Two fallacies were debunked at the Waterford Distillery Festival 2024 – one, that organising a piss-up in a brewery – or any drinks production site – is easy. The team at Waterford Distillery went all out, decorating the massive site with brand-themed chains of coloured paper, setting up cocktail and craft beer bars, organising food and drink trucks, hosting masterclasses, tours, talks and setting up a stage where a series of musicians played live throughout the day. The chap I spoke to who was manning the merchandise stall normally worked as an accountant with the firm – this was all hands on deck. Organising a piss up in a distillery is, it would appear, no mean feat, especially when you’ve sold 700 tickets.
The second phrase that needs binning is that today’s rain is tomorrow’s whisky – it really does seem unlikely that rainfall could be harvested, purified through reverse osmosis, then used in mashing in, fermenting, distilled, and casked within a 24 hour period and even then, you would need some wild technology to speed age it by three years. That said, ‘today’s rain is three-years-from-now’s whisky’ doesn’t quite roll off the tongue so well.
But inaccurate as it may be, today’s rain being tomorrow’s whisky was still a phrase I uttered a few times during the festival in Waterford Distillery. I said it when we arrived in the pissing rain, when we looked out at the band playing the courtyard in the pissing rain, and when I was standing at the bar in the pissing rain waiting for a drink and a gust of wind lifted the canopy overhead and disgorged about 25 litres of water down my back, to the amusement of those behind me. It just did not stop raining for the whole day, but what should I have expected from an outdoor event, in Ireland, in a city called Waterford, in high Irish summer, organised by a guy whose second name is literally ‘rainier’. The omens were never great.
Yet somehow, it was still a fantastic day out. My wife, who is sane and thus has no interest in whiskey, however it is spelled, thoroughly enjoyed the day because Waterford is a very, very stylish brand – their bottles look cool, their labels are beautiful, their whole ethos is interesting and weird, and that elevates it above a lot of the category. Its un-whiskey-ness is an instant eye-catcher for the normal drinkers, or whisky curious, of the world. My daughter had the same reaction when she saw the bottle I was sent of their new release, the Koffi, and took a photo of it for her Instagram. Perhaps being a whisky that echoes (or aspires to being) a wine is a good thing, actually.
I have come full circle with Waterford Distillery – before they had produced a drop I was guzzling down the Kool Ade, singing their praises and explaining in painfully lengthy profiles and thinkpieces just how this was going to change everything.
Then I had some of the whisky, and try as I might to love it, it was not the ambrosia I had been promised – this was not the most profound single malt the world had ever seen, nor was it the mindfuckery it pledged to be. My mind was left distinctly unfucked by the samples and bottles I tried; this was whisky released too soon, with too much buzz, and too high a price. And behind the buzz, there was a period where almost all of the debate was around terroir in whisky and whether it was a) plausible, and b) likely to have any discernible impact on flavour in the finished product. When I finally got to try the product, it didn’t seem finished, as it was too young, and if this was terroir in action then maybe stick it back in the cask until it’s less noticeable. In the end I had to accept that if there was terroir in whisky, then there was terroir in many other food and drink products and, while interesting, it was at best an element of flavour rather than the defining characteristic. Consider the terroir of milk – which type of grass, what type of soil, what breed of cow, who is the farmer, what kind of milking parlour, pasteurised or not. We don’t argue these points because on some level they make perfect sense, on another they make no sense, and in the end none of it matters. There’s nice milk and less nice milk. Find the nice.
I think Wayerford’s take on terroir had its time to win us over, and that time has passed, partly because Koffi (named after French experimental artist Nathanaël Koffi, who designed the patchwork of colours on the label) is a good enough whisky that it doesn’t need any high concepts. It doesn’t need to be sipped with a slightly wrinkled nose and then described as being interesting, because it is good. Good enough that when I was sent a bottle, I started to succumb to Waterford Distillery’s charms all over again and saw the world beyond terroir. I booked tickets to the festival for my wife and I, booked a hotel room, and headed back to Jonestown to drink deep of the Kool Aid once more.
In the four years since their first release, the buzz around Waterford – and associated fractious discourse around terroir in spirits – has abated. This could be due to a rising number of new Irish distilleries launching their inaugurals, or it could be that consumers felt a little underwhelmed by some of Waterford’s output. Sales were brisk however, with the Business Post claiming they were to the tune of €3.3 million in 2021, up from €2.8 million the year before. But the mild furore around terroir has dissipated somewhat, helped by the growing chatter of new entrants releasing their own spirit. The signal to noise ratio has shifted and the grand pronouncements from Waterford have become less piercing. Now everybody is shouting about everything, to the point where Waterford’s latest release was greeted with something of a shrug of the shoulders by the commentariat.
Naturally the release comes with a lot of bumpf – this is how it is intro’ed on their website:
How do you assemble the world’s most profound natural whisky possible? This Spring, with the introduction of The Waterford – Cuvée Koffi, we attempt to answer that very question. 24 distinct Single Farm Origins, each revelling in its own distinct terroir-derived flavour, augmented by four distinct cask types across a world-leading cask profile of Good Wood, layered into our most complex Cuvée Concept like the greatest wines of Champagne and Bordeaux, and with total traceability and transparency from field to barrel. This whisky layers some of our earliest Single Farm Origins, each of which is over six years old. It is the apogee of our range, our new flagship single malt, our oldest and most complex possible whisky – our lodestar.
Yes, lodestar, that thing we all kinda know from that Trump anon letter. What I would say to a whisky lover is – forget all the above, and all the other associated guff that almost any release from Waterford seems contractually obliged to be released with: The Koffi release is quite good. It was good enough that I wanted to physically revisit the distillery, and despite the pissing rain and getting soaked when I could have had cheaper drinks in a warm pub somewhere in Waterford city, I stuck with it. Koffi is good.
My one outstanding quibble with Waterford is that their stuff is just too expensive. I could frame that another way by saying it is young, but youth isn’t the issue here – I have had some banger Scotches and Armagnacs that were five years old or less, but they all cost me sub-€50. I have heard the stock response to this complaint of mine many times, that making whiskey here is completely different to in Scotland, and it is simply more expensive, but as a consumer I am telling you that I don’t care and that I don’t want to pay €70-€90 for a four-to-seven year old.
Fortunate then that the good people at Waterford Distillery sent me a bottle of the Koffi. It comes, as all Waterford releases do, with a code which you can enter on their website to dig down into what is in the bottle. In short – it is a blend of 24 single farm distillations and was matured for six years and five days before being assembled on October 25th 2022 and bottled on July 18, 2023, with all natural colour and a chunky ABV of 50%. The site also lists what farm went into which cask and all associated details if you are into that kind of thing.
Straight out of the bottle and gloriously unburdened of all this info, I found the Koffi to be most pleasant. A lot of the younger whiskies on the market here tend to be a little thin – they lack the depth and the oomph that you’d expect from beverages of equivalent price, but this was pleasantly meaty – and in a sea of new releases where cask finishes take the headline on the bottle and in your glass, the Koffi is very stripped back and real; no bells and whistles, just a very direct whisky. Think Steve Albini’s productions – raw but polished, real and live and in your face. Chatting to others at the event the consensus was the same – this is a good whisky, and the festival is a great day out, no matter the weather.
Triple Distilled Communications 