almost nothing of the place. In my mind I have a showreel of things I love about it – highlands, islands, castles – with a soundtrack by Idlewild, Twilight Sad, Mogwai, Glasvegas. Throw Ratcatcher, Braveheart, Local Hero into the pot too. It’s like a weird fetish. Even my rhapsodising about How Late It Was How Late or Edwin Morgan makes me sound like the banter boys from Chewin’ The Fat. The Scotland I love doesn’t exist anywhere outside my head. It’s a vague notion of a place built from books, films, TV, and occasional flaneurial sojourns to the country.

My love of whisky has only made this condition worse, and has also turned me into something of a Quisling, crowing about the greatness of Scottish whisky whilst occasionally pouring scorn on our domestic product. But a healthy domestic whiskey scene is one that can take the hits, that can withstand scrutiny and is one which has nothing to hide, not least in terms of where the stuff is actually being made.

This is Irish whiskey’s year zero. The old order, the great houses, the romantic icons and legends of yore are dead and gone, they are with with O’Leary in the grave. We had a rich prehistory of distilling, and then a long, sad decline. Much of the last century was spent trying to simply survive, with only Bushmills, Cooley and Midleton left to keep the flame lit. In that period, everything changed – a lot of our heritage and tradition was effectively forgotten, or lost. The past decade has seen a reversal of our fortunes (largely due, ironically enough, to one of the last great houses – Jameson) but for the vast majority of the Irish whiskey scene, there is little direct lineage back to the olden times. You can mourn the loss, or see this as an opportunity to start anew, unburdened of history. So we can build this as we go, and our friends across the water can be a blueprint on how to elevate whisky to the point where it is part of our identity. Whisky is Scotland’s national drink – they have an entire category that is synonymous with their country, and their people, whereas we only have one brand, one style, as our national drink – Guinness.

Anyone who has been on whisky trips will tell you just how ingrained in the culture whisky is in Scotland. This aura of whisky is captured in the documentary The Amber Light, which explores Scotland through the prism of their national drink and how it has permeated music, art, culture, and memory, with whisky writer Dave Broom as host, guide and subject.

Dave Broom in a still from The Amber Light.

The director of The Amber Light is Adam Park, so as the film landed on Netflix this year, I thought I would ask how it came about, starting with his own history: “I bounced around quite a lot as a kid but moved to Dublin from South Africa when I was 11 or so, and lived in the city until I was 22. Mostly hanging out and DJ-ing at clubs like the Funnel and Switch, heavily into music and making videos. Those are my two loves. So I moved to London to study film, started at the bottom and worked my way up, really.”

The making of The Amber Light was fuelled by crowdfunding, something which Park says was the plan from the beginning.

“It served a number of functions; not just to raise cash but also to build an audience and act as a bit of marketing to get the word out. A sort of built-in PR story. As challenging as it was, I’d not entirely dissuade people from going down that route, depending on the project.

“Then the rest of the budget was pulled together from a few other sources, mostly private, and there’s the BFI tax credit for production which comes in once the film is finished to hopefully fill in some of the gaps.

“It’s not impossible to get funding, but yes it’s pretty hard. It’s very chicken-and-egg. There are pockets of money and it’s accessible with a combination of access, luck, experience and having the right project. It’s a little easier from country to country, some cultures place more importance on this kind of stuff than others, so it can become a political football.”

And despite the well-documented difficulties in getting funding for film – or simply getting a film made – Park and his team did not want to take money from the whisky industry itself.

“We were very careful from the beginning not to take booze money, for editorial reasons. We tried very hard to ensure the film was brand agnostic, which I think we succeeded in. Obviously we couldn’t do it without mentioning the big whisky firms, but I’m happy with the balance we achieved.”

So what lessons, if any, does Park think we could learn from the Scots on whisky, given that we are effectively at the start of our journey whereas the Scots are two centuries into theirs.

“I’m not entirely sure how much Ireland should learn from Scotch whisky, to be honest. If there is, it’s mostly a question of perspective. And I’m not sure I agree that Ireland is at the start of its journey. Jameson and Bushmills, for example – an interesting dichotomy there, that touches on so much of Irish history, even ignoring the sometimes odd mythology that has built up around it.

“I am no expert on process and the actual making of the spirit, but it strikes me that there’s as much richness in story in Ireland as there is in Scotland. Anywhere that has a strong cultural connection to spirits, like Mexico, Caribbean, Kentucky, it’s going to touch on all sorts of things because it’s been there so long, and it’s been bringing people together for so long, helping to build community and become part of the culture.

“There’s also so much that Ireland and Scotland share; not just whisk(e)y, but culturally, in language, music, and so on. Literature. Poetry. A love of self-flagellation. It is an interesting point that Ireland’s drink really is Guiness rather than stout, which maybe it should be. But that as in most things is down to clever branding people somewhere along the way. As ever, business decisions can be fundamental to success (though not always – Scotch has had ups and downs and circumstance can take a lot of credit for where they sit today), no more so than in Irish whiskey. And at the moment where the Scots got it right, the Irish didn’t, but are now going through a bit of a renaissance.”

There are a few films about whisky – documentaries which veer from the po-faced, hyper-reverential visual essays to Brigadoonesque, tartan-soaked sales pitches. Dramatic films usually only feature it as a flimsy narrative device that offers little to the true nerd. The Amber Light is a film on whisky as much as a film about whisky – it frames Scotland’s national drink as muse, as landscape, as sound. Is it an accurate portrayal? This I could not say – it feeds into my amber-tinted views of the Scotland I claim to know, but show it to an actual Scot and they may see a completely alien place.

The question it left me with was how long will it take before Ireland could make a similar film; how long before the words national drink bring to mind something other than a big black and white pint; how long until Irish whiskey has soaked down into art and literature in the same way it has in Scotland? And what will it take to achieve that?

The Amber Light is available on Netflix now.
The Quiet Corner

August 23rd, 2022
Just outside the small Scottish village of Pencaitland, nestled in a pleasant green valley, lies Glenkinchie Distillery. It’s not an especially well known distillery, nor does it have much in terms of underground cred; I’ve never heard anyone speak in hushed tones about any bottlings, indie or otherwise, from there. It seems odd that for a distillery with a capacity of more than two million litres of pure alcohol per annum, you hear so little about it. Perhaps hoping to rectify that – or to simply pull in more tourism from Scotland’s capital Edinburgh which lies about 20 kilometres to the west – the distillery has recently been anointed as one of the ‘four corners’ of the Walker brand. Rebranded as ‘the lowland home of Johnnie Walker’, Glenkinchie recently underwent a multimillion pound revamp of its tourism offering, as did the other three corners – Caol Ila on the island of Islay, Clynelish in the Highlands, and Cardhu on Speyside. Glenkinchie is, to my mind, the least well-known of all these – it’s like the bass player in the band; nobody raves about them until they get killed in a bus crash. Most of the time you would barely know they were there, but take them away, and an absence is felt. This is Glenkinchie’s blessing and curse – essential and taken for granted all at once. One of the first Scotch whiskies I tried was the ubiquitous Glenkinchie 12 year old and I always found it to be a delightful, good value, easy drinking whisky. But aside from that, I knew almost nothing about the distillery, save that it was the closest distillery to the home of an old friend who lives in Tranent.

I had briefly considered a tour of the distillery five years ago, but arriving on a crowded day to a very stressed staff member who seemed not best pleased to see more cats to herd through the site, we thought it best to leave it to another day. My recent trip could not have been more different – our guide, John, knew the names of all 12 people on the tour, chatted to us all one by one, and was affable and genial throughout. He was born in the area and had worked at the distillery for about 12 years and his family’s links to Glenkinchie went back a few generations. He told us that what made Glenkinchie unique was its people and its place – East Lothian is known for its fertile land and if you come to the area at the right time of year you will see miles and miles of golden barley fields. Some 80% of the barley used at Glenkinchie comes from the surrounding farmland, according to our guide.

The tour starts with the ringing of a bell, previously used to signal the start of the working day and to call the workers to a morning dram. I’ve heard various accounts of the old practice of dramming in distilleries but few have stuck in my head like one delivered by a distillery manager on Speyside in 2015, who gave a scathing interpretation of what is often portrayed as a cosy bit of lore. He told us that workers in those days were effectively addicts, enslaved to the product they were making, as it dulled their minds and often broke their spirits. He said that workers did not fight for their rights as they should have because they were alcoholics. It was a rare moment of clarity about dramming, but not the sort of message you’d want to start a tour with. Our guide in Glenkinchie made brief mention of the practice, with no moral judgement, how it ended in the 1970s, and we moved on to a history of the distillery.

