Paddy, which claims to be the best-selling whiskey in Ireland, has only recently received wider distribution to the rest of the world … The whiskey itself, a “high-malt” blend of all three styles of Irish whiskey (malt whiskey, single pot still, and column grain whiskey) is triple-distilled, aged between 4 and 7 years, and bottled at 40% ABV.
The Quiet Man, a new brand partnered with Luxco for distribution, is the first Irish whiskey bottled (and soon, distilled) in Derry, Ireland in more than 100 years. While the distillery is under construction (slated for completion around now, early 2018), the brand sources Irish whiskey with a “high” (undisclosed) malt percentage, and marries the blend in first-fill ex-bourbon barrels.
I felt about the standard bottling that it could do with less watering-down, and along comes a Cask Strength sample for me to verify that assumption! Walsh releases a yearly bottling of the Writers’ Tears Cash Strength (around 2000 bottles a year) with a different label and packaging, and it does not appear to ever make it to the US market. The whiskey is aged in first-fill American oak and bottled without chill filtration. The 2014 edition is a respectable (but not extreme) 53% ABV.
Created in 1978 to compensate for a legal skirmish that took Johnnie Walker Red Label off of UK store shelves, it failed to recapture even a portion of that lost market share. … Whyte & Mackay master blender and celebrity whisky personality Richard Paterson re-formulated the recipe, likely a necessity since the blend now needed to be composed of whiskies available to W&M instead of the full Diageo stable. In early 2017 the brand was re-launched with new packaging.
The Irishman is a brand of sourced Irish blended whiskey released by the very-much-not-a-distillery Walsh Whiskey Distillery Ltd., which also sells the very popular Writers’ Tears. Like Writers’ Tears, this is actually not a “blend” in the typical sense. It is a mixture of 70% single malt Irish whiskey with 30% single pot still Irish whiskey, with no column-still grain whiskey in sight.
In essence it’s a mixture of 60% Clynelish, 20% Dailuaine, and 20% Teaninich, the majority of which is then finished for two years in various toast (heat-treated) grades of the aforementioned French Oak-topped barrels. This is intended to bring out the “spice” notes inherent in French Oak, as well as to contribute to the sweet, oaky flavor available when using new oak…
Green Label, unlike all of the other Walkers, is actually a blended malt composed of (unsubstantiated) 27 different single malts, all at least 15 years (or, more likely, exactly 15 years) of age. ,,, The blended (or “vatted”) malt is bottled at 43% ABV and retails for around $45 to $55. My bottle was purchased in 2017, after the renaissance of the label.
Produced by the same bottler (NOT distiller) who sells The Irishman blend, Walsh Whiskey Distillery Ltd., Writers’ Tears is a novel vatting of 40% triple-distilled Irish single-malt whiskey “probably” from Cooley (but the source is unknown), and 60% triple-distilled Irish single pot-still whiskey from Midleton, the only distiller of mature single pot-still whiskey — for now!. The vatting is aged for an undisclosed amount of time in ex-bourbon American oak casks and bottled without chill-filtration at 40% ABV.
If you’re new to the modern whisky/scotch market, you might be confused to read about the term “NAS”, even if you know that it stands for “No Age Statement”. How can a whisky have no age? Why does the term matter, and why does it seem to cause such controversy in online discussions?
Diageo’s Johnnie Walker range added a Platinum Label to its pantheon of blended scotches in 2013, kicking against the goad of the NAS trend by including an 18 year-old age statement on the label. The blend contains whisky from 20 to 25 distilleries (likely most of them owned by Diageo) and is advertised as having a predominantly Speyside character with some hints of Islay peat.