Waterfordist division of labour

Bill Linnane

That is the Twitter equivalent of those montages in the A-Team when BA transforms some old rusted car parts into a Black Hawk stealth chopper.

Mark Reynier’s crack team have taken an old Guinness brewery and turned it into a state-of-the-art distillery in a very short space of time, and are now ready to distill. It seems like only yesterday that the whisky world was asking ‘where the hell is Waterford?’ when Reynier resurfaced there, but since then he has put in place an incredibly detailed and transparent traceability system for his grain supply, and has deconstructed and reconstructed the brewery to suit his need – that need being, specifically, to bring some ‘mindfuckery’to Irish whiskey. But more than that, he is bringing honesty; no dressing up Cooley stock, no vagueness about sourcing grain, and a respect for the past without exploiting it; ie, no marketing bullshit. If he follows the Bruichladdich template, this will be about terroir, experimentation and hopefully the same wild spirit of adventure. And at least the weather is better than Islay.

Here’s a short film about what he has done in the sunny south east:

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