John Johnstone, our tour guide, with a farmhouse still at the start of the Glenkinchie tour.

Founded in 1825 by farmers John and George Rate, Glenkinchie started life as Milton Distillery until it was licensed and renamed in 1837. In 1853 they were bankrupted, the site was converted to a sawmill, and then later turned back into a distillery. There is an excellent in-depth history on the oft-lamented ScotchWhisky.com which covers most of the two centuries Glenkinchie has been pumping out malt which rolls off the stills with a sulphuric element likened to ‘over-boiled broccoli’ but which softens in cask to a biscuity, floral number.

After a brief history of both the distillery and the Johnnie Walker brand itself, it was time for what one might call the experiential part of the tour. You can revamp a distillery, rebuild it all in exposed brick and beam and have the best tour guides in the world, but in a world where aesthetics are becoming more and more a part of drinking culture, you will need something more. Hardcore whisky fans tend to roll their bloodshot eyes at the more showbiz elements of modern distillery tours, but I love them. Blending light and sound with flavour is a fantastic way to deliver a message to newcomers, and the Glenkinchie tour was no different. In a room designed to look like a fairytale bower we sat around a large table; in front of each pair of us were three bell jars, and under each were three key scents of the distillery’s malt. One by one we were asked to raise the jar and identify the scent, all the while being entertained by synchronised video projections onto the table, lights underneath it and ambient music. It created an experience that was immersive and memorable. Most importantly, it was something that has to be experienced – photos, videos, and my inept descriptions will not do it justice. You have to be there.

Visuals illustrate the grassy notes in Glenkinchie whisky.

I had a similar experience in Strathisla where tubes of light were used to illustrate a message about flavour (or to represent the firing of the synapses in the brain, take your pick) and I loved that too. All of these devices are about entertainment and storytelling, and while they may seem frivolous to some diehard fans who want to talk copper and yeast, they have a hugely important role to play in engaging newcomers to the category. The Walker four corners all have had revamps in this style, which only give a taste of the brand HQ in Prince’s Street in the former House Of Fraser building. It is a sight to behold, offering five floors of Instagrammable splendour. If the four corners are the satellites of the Walker empire, Princes Street is the mothership. Again, hardcore whisky fans might say that the HQ is utterly detached from the reality of production and as such has nothing to do with whisky. Without branding, without marketing, without various forms of commercial storytelling, whisky is nothing. It would be an inert liquid sold in unmarked bottles. Where is the joy in that? Johnnie Walker himself was not a distiller – he was a salesman, a shop owner, who understood that appearance is important when selling goods, be it his natty attire or his shop window. We covet first with our eyes.

The standard 12-year-old release from Glenkinchie.

The company that oversaw the recent redesign of the Diageo visitors centres is BRC Imagination Arts – they were also behind visitors centres at NASA Kennedy Space Centre, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the new Las Vegas Raiders tour Experience at Allegiant Stadium, The Grand Ole Opry Backstage Tour, and The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, along with the Guinness Storehouse (the biggest tourist attraction in Ireland) and the rebooted Jameson Heritage Centre at Bow Street. In operation for four decades, they are masters of the experiential tour. According to our guide, the four corners all have elements of their tours which link them but this was not a copy and paste – each one has moments that make it unique and which speak to the distillery’s unique heritage.

Two massive stills.

Back to Glenkinchie. There are two items of note in the distillery – one is the largest wash still on mainland Scotland – the spirit still has a capacity of 17,200 litres, while the wash still holds up to 30,963 litres (Islay’s Bunnahabhain Distillery boasts two wash stills with a capacity of 35,386 litres each). This monster was replaced in 2008 and the roof had to be taken off and the new still hoisted into place, as it was too vast to enter any other way.

Two tiny stills.

The second item of note is that the distillery is also home to two of the smallest stills in Scotland, just part of a one-sixth size model of a malt whisky distillery built by Basset-Lowke of Northampton for the British Empire Exhibition, Wembley, of 1924-25 (there is a video of it here). According to our guide, excise gaugers used to check the tiny stills annually to make sure they were not in use.

At one point during the tour, our guide told us about a young physics student who took an interest in whisky, starting with the tourism side then moving into production before going to work in a distillery in Tasmania. He then returned home where he continued to work in the industry and is now master blender with Edrington’s The Famous Grouse. This, our guide told us, was his son, Craig (who featured on a BBC documentary series a couple of years ago when he was working at Lark). So despite the vastness of the Scotch whisky industry, at its core is a relatively small community – from those who make it to those who drink it and everyone in between. But it also gave us a really human moment on the tour – a father, speaking with immense pride of his son, and the career he had forged in the industry. Frankly, no amount of chemistry chat or distillery spec can compare. That said, here’s some distillery spec:
- The washback woods are mixed – some made from Oregon pine, some from Canadian larch, and they range from a few years old to a staggering 40 years of service.
- Glenkinchie used to do a peated ten year old single but stopped in 2005 and peat has not played a role there since.
- The maltings – out of use since 1968 in favour of Roseisle – predate the Victorian red-brick of the distillery, as can be seen in photos.
- The ‘unusually hard’ process waters are drawn from an on-site well having previously come from Hopes Reservoir in the Lammermuir Hills; the cooling waters come from the Kinchie Burn.
- The distillery uses a steel wormtub with an odd rectangular coil.
- Only 250,000 bottles of Glenkinchie are sold in a year, which means their bottling output – as opposed to their far more significant blending output – can be distilled within a three-week period.
- Unlike other distilleries that had a cat to keep the moose unloose aboot the hoose, Glenkinchie had a dog (photo from c. 1900 of the workers and dog here). The dog has been immortalised in statue form with the striding man to the front of the building.
Our guide gets us seated in the tasting room.

The close of the tour was the tasting, where we were given the 12 year old, the 2022 Tattoo release, Johnnie Walker Gold Label Reserve, and a highball for good measure. My personal favourite was the 12 – I felt the Tattoo lacked depth and the Walker, while showcasing Glenkinchie’s role in the brand, felt mildly irrelevant. The highball was great though. My friend – and designated driver – was given a nifty box with three sample bottles in it to decant his samples into. This should be on offer at all distilleries – there will come a time when takeaway samples from distillery tours will be the default so you might as well start getting ready for that day.

So in summary – is it worth a trip? If you are in Edinburgh or its environs, yes. If you are in the Outer Hebrides, perhaps not. It’s a great tour, and we were very lucky to have such a great guide, but this is not a pilgrimage distillery – not a sacred site, a place of holy worship. It’s a grunt. It would be nice to see that change, for there to be more accessible bottlings than the 12 (there are older expressions in the gift shop but these all sit in the premium range and as such are invisible to me). Perhaps that will happen – the rest of the four corners all have their space on the shelf, so surely there is room for the Edinburgh malt?

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To Those Who Wait

May 20th, 2022
The dancefloor of Auntie Annie’s indie club in Belfast seems like an unlikely setting for the start of a Northern Irish distilling success story, but it was there in 2006 where David Armstrong and Fiona Boyd first locked eyes. David, an aerospace engineer, and Fiona, a property surveyor, connected immediately over their shared love for all things food and drink, but it was Fiona who dreamed of starting a distillery, as David explains: “The idea for the distillery belongs wholly to Fiona. Fiona had been reading about the lost distilleries of Ireland, I think it was the Townsend book, around the time her family took on Rademon Estate and at that time she had mentioned to her father about building a distillery. He immediately dismissed the idea, told her she was crazy and to keep doing what she knew.

“But Fiona, just like her father [Northern Ireland property developer Frank Boyd], knows her mind and some years later when we got married in 2011 we both knew we wanted to own and manage our own business. We are both so passionate about food and drink, the food scene on the island of Ireland and, locally for us in County Down, is world class. Ideally, we would have loved a vineyard in France but as we live in County Down and not Bordeaux, Fiona again suggested a distillery and I naively said yes.

