In a 200-year-old building on the docks of the River Suir, just a few hundred yards from where the Vikings first settled this town in the 10th century, one of the boldest experiments in the long history of Irish whiskey is being born.
The Irish whiskey industry now has 35 operating distilleries with another two-dozen announced and currently either in the planning stage or under construction. It has been a remarkable turnaround for an industry that, as late as 1988, had only two functioning distilleries. In the meantime, sales have soared from 200,000 cases in 1989, to over 11 million cases in 2020.
Teeling Irish Whiskey, located in Dublin, Ireland, is one of a newer range of Irish whiskey distilleries in recent years leading a renaissance in this whiskey category. It started with a range of expressions from barrels it owns purchased from elsewhere, much of which it still makes use of, and more recently also brought on board its own in-house distilled whiskey. Now joining all of these is what’s described as the first “Dublin distilled peated single malt.”
Miles of column inches already document Irish whiskey’s resurgence in the past decade. As a proud Irishman with more than a passing interest in whiskey, this of course makes me happy, but we have been here before. Our industry is an object lesson in boom and bust. This time, our renaissance has to be different.