“From 2011 to 2013 during every holiday and weekend we travelled the world doing distilling classes and visiting distilleries; we ordered our first still in January 2013, it arrived summer 2013, then we undertook recipe development whilst continuing in our day jobs, eventually we both left our jobs in 2014 and we launched Shortcross Gin in April 2014, so we celebrated eight years as a distillery this April.”

If that makes it all sound easy, it isn’t; while many distilleries built on the island of Ireland in the past decade use sourced stock as a revenue generator, Rademon opted not to.

“To be honest, if you asked me in 2014 to go out and source an Irish whiskey I don’t feel I would have been the right person to do it. We always believed that you need to learn your trade, this is important for me personally having served an apprenticeship, so we focused on learning how to make and understand our own whiskey in the first instance. We are at heart a craft distillery – we only sell what we produce, and that is an important ethos for us.”

Fortunate then that their gin was such a success, winning multiple awards and spreading out to sizable markets such as the US and Canada. The distillery even produced a special limited edition gin with a royal touch – Hillsborough Castle and Gardens Shortcross edition features rose petals handpicked from Queen Elizabeth II’s Granville Rose Garden at Hillsborough Castle – the queen’s official residence in Northern Ireland. Shortcross is also the official gin of Royal Down Racecourse (Fiona’s mother Rose is well known in equestrian circles as the co-owner of the legendary Hurricane Fly).

But their gins aren’t simply a money-spinnner for Rademon while they wait for the whiskey to mature.

“Gin has become a byword by the media as a means to an end for new distilleries, we would love to invite those people to come and work at the distillery for the day to see the effort that goes into creating Shortcross Gin. We love gin and to make a great gin you need to be passionate about it.

“The skills we have learnt from gin have been key to creating our whiskey, namely the ability to nose and taste flavours and put them all together.”

As the gin became a success in its own right, they started to look into making whiskey.

“In 2014 we were in the US and visiting distilleries when we had the realisation that to grow the distillery we would need to look at other categories. Now, one thing about both of us is that we believe you should only make what you love, and over the previous two years I had started to get into whiskey, particularly malt whiskey, following a tasting of Connemara Turf Mór at Belfast International Airport. That tasting blew my mind and I was determined that we should make malt whiskey and with that, some with plenty of smoke too. We began distilling whiskey in our 450-litre copper pot still in 2015 and filled our first casks in August 2015 and continue to do so today.”

The inaugural Rademon Estate Distillery whiskey was released late last year – Shortcross Irish Whiskey, a double-distilled, five-year-old single malt, matured fully in Grand Cru Classe Bordeaux Red Wine casks before being finished in chinquapin oak – the first time this cask combination was used in Irish whiskey. It takes a patient person to wait to the five-year mark when it could legally be sold at three, but David felt it was worth it (and there was the small matter of a global pandemic).

“If Covid hadn’t arrived, we would have done something in 2020 but having the space to let things mature a little longer has allowed us to craft a release we can really be proud of. Personally, we thought the five-year mark, well actually it’s almost six years, was a good point to release this. The balance was just there in the whiskey and we knew it was good, so Fiona and I knew it was the right time to go for it. You have to believe in yourself and the liquid, bringing together the joy of seven years’ hard work of getting to this huge moment in time of releasing your very own whiskey.”

Obviously there was a lot of excitement for whiskey lovers – this was a release that was a long time coming – and then it won Best New Irish Whiskey at the Irish Whiskey Awards last year.

“To win the award was mind blowing. I was also known to have shed a tear that evening, it was the culmination of seven years hard work to put our very own Shortcross whiskey out there, that I single handedly worked on from mashing in, fermenting, distilling and filling the casks. We entered the awards without anyone having tasted it or giving us a nod that we were on the right path. We were overwhelmed by the positive response and support we received following the award.”

But along with the giddy highs, there was the reaction to the price – stg£300 – in the whiskey community.

“There was a small collective of negativity on social media, that just did not give up and became so vitriolic. I don’t think you could ever please these people and that says more about them than it does about us. Our first ever release was a small, limited release of less than 700 bottles, 656 in total. Two casks. It was a momentous and historic moment, Shortcross was the first Irish whiskey to be wholly distilled and released by a new Irish whiskey distillery in Northern Ireland since the 1920s and the first new Irish whiskey to be released outside of the Old Bushmills Distillery since the closure of Old Comber and Coleraine distilleries. It breaks the chain of Bushmills-only releases and that is something really important in the rebirth of the industry in Northern Ireland.”

But while the first release was limited and had a pricetag to reflect that, their next release is both affordable, available, and intriguing, as David explains.

“We like to do things a little differently so our second release is something completely different – Shortcross Rye & Malt Irish Whiskey. This coincided with a couple of things that happened in 2017 and then ultimately ended up with us visiting rye whiskey distilleries in Maryland, which is the birthplace of American Rye whiskey.

“When we got back to the distillery we began to explore how we could create a rye-influenced Irish whiskey, after many iterations and failings along the way we found that the best way for what we wanted to achieve this was to use malted rye rather than raw rye to amplify the fruit notes and tame the spice.

“The whiskey starts life with a mash bill of 30% to 50% malted rye and the remainder malted barley. The wash is fermented for 140 to 160 hours, allowing time for a secondary fermentation to kick in. This helps create flavour from the very start of the process, through distillation and on to maturation. We then double distil the spirit on our 450L and 1,750L copper pot stills, with the 450L being one of the smallest stills used for whiskey on the island of Ireland.

“For maturation we used a combination of first fill ex-bourbon casks and also virgin chinkapin oak casks, which create rich flavours of fudge, stem ginger and spice.

“It’s a great whiskey and one we are seriously proud of. We can’t wait now to see it in the wild and in the hands of whiskey drinkers.”

Thanks to the generosity of Rademon, a bottle of it is now in the hands of this whiskey drinker. So what to think: All of the above, nutmeg, spice, hints of mace and whispers of aniseed; heather and manuka honey. Sweet, smooth, spicy. For a first release it holds excellent promise, although that is probably damning it with faint praise. But it is an important whiskey, for all the historic and cultural reasons listed above.

There are distilleries all over the island of Ireland that get a lot of attention – some spend a fortune on PR, some are controversial, some are just loud. There are others who are quiet. This, for me, has been part of the intrigue with Rademon – a distillery that is just quietly working away, with no fuss. The fact they never released a sourced whiskey just adds to their mystique; no resurrected brand from the days of yore, no press releases spoofing on about heritage, just a distillery quietly making gin and whiskey – new, fresh, interesting. The fact they opted to release a rye and malt whiskey as their first widely available release shows a confidence – they also have a peated 50PPM whiskey so they don’t seem overly concerned with creating a potentially polarising product.

The rye and malt more than lives up to my expectations – it’s an interesting, easy drinker, but more importantly it is something new; this isn’t some murkily rebranded West Cork Distillers/Great Northern/Bushmills/Cooley whiskey that somehow, no matter the finish, always tastes more or less the same. This is a new sensation – a new Irish whiskey, a new Northern Irish whiskey, and one that was worth the wait.
- Rademon Estate Distillery’s Shortcross Rye & Malt Whiskey is available from their webshop – 46%, non-chill filtered and all natural colour, it is priced at stg£65.
Prologues and epilogues

March 29th, 2022

“We have always been storytellers” – Kevin Keenan, Glendalough Distillery co-founder.

Glendalough Distillery is one of the success stories of the Irish whiskey resurgence. Founded in 2011 by a group of friends, their prominence in the media came from a combination of being early adopters of an exciting new trend and some high profile investors. One could also say that the business’s proximity to the Dublin media bubble helped (along with the team’s own media savvy), but their brand and their story was always strong – little wonder, given that several of the founders worked in branding, marketing, and advertising for some heavy hitters like Tullamore DEW and Jameson (another two of the founders were data analysts for Davy Stockbrokers). But beyond the brand, and the narrative, I knew little of Glendalough, but here is what I do know:

Founded in 2011, they didn’t start distilling until 2013 when they made their first gin (which means they are far from being Ireland’s oldest craft distillery – Longueville House was making apple brandy in 1985). They distilled some whiskey in 2015 before the technical file outlawed bringing in the wash from elsewhere. Also, one factoid that always stayed with me was that all of the founders happened to have the same favourite monk.

I’ve never been clear about the rest of the Glendalough story, despite co-founder Brian Fagan getting in touch in 2018 to explain a bit about where they were in their journey. He told me that they bought a site on Glendalough Green in 2016 and were considering their options about what size and style of distillery to build there. He said that they would have planning in place by the end of that year, but that in the meantime they were ordering more Holstein stills and would be distilling whiskey from their current site (an industrial estate in Newtownmountkennedy) by autumn 2018. In January 2019 Fagan emailed to say their new stills were in situ and were waiting to be commissioned, and that he would give me an update on their plans that I could feature on my blog. I haven’t heard from him since, but then 2019 was something of a momentous year for the firm so maybe it slipped his mind.

Canadian drinks firm Mark Anthony Brands invested €5.5 million in Glendalough in 2016, and then, in 2019, they bought out the rest of the company, giving shareholders a €12 million euro windfall. Brian Fagan moved on and started another drinks firm into which rugby legend Brian O’Driscoll again ploughed some money, so when I was sent a bottle of the new Glendalough seven-year-old single malt finished in a Mizunara cask, I asked the PR firm for that long overdue update. Firstly, I asked where they were on the planned purpose-built whiskey distillery which had been a feature of their soundbites for more than a decade. This was their response:

“In line with the continued growth in our gin and whiskey portfolio, our ambition remains to develop a new brand home for Glendalough. Plans are progressing well.”

Eagle-eyed readers will note the word distillery does not feature there. And while plans for whatever a ‘brand home’ constitutes may be progressing well, a quick search on the Wicklow County Council planning website shows there have been no plans submitted by Glendalough Distillery or Mark Anthony Brands for either a distillery, or a brand home, or anything, ever.

I also asked them about their distillations of whiskey in the past, and what amount they were distilling now – ie, casks per week – and what age the oldest stock they have of their own whiskey. This was the response:

“We set up whiskey stills a number of years ago, and have ambitious plans for our own liquid. Watch this space…but it takes time and we are patient.”

Again, a swerve. Setting up whiskey stills and distilling whiskey are not the same thing. From that response I can only assume they never actually got around to distilling whiskey after their initial attempts in 2015. Even the BBC Good Food website seems confused about Glendalough, saying in February of this year that their distillery was still being commissioned.

I also asked what percentage of the whiskey sold under the Glendalough Distillery brand worldwide was actually distilled in Glendalough distillery, and if there was a plan to phase out sourced stock, and if so, when would that happen. This was their response:

“While we continue to distil our award winning gins in Wicklow directly, our Single Malts, Single Grain and Single Pot Still are currently distilled elsewhere in Ireland to Glendalough’s specification. We are happy to be transparent about that and this is stated on our back labels. As mentioned above, we have our own whiskey liquid in the works. We plan to continue to source stocks while waiting on our own whiskey, distilled in Glendalough Distillery in the future. Between now and then, we will continue our relentless search to find the world’s best, rarest, most flavoursome oak to age and finish our whiskeys.”

Frankly, I am no wiser as to what the Glendalough brand is – indie bottler? NDP? ‘Brand’? Their pot still release from a couple of years back was meant to be the start of a transition to their own stock – the reason it’s not single pot still is they hoped to blend their own with it over time. I’m going to assume that transition never happened.

As for their claim about how the sourcing of their whiskey is clearly stated on the labels, this is what they were talking about:

Squint hard, gentle reader, and you will see that it does indeed say ‘produced for Glendalough Distillery’ in there among the jumble of info that nobody ever reads. But another thing I noticed about the bottle is that it no longer has Glendalough Distillery embossed on the glass.

A screenshot of the Glendalough whiskey webshop showing the new bottle without the words Glendalough Distillery printed on the glass.

Perhaps this is a sign that they are preparing to transition from aspirational whiskey distillers to a simple whiskey brand. Nothing wrong with that, and I’m not saying the founders are the boys who cried distillery but it does feel like a can was kicked far past the point of reason. I can tolerate whiskey being sold under the brand of a planned distillery, but only for so long. There comes a point where I expect you to piss or get off the pot still, and that point was several years ago.

As for the whiskey within – I had a bottle of the old Glendalough seven a few years back and it was a cracker – very similar to the cask strength Whistler Blue Note. But this Mizunara finished one is a completely different animal – I’m going to assume a different distillery was the source for this. It’s good, odd, not sure I’d be racing out to get myself any other whiskey anointed by the famously awkward Mizunara wood, but it’s a pleasant diversion. A similar price point to the Athru I reviewed recently and I would favour that over this, despite my preference for age statements over NAS. The packaging here is beautiful, but as I said at the start, the branding was always solid – although the Gandalf-esque image of St Kevin is, in fact, crap. A shame really, given that he was their favourite monk.
The Aesthetics of Industry

March 16th, 2022

Most of Ireland’s distilleries were built in the last decade. We don’t really have beautiful historic distilleries like Scotland does. Not that their distilleries are all postcard scenes from the days of yore – for every chocolate box distillery like Strathisla there is a more utilitarian operation like Tamdhu. But Ireland has an amazing array of buildings housing distilleries – from Dingle, housed in a steel shed built onto a historic sawmill, to the farm distilleries in what looks like a haybarn, to the purpose built compact and bijou ones like Connacht, we have a bit of everything. While there are some curious distilleries built in curious places, few compare to the setting of Lough Gill Distillery.

Hazelwood House has quite the history – it was the first Palladian house in Ireland designed by Richard Cassels, who also designed Leinster House, Russborough House, and Powerscourt House. It was built in 1731, then occupied by Wynne family for 200 years, then lay empty from 1923 to 1930. The estate around the house was sold to the Land Commission and State Forestry Department in 1937, the house was occupied by the Irish Army in 1943, then purchased by Department of Health in 1947 for use as psychiatric hospital, and then, in what would become one the oddest developments for a stately home, it was bought by an Italian manufacturing company in 1969 and incorporated into a massive factory complex producing nylon yarn. The factory closed in 1983 and was bought in 1987 by the South Korean company SaeHan Information Systems, who produced video tapes on the site until 2005.

This is, to me, the defining image of Hazelwood – this beautiful historic home, sat on a peninsula jutting into Lough Gill, surrounded by woodland, with a sprawling factory out the back. It’s like a Terry Gilliam-directed steampunk dreamscape – aristocracy and industry colliding, Howl’s Moving Distillery. Of course it is easy to furrow the brow and ask, WTF were the planners thinking. But this was an area starved of jobs in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, so when someone came to them and said they wanted to open a factory and create hundreds of jobs, I would imagine aesthetics went out the window. You can’t eat the scenery.

From the Strathislas to the Macallans, distilleries are basically chemical plants. There is a frankness about Lough Gill that makes it stand out – that this is an industrial chemical process, and dressing it up in thatch and slate is deception. Of course, it does have impressive frontage – a stately home to whisper heritage and authenticity, and then a brutal factory reveal to say, we make booze, so suck it losers. I like the chaos of it.

David Raethorne is the entrepreneur behind Lough Gill. A software engineer by trade, he founded healthcare software business Helix Health in 1987, which was bought by US investment group Eli Global in 2014 for a reported €40m. Raethorne was also an early investor in Smiles Dental, which sold to Oasis Dental in 2014 for €36m. After buying Hazelwood eight years ago, he unveiled his plans for a distillery, raising €3.5m through the tax-efficient employment and investment incentive scheme (EIIS) in 2019, and in May 2021 they secured €15 million debt financing from Pittsburgh-based PNC Bank. The old adage about how to make a small fortune in whiskey – start out with a large fortune – springs to mind, but Raethorne isn’t prone to failure.

The extra funds have allowed them to ramp up production since their Frilli stills were commissioned in 2019 – from July last year the plant was to start 24-hour production (resulting in 14 casks filled a week) under the stewardship of their Australian distiller, Ollie Alcorn. Hailing from the wine-producing Barossa Valley near Adelaide, this wouldn’t be Alcorn’s first rodeo – mainly because he used to work in an actual rodeo, as well as working on pearl diving boats, and in the wine industry. Alcorn’s wife Isabel is Irish and after moving to Dublin in 2008 they made the sensible decision to leave it and ended up in Sligo. With his background in drinks he was made head distiller at Lough Gill, and then guided by Scotch whisky legend Billy Walker in all aspects of whiskey production. It’s also worth noting that Lough Gill plans to make single malt, and single malt only – no clear spirits, no single pot still, no grain.

Raethorne’s plans for the house include using its vaults for whiskey tastings, but even as the proud owner of a sprawling distillery and warehouse complex, he admits it is an eyesore and suggested disguising it with a water feature. But in the meantime, while they wait for their own stock to mature, Lough Gill has released some sourced whiskeys.

I have made the point many times that I understand why distilleries source whiskey, but that doesn’t mean I’m not disappointed when they do. I know they need or want money, but it is a lessening of the brand in my eyes when they chuck out another distillery’s product with their own distillery’s name on it. Lough Gill’s whiskey brand, Athrú, is not conspicuously branded with Lough Gill Distillery logos, but they are there, embossed on the glass, and on the label, along with the words ‘produced by Lough Gill Distillery’ which again raises questions about what the definition of producing whiskey actually is. Distilling? Maturation? Fiddling about with cask finishes? Bottling? Branding? Getting it on shelves in Tesco? Lough Gill is currently distilling their own barley to add oomph to their future provenance but in the here and now it’s a bit all over the place. Maybe sticking ‘produced for’ on there would work a bit better.

I was sent a bottle of their small batch blended malt for review. I’ll let the press release take it from here:

Athrú Whiskey has launched its first small batch release, a triple-casked malt Irish whiskey. This inaugural small batch release highlights a blend of three unique casks of six-year old Oloroso, six year-old Bourbon and 17-year old madeira finishes.

Limited to just 3,000 bottles and bottled at 46% abv, this perfect blend of malt Irish whiskey gives Athrú a combination of dried fruits and spiced vanilla with a subtle toffee finish.

Athrú Whiskey Head Distiller Ollie Alcorn said “I carefully select the best of each batch of casks’ to create our small batch, limited releases. After rooting through the warehouse, I’ve picked a moreish combination of Bourbon, Oloroso and Madeira, a Portuguese fortified wine which adds depth and sweetness. Together, they produce notes of dried fruits and spiced vanilla with a subtle toffee finish. This release takes us on a deep dive into further exploration of wood-finishing, allowing us to show a more experimental side to our approach.”

Commenting on the launch, distillery founder David Raethorne said “We are delighted to launch our first small batch release. This release will be of particular interest to those who have followed our journey since our first whiskey release in 2016 but also for those who want to experience the art of the Athrú Whiskey wood finishing process. At Lough Gill Distillery, we always endeavour to create really special and unique products and we think this is evident in this special Small Batch Release. We are really proud of this launch and can’t wait for whiskey fans to try it.”

NOSE: warming dried fruit that mingles with softly spiced vanilla and almond, with hints of lemon zest.

TASTE: the raisin note continues nestled within caramel, praline and butterscotch sweetness.

FINISH: gentle finish that fades leaving toffee and brown sugar notes.

The Athrú Small Batch Release Bottle is priced €85 and available to order from athru.com or select stockists nationwide.

To the cons – sourced whiskey, opaque provenance, high price. Scallywag, a blended malt from Speyside, is about 30 euro less, and similar in flavour profile. But this is Irish whiskey so complaining about the price is pointless. Also, I did get the bottle for free, so there’s that.

The pros – an excellent blended malt in a lovely bottle. A hideous distillery behind a beautiful ruin. An interesting proposition, aesthetically and every other way. Look, they could have resurrected some old west of Ireland whiskey brand and shoved out a sourced whiskey under that, but they didn’t and went for something more modern and bold, and that is to be commended. I really enjoyed this whiskey – shave 20 euro off that asking price and my enthusiasm would reach the point of recommending it to others, although I would probably end up adding numerous caveats about the hows and whys of sourced whiskey. This is why I don’t work in sales.
The Apostasy

February 28th, 2022

In 1996, a documentary film named Microcosmos was released. Eschewing the norms of nature documentary making, the French team behind it didn’t focus on loveable mammals, noble sea creatures, or elegant avians – they filmed bugs. They captured all the highs and lows of invertebrate life – love, peace, and war. Using specialist cameras they captured the raging battles that go on under our feet, unbeknownst to us. I think of these tiny battles when I see people arguing online about terroir in whisky. Whiskey fandom is niche enough without disappearing into a micro-universe of debate. There are some things in this whiskey-soaked world we inhabit that are worth arguing about, and terroir ain’t one of them.

The debate over whether whisky is all about terroir or all about the wood is akin to the debate about nature versus nurture; are we who we are because of genetics, or is it shaped by who nurtures us? To its true believers, terroir is the DNA of a whisky – those initial flavour elements we can taste when it rolls off the still are as a result of the place where the barley was grown (amongst other factors in the distillation process, obviously). Terroir tells us that the gestation of the barley in the earth shapes how the whisky will taste; that is the time in the womb; it is nature.

Nurture is the rest – the distilling, the time spent in cask; the socialising and rounding of the spirit into a complete and mature entity. This is, of course, just my take on it – your mileage may vary and your opinion may well differ. That is ok. I don’t really care that much about it. Obviously, Mark Reynier cares rather a lot – after selling Bruichladdich on Islay to Remy Cointreau he bought an old Guinness brewery in Waterford, transformed it into a distillery, and then built a remarkable brand. I have written extensively about this distillery and its owner, but here is a recap.

From the outset, Waterford was all about the barley. All about the farmers, the field, the soil, the grain. They singled out farms, and fields within those farms, grew barley on them and then distilled field by field. They claim that different soil types and the respective microclimates that nurture them give barley a unique flavour. So far so good. But why not just make a loaf of bread out of the barley to see if this field differs from that field? Or just eat some kernels and see how they taste? That was too simple, and besides, this was about flavour survival; this was about those unique compounds being evident after the various brutalities of the distilling process; the crushing, mashing, brewing, boiling and condensing. How could any unique flavour survive that?

To back up their claims about terroir Waterford Distillery took part in a Teagasc-backed scientific study into the existence of terroir in whisky which found that it does exist (although the study was on new-make rather than mature whisky). While this was heralded by terroir’s true believers as a momentous occasion, I’m not entirely sure that there were many who outright denied that terroir in whisky existed. Most of the arguments I have encountered against the concept were based on the fact that terroir would be of minimal importance, especially when compared against key flavour-defining aspects of the distilling process such as fermentation times. And of course, casks have to be the ultimate kingmakers in dark spirits – the idea that the 90 days or so barley spends growing in soil leaves more impact than the five, ten, or 20 years that distilled spirit spends in a cask would, understandably, be something of a stretch for some within the industry. You can say that those who get sniffy about terroir have some industry-led agenda; you could just as easily say that of course Waterford’s research into terroir proved its existence. Cynicism is a healthy thing, in moderation. But I often think of this excellent point by Alistair:

#Terroir denial is a myth invented by whisky marketers to sell terroir driven product.
— Spirit and Wood | Alistair (@SpiritAndWood) January 22, 2020

Which was followed some months later by this tweet from Mark Reynier;

It’s extraordinary how terroir puts the fear of God into a specific group of whisky fans safe behind the Morgan Denial, fearful of their peers’ views. It’s as if the Cognac AOC doesn’t exist. But there’ll be some red faces soon & not mine.#flatearther #mizaru #kikazaru #iwazaru https://t.co/HT8ZdBsX9k
— Mark Reynier (@markreynier) July 1, 2020

Reynier reminds me of Hazel Motes, the disillusioned antihero of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, travelling the land preaching to the masses of his Church Without God, trying to lift the scales from their eyes and teach them to live without faith. Motes learned the hard way that faith is inevitable, and we all fashion our own personal religions eventually. Everything about Waterford appears to be rejecting the norms of whisky – from the obsession with barley, to the hyper-modern branding, the medicinal-blue bottles, the coloured glass stoppers, even the rejection of the standard spelling of Irish whiskey. But just as Hazel Motes’s church without god was still a church, Waterford is still a distillery, and Reynier is still a very successful drinks entrepreneur, one who is still making good, old fashioned single malt whisky, just with a slightly different production process (or brand narrative, depending on your level of cynicism).

But there are many great things about Waterford’s new testament: It has written a new origin story for whisky – it no longer begins with the distiller, or the maltster, but with the farmer. It celebrates the individuals who grew the grain just as it celebrates the grain itself – terroir is about people, as much as place, and the hand that guides the plough and sows the seed is, to my mind, as important as which way the wind blows or the elevation of the soil. Farmers were a footnote in whisky for many years, now they are a core element of Waterford’s brand. Polarising as Reynier’s persona can be – and I’m not here to defend either terroir in whisky or its most ardent champion – what he has done to celebrate the labour of Irish farmers is remarkable.

He also gifted smaller non-distilling producers with a remarkable way to be part of what they produce; anyone who can grow barley can get it distilled under contract at Great Northern and claim it as theirs, without the vast expense of having to build a distillery. I’m old enough to remember when indie bottlers and random brands across Ireland tried to claim that their local water, used to cut their sourced whiskey before bottling, gave them authorship of the release. It was always a weak claim, but now they can show provenance and ownership through a bit of farming, a contract to distill, and terroir. If you have a field and a bit of barley, you can have your own whisky.

In their first year of releases, Waterford Distillery managed to put out 27 unique bottlings. Understandably, given the volume of bottlings, reception was mixed. Perhaps expectations were too high – perhaps all the sturm und drang didn’t help; perhaps people were happy to tear it down given Reynier’s jousting in the media, where they might have been kinder to another, more low-key operator. Reynier’s claims that he was going to make the most profound single malt ever created may have played well with his Jobsian acolytes, but for some it was a gauntlet being thrown down – it’s not hard to see some thinking, well, let’s see about that before they had even opened a bottle. Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion – and the zealots raving about the liquid are as valid a voice as those saying it was overpriced and too young.

But this is Reynier’s style – adversarial, quixotic, divisive. There is an excellent piece on horticulturist Claire Vokins’s blog about a tasting hosted by Reynier which gives you an idea of how polarising he can be. However, it is impossible to separate him from Waterford, frustrating as his detractors may find it. It stands apart, because he does.

There are some very positive reviews of single farm bottlings, and some less so. The negative ones raised the question – what if the terroir of a field produces poor flavours? What if its most pronounced note is decay, or sulphur, what if it’s just bland, and in no way profound? Who do we blame then – the farmer? The distillery? When the whisky is crap, who takes the hit? And if it is crap, why was it even released? Terroir doesn’t automatically mean good, or better. It means different, and given the reliance Irish whiskey has had on the output of only three distilleries over the last 30 years, difference is welcome. Bad whisky, however, won’t do anyone any favours.

Some reviews made the point that the whisky is young, but outside of the big three – Midleton, Bushmills and Cooley – almost all Irish whiskey is young. Even Dingle isn’t even ten yet. Also, if you wanted to celebrate terroir as a component of flavour, a younger whisky would be the way to showcase it. Reynier says that the next step in the Waterford project is tracking how terroir affects the spirit as it matures, but you would have to assume that as time goes on, terroir will take a backseat to discussions around their wood programme – I very much doubt they spent all that money on quality casks just so they could keep mum about it. So this is terroir’s time to shine (or not). Perhaps in future the terroir of the trees used to make the casks will be considered, or the terroir of the people making the whiskey. For now, it’s barley, and the Irish countryside.

I was sent two bottles for review – Hook Head 1.1 and Grattansbrook 1.1, the latter a UK exclusive, and it is there I will begin.

Grattansbrook 1.1

Terroir is a facet of the drive towards transparency. That is the T that matters here – there is a code on the back of every bottle and when you enter it on their website you get a barrage of information about the farm, the farmer, the field, the soil, the barley, the distillers’ names, the casks, the age. It is remarkable. But all that info does not make it taste better, so what of Grattansbrook – on the nose, mace, star anise, tea. On the palate, manuka honey, nutmeg, cola cubes. The finish lingers. It’s okay…ish. It wasn’t the first one I opened, but the first one in this review for the purpose of decency as the next bottle is, in my opinion, vastly superior.

Hook Head 1.1

Grattansbrook has a lot of dryness, Hook Head has earthiness. I will spare you my notes on Hook Head 1.1 but suffice to say the bottle is long gone, and I’m not the only one to have a fierce thirst for it – it won best Irish whiskey and best irish single malt at the San Francisco spirits awards last year. So if there is an entry point to Waterford, this is as good a place as any.

As we trundled to the end of year, the releases kept coming – limited, hyperlimited, and other. A slight scaling back on the 27 in 2020, last year only saw them put out 16. It can still be overwhelming just to keep track of the releases, and I would imagine that, if there are zealots out there trying to catch ‘em all, it is something of a pain in the ass. And while there are true believers who will do it, there are people I know who will not drink Waterford. The message on the website which proudly states that Waterford ‘is not for everyone’ before adding that this is for ‘the cognoscenti, the intrepid and the curious’. Perhaps implying those who do not like your whisky are dull of mind is not the best way to change their opinion. The indigo-eyed tricoteuse who adore Waterford and will fight to defend terroir may delight in this microcosmic battle, but I certainly don’t. I came to whiskey for community, not some endless argument about soil.

Biodynamics is the next experiment in the Waterford project, another concept adopted from viticulture. There does come a point in this where you have to stand back and consider all the elements of Waterford that were taken from wine production – terroir, biodynamics, even the rejection of the aesthetic norms of whisky packaging in favour of those blue bottles and hyper-modern design – and ask if this is a whisky that wants to be a wine; if it is praying for a miracle of transubstantiation to take it away from all these base brands with their addiction to orthodoxy. Is it such a shameful thing, for a whisky to look like a whisky? I still think Waterford is a fascinating brand and what they are doing is remarkable. I look forward to future releases, and seeing how the project develops over the years. But for the time being, I am renouncing my faith.
Урожай

February 28th, 2022

This time three years ago the news was breaking that Walsh Whiskey and Ilva Saronno were parting ways. It was hard to comprehend – Bernard and Rosemary Walsh had built their Writers’ Tears and The Irishman brands from the ground up, and had the foresight to start doing so well before the multitude of non-distilling producer Irish whiskey brands that are weighing down the shelves in your local drinks emporium. It’s hard to imagine anyone conceiving a whiskey brand all the way back in 1999, but the Walshes did – kind of.

The company started life as The Hot Irishman, a concentrate to be used for making Irish coffees. But as Irish whiskey began its acceleration in the early 2000s, Walsh saw the potential for a whiskey brand and in 2006 The Irishman Founder’s Reserve whiskey was launched. In 2009 Writers’ Tears – a blend of pot still and malt whiskey – was launched. Then, in 2013, as Irish whiskey took off worldwide, Walsh merged with Ilva Saronno – the Italian parent firm of iconic brands Disaronno and Tia Maria. With the backing of a drinks titan, they built a beautiful distillery in Royal Oak, which opened in June 2016. Less than three years later, in January 2019, Ilva Saronno and Walsh Whiskey consciously uncoupled.

In a frank interview with Mark Gillespie on WhiskyCast, Bernard Walsh said that while he wanted to focus on premiumisation, his Italian partners had a different view of the market. If that seemed opaque at the time, the release of Ilva Saronno’s The Busker made clear what he was referring to. It’s hard to imagine brands more disparate than the brutalist, smashable dram of The Busker (which is a quality, affordable, no frills whiskey) and the considered elegance of Writers’ Tears (as imbibed by Margaret Atwood, no less). But while WT is a quality whiskey in a stunning package, The Irishman’s livery was a little dated. A rebrand in 2013 updated it somewhat, but it still looked like the poor relation next to Writers’ Tears. They also made the decision to include Bernard Walsh’s face on the label. I am of the mind that unless the face on the label is a Victorian cameo-style sketch of Rabbie Burns or Paddy Flaherty or some other dear departed icon, your label will not be improved by its inclusion, especially if it’s not an immediately recognisable face (addendum to this – it’s not ok to mock the god-awful line drawing of Paul Newman on Newman’s Own as they are for charity). The Irishman needed a reboot, more than a rebrand. But reboots cost money.

In November 2021 it was announced that Walsh Whiskey had been bought by Amber Beverage Group for an undisclosed sum. An informed source told the Irish Times it could be on a par with the alleged 90 million Sazerac bought the Paddy brand from Irish Distillers for – but the cynic in me suggested that seemed a little high. So I checked with another source in the industry who said they were surprised the figure wasn’t higher.

Luxembourg-HQed Amber Beverage Group (ABG) are a division of SPI Group, which is owned by Russian billionaire Yuri Shefler, a former member of the Russian military who has been locked in a trademark battle with the Russian state-owned company FKP Soyuzplodoimport over the ownership of Stoli brand vodka for decades. Per Forbes, Shefler bought the Stoli brand from state-owned VVO Soyuzplodoimport for $285,000 in 1997. Russia’s Supreme Court ruled the sale illegal in 2001, banning Shefler from selling the vodka inside its borders. In 2014, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium joined Russia in banning sales of Stolichnaya. However, in July of 2021, SPI Group hailed a victory in the ongoing dispute, winning the rights to sell Stoli in eight of 13 European countries. Also, in light of current events it is worth pointing out that SPI’s Stoli is made in Lativa, just in case you feel like boycotting it because it is ‘Russian’.

Update 7.3.2022 – Stoli has rebranded. In a press release, Shefler said: “While I have been exiled from Russia since 2000 due to my opposition to Putin, I have remained proud of the Stolichnaya brand. Today, we have made the decision to rebrand entirely as the name no longer represents our organization. More than anything, I wish for ‘Stoli’ to represent peace in Europe and solidarity with Ukraine.” What this means for the trademarks, I couldn’t say – but it might pave the way for Shefler’s Latvian-made Stoli to be a distinct brand from the Russian made and owned Stolichnaya

While Stoli may be the biggest name in their portfolio, ABG are big and plan on getting bigger. According to a piece published in The Spirits Business in June 2021 –

Throughout the pandemic, the company continued to witness positive sales. Amber Beverage Group saw organic sales increase 11% to €268.7 million (US$347.1m) last year, boosted by its “strengthened” presence in core Baltic markets. Organic operating profit for the full year rose by 21% to €21.9m (US$26.8m). The company had surpassed €30m (US$36.4m) in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) for the second time, reflecting its ability to adapt quickly.

Part of this expansion saw them buy Angelina Jolie’s share of a French vineyard she had invested in with her former partner Brad Pitt. That sale is now the subject of litigation by Pitt as part of their long-running divorce battle. Pitt’s suit claims ‘She sold her interest with the knowledge and intention that Shefler and his affiliates would seek to control the business to which Pitt had devoted himself and to undermine Pitt’s investment in Miraval’.

Obviously, big firms don’t always get big – and stay big – through peace, love, and understanding. Sometimes difficult choices are made. In December 2021 a tribunal ruled that Shefler unfairly sacked a UK senior executive over the phone for objecting to 30% staff pay cuts during the pandemic. You can read the full judgement here.

ABG’s financial prudence meant they were able to spend half a million euro on the renovation of The Irishman. I’ll let the press release take it from here:

The Irishman® range of super-premium whiskeys produced by Walsh Whiskey (part of the Amber Beverage Group) has undergone an extensive rebranding to reflect its dedication to the pursuit of excellence in Single Malt whiskeys. The €500,000 rebranding, which sees wholesale changes to The Irishman’s bottle, labelling and packaging, follows a strategic review which commenced in April 2020. Walsh Whiskey was assisted in the review by Bord Bia’s (The Irish Food Board) specialist Insight Centre – The Thinking House. The extensive design project was undertaken by HERE design agency in London.

Announcing the renewed focus on single malt and the brand redesign, Walsh Whiskey founder Bernard Walsh said: “As the Irish whiskey category continues to develop with increasing variety, it is important that we are clear in our proposition to whiskey consumers. Our message is simple: The Irishman will always be single malt focused – whether championed in pure expressions or blends – and that it will always be triple distilled to leave a lasting impression.”

There are also changes to the composition of the range, with a change of name for one core expression and the addition of a limited edition to the core of the portfolio.

The Founder’s Reserve blend (70% Single Malt & 30% Pot Still) has been renamed The Harvest. This expression, a truly unique blend of two premium styles of whiskey, started life as the first ever whiskey created by Walsh Whiskey’s Founder. The renaming of this core expression as The Harvest honours the great contribution of the farming community in the whiskey-making process. The whiskey is crafted entirely from a mash bill of 100% Irish barley.

First released as a limited edition bottling in 2018, The Irishman Caribbean Cask is being added to the portfolio’s core expressions which also include The Harvest; Single Malt; 12-Year-Old Single Malt; 17-Year-Old Single Malt & the Vintage Cask. The Irishman Caribbean Cask Finish is a rare vatting of Single Malt and Single Pot Still whiskeys finished for 6 months in Chairman’s Reserve Rum casks from the tiny tropical Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, before being bottled at 46% ABV.

A new colour palette of understated cream, green, grey, blue and burgundy is applied to the labels of the six core expressions of The Irishman range.

The trajectory of Walsh Whiskey probably holds some lessons for other producers – you don’t need a distillery to build a valuable brand, whiskey is a long game, and the road to success isn’t always sunshines and roses. Just ask Brad and Angelina.
The Augurs Of Spring

February 25th, 2022

Many years ago, someone in the whiskey business told me that Green Spot sold well with women. I brought it up with one of the production team in Midleton, and they explained that this was a result of the flavour profile. Then I brought it up with one of their marketing team, and their explanation was more straightforward: It sells well with women because it looks like a bottle of wine. You may well bristle at both opinions, or you may believe that it is a grim truism – many products, including food and drink, are marketed to people based on gender. (You may also correctly note that I used this story many times to illustrate the same point). Whiskey was solely aimed at men for decades, so the conundrum the industry has been battling for the last 20 years is how to shift that focus.

Back in 2019, the then CEO of Chivas Brothers Jean Christophe Coutures gave an interview to MarketWatch about how more women were drinking whiskey. Coutures, in reference to the Glenlivet Founder’s Reserve and its success with women, had this to say:

“It has a more approachable taste, a smooth, creamy sweetness with delicate flavors that doesn’t have the same edge often found in whiskey. We’ve also made the packaging easier to understand and priced it at entry level. More women keep returning.”

At the time I found it hard to believe, so I contacted one of the journalists who wrote the piece to make sure the quote was correct. He confirmed that it was. Giving Coutures the benefit of the doubt, English is not his first language. Perhaps he was trying to say that the success of Founder’s Reserve was not that it was dumbed down for women, but that it was dumbed down for everyone. Whiskies like Founder’s Reserve (affordable NAS single malts) are probably everyone’s first port of call when moving beyond blends, and that applies to both men and women. But Coutures’s comments were still a god-awful clanger.

So the question now is – how do you encourage diversity among whiskey consumers? I have no idea. I’ll leave that to the marketeers. But events the one held this week at Powerscourt Distillery are a good start. I’ll let the press release take it from here:

The ancient Irish feast of Imbolc (Spring) was celebrated in style at The Powerscourt Distillery on Friday 18th February. The first day of Imbolc coincides with Brigid’s Day, and the celebration at the Powerscourt Distillery used the occasion to celebrate the connections between Brigid and her associations with Brewing/Farming/Dairying/Nature and Hospitality.

Guests were welcomed with a cocktail called Brigid’s Cloak. Named after the legendary cloak laid down by Brigid as she claimed lands from the King of Leinster, it was based on the classic Manhattan. Reflecting Brigid’s reputation as an Irish woman ahead of her time, it was made using Fercullen Irish Whiskey and Irish ingredients made by female producers, with vermouth from Valentia Island Vermouth and bitters from Beara Bitters.

Following a drinks reception, Caroline Gardiner, Head of Marketing at Powerscourt Distillery, introduced the two panel discussions chaired by broadcaster Suzanne Campbell and curated by the Food and Beverage Specialist at the Distillery, Santina Kennedy.

The first panel incorporated guests with associations with Imbolc and Brigid to highlight and celebrate the occasion. Imbolc literally means ‘in belly’ meaning in the ewe’s belly – signifying springtime/lactating ewes/ spring lambs – so it was appropriate that the first panellist was Hanna Finlay from Ballyhubbock farm in West Wicklow, producer of sheep’s dairy ice cream and cheese. Storm Eunice prevented Hanna from driving over the Wicklow Gap to join the panel in person, but she was able to participate in the lively conversation via video link.

Hanna was joined by Judith Boyle, Brewer and Beer Lecturer at TU Dublin who shared funny anecdotes about growing up in Kildare – the home of St Brigid as well as her experience as a female brewer; Rosanna Goswell from Tuath Glass who gave a fascinating insight into her Irish Whiskey Glass , which was named after Tuath De Dannan – the family of the Goddess Brigid.

Also on the panel was Brigid O’Hora – the sommelier who brought insights into modern Irish Wine appreciation gleaned from her online wine training platform – Brideys Wine Chats . Being a ‘Brigid’ from Co Kildare who is the mother of triplets there was no shortage of associations with the Patron Saint of fertility!

The panel was completed with Alex Slazenger, Head Gardener at Powerscourt Estate who captivated the audience with the history and legacy of the gardens at Powerscourt and his plans to continue his grandparents pioneering work to create a sustainable garden of outstanding beauty.

The second panel discussed the ‘Taste of Place’ . Powerscourt Distillery celebrates its location throughout its offering – from the water from Powerscourt Waterfall that is used to make its whiskey, to the barley in the surrounding fields to the use of local produce in its cocktails and food pairing tours and tastings.

To celebrate this idea of Irish terroir, panellists included Orla Snook O’Carrroll of Valentia Island Vermouth, Ireland’s first vermouth which is made using botanicals from Kerry; Orla was joined by Celina Stephenson of Wicklow Way Wines. Their Móinéir wine is made using only Irish berry fruit, capturing the taste of Irish summer. The idea of capturing a taste of place was explained by Geraldine Kavanagh , professional forager for Glendalough Gin, who kept the audience really entertained as she described trying to explain her occupation to a bank manager. She brought a handmade willow basket of foraged treasures from the Wicklow mountains, describing how she used the botanicals to be distilled into seasonal gins. Olly Nolan, the beekeeper behind Olly’s Honey described how the honey from the hives at the distillery captures the taste of Powerscourt, from the wild hedgerows around the estate and the variety of flowers in the world renowned gardens. This panel was completed by Mary O’Sullivan who described setting up her Bitters during the pandemic. A botanist who grew up on an organic farm in Co Kerry, Mary really evoked a sense of capturing the magic of flowers and plants to achieve a taste of a place.

Guests were then treated to a Powerscourt Distillery Whiskey and Food Pairing experience. Head of Whiskey John Cashman enthralled the audience with his introduction to Irish whiskey and detailed guided tastings. Santina Kennedy, who organised the event, led the guided food pairings . Using her research into Irish Food History taken as part of her MA in Gastronomy and Food Studies, she has developed a unique whiskey and food pairing experience. She uses only high quality Irish food produce whose taste, texture and story mirrors the various expressions of Fercullen Irish Whiskey. Under Santina’s guidance The Powerscourt Distillery champions locally produced high quality Irish food as part of the overall offering.

A cake by Kate O’Hora of @thecake_table captured the essence of Imbolc and Brigid, with delicate spring flowers and a flowing edible cloak.

Powerscourt Distillery’s Imbolc celebration will become an annual event, with a bigger and even more exciting day being planned for 2023.

Press release endeth – unsurprisingly there was no mention of the recent, startling departure of their master distiller Noel Sweeney, or the departure not long before that of backer and MD Alex Peirce. These are strange times for Powerscourt Distillery – former C&C CEO Maurice Pratt joined the board before Christmas, presumably to steady the ship, but without Perice – whose family are involved in Isle of Arran Distillery and Lagg Distillery – and Cooley legend Sweeney, their identity – to my mind at least – has taken a setback. Events like their Imbolc gathering are good because it is uncommon – a female focussed hosted by a whiskey distillery. Hopefully others will follow their lead.

Some photos from the event:
Paddy’s Home

November 12th, 2021

A screenshot of the Paddy website as it looked in 2007.

Paddy J O’Flaherty was a celebrity. He wasn’t always that way, but it’s how he ended up. He started his career in the drinks trade as a sales rep for what was known as Cork Distilleries Company (CDC) Old Irish Whisky. He was one of the first brand ambassadors – think The Simpsons’ rambunctious brewery spokestoon Duffman, but in a bowler hat, and instead of firing merch out of a T-shirt cannon, he fired out free drinks in pubs across Cork. He was so good at his job that he became synonymous with the brand. CDC saw an opportunity, bought the rights to his name and image and used them both to sell what was now known as Paddy Whisky.

This wasn’t a case where the brand was renamed after a distiller, or a maltster, or a cooper – it was named after someone who had nothing to do with production and was only concerned with selling the stuff. O’Flaherty had as much input into the creation of the liquid in the bottle as McGregor has in Proper Twelve, or Ryan Reynolds has in Aviator Gin, or George Clooney had in Casamigos. So what I’m saying here is, Paddy whisky was one of the first celebrity drinks brands, while Paddy was one of the first influencers.

A fairly desperate plea for acceptance in this US Paddy advert from the 1930s. pic.twitter.com/xkCD7SFFhA
— Bill Linnane (@Bill_Linnane) January 19, 2016

Fast forward to 2016 and Pernod Ricard Irish Distillers sell Paddy to American drinks giant Sazerac for an undisclosed sum (there is this suggestion that it was €90 million euro). The sale didn’t raise much of an eyebrow – even for a proud Corkman like myself, Paddy was an also-ran. Despite its position as one of the last Cork whiskey brands, I didn’t have much of an opinion of it. On a night out in an average pub, you’d always have three choices – Powers, Paddy or Jameson. Jameson was, as we would say in Cork, mockeyah. Not a serious option – a bit too bland and safe. Powers was the best option, with its pot still spices and robust profile, because Paddy had a bit too much personality. And by that I mean I found it to be rough as fuck. Paddy was the whiskey you drank when all else failed, when the host at the wake hadn’t stocked up properly, or when dawn was breaking and you didn’t care about flavour profile all that much anymore.

But there was potential there – it’s an historic brand with a great story behind it, with a healthy dose of ture-a-lure-a-laddie for our cousins across the Atlantic. It was also the fourth largest Irish whiskey brand in the world at the time of its sale. It just needed a bit of a refresh. Irish Distillers had enough to worry about with other portfolio reboots, rebrands and expansions. To reanimate Paddy would take a sizable amount of investment and effort. So they sold it to Sazerac, a firm comprising seven American and one Canadian distilleries, and some 450 brands (they already owned Michael Collins Irish Whiskey).

After the sale, Paddy was revamped, but in different ways in different markets. Here in Ireland, it was tweaked ever so slightly. In the US, it was cranked up to 11 – and placed in the possessive, complete with an ocular irritant of an apostrophe (Powers should technically carry one also as the family name is Power, but they don’t as it looks shit).

A new era for Paddy Irish Whiskey. Paddy Flaherty has been given the Hollywood-Irish treatment. New bottle shape, name and image all packaged up in a nice new tube complete with souvenir “Paddy Post & Press” newspaper. Thoughts? pic.twitter.com/7EjPtDhIsd
— Barry Chandler 🇺🇦 (@irishwhiskeybc) February 17, 2019

The sale of the brand may not have been seen as such a big deal, but the rebirth as Paddy’s was a bit unsettling. I think it was just so….American? But if there are a people on god’s green earth that we want to buy Irish whiskey, it is our friends to the west.

Sazerac appears to have big plans for the brand, as according to the Sunday Independent, they are looking for a physical home for Paddy. Obviously they can’t run tours in Midleton distillery since they don’t own it, so they are apparently looking to either buy a distillery or enter into a partnership with one. On the latter: Where would fit their needs? You’d have to assume they will need a distillery with column and pot stills if they mean to produce the brand there, and it would need to be sizeable. Or, they could buy/build a very small distillery for tourism purposes and outsource the bulk of production to one of the workhorse distilleries. They could also look outside Cork (if this thought worries you, be reassured by the fact that Cork is heavily featured on their corporate website as the home of Paddy).

But does it really matter if Paddy is made in Cork? Does it matter that virtually all the other brands made in Midleton are originally from Dublin – Jameson, the Spots, Powers, Redbreast? Almost none of the brands made in Midleton are historically or intrinsically linked to the place – Irish Distillers limited could sell almost any of their brands as none of them are geographically anchored. The only ones whose identities are tied are Midleton Very Rare and maybe the single casks. Even Method & Madness is a moveable feast. I’m not saying they should jettison some of these iconic brands but it does show how some of our biggest names are nomads, a byproduct of all the consolidation and contraction in the industry.

But if Sazerac wanted to partner or outright buy an Irish whiskey distillery, they will just have to wait. There are some which will, sadly, fail, or will have to take painful and humiliating write-downs of their valuations. Such is life.