Tasting Whiskey

by Lew Bryson

  These days the ratio is about 60:40 barley:malt, but it varies with what they’re making. It makes for a headily fresh scent in the brewhouse, and a substantially different weight and mouthfeel in the spirit; the raw barley has different nonfermentable components that come through brewing and distillation as a pleasantly syrupy feel and a green, fruity aroma of apples, peaches, and pears. That’s the stuff that makes these Midleton whiskeys what they are, the very heart of it all.

  To get it head-on, try some Redbreast. I had my first taste of it years ago when an Irish friend in Philadelphia, just back from a visit home, pulled a flask out of his pocket while we were at a formal dinner. “Try this,” he whispered. I don’t exaggerate when I say I was stunned, and then hooted in pleasure; an embarrassing moment, but I was struck by the wonderful freshness of it, the coiling soft mouth, and the vaporous flow of fruits and spice it left in my mouth as I breathed. What is it, I asked? He grinned. “Can’t get it here.” Now we can, and believe me, I do.

  Another component of Midleton’s genius is their wood management. I tried Jameson for the first time in the ’80s: not impressed. I was drinking Wild Turkey and Glenlivet at the time, and Jameson had neither the zest and fire of Wild Turkey nor the elegance of Glenlivet. It was fairly lifeless stuff. But when I tried it again in the late 1990s, in the spirit of fairness after a great experience with Black Bush, I was surprised to find it quite nice. Was it me, or had Midleton changed something?

  Probably to some degree it was my own evolving tastes, but it was also Midleton. They’d invested heavily in their barrels and pioneered the idea of wood management: tracking barrels through the warehouse and noting the quality of the whiskey that came out of them. Ger Buckley, the master cooper at Midleton, noted that the distillery greatly increased its use of bourbon barrels starting in the late 1970s. “Before that, we used wine casks, new casks, whatever we had,” he said. “It was just a container.”

  Today’s distillers recognize that a barrel only has so much to give a whiskey. Some flavor changes come from the slow breathing in the barrel, the exchange of oxygen, and the “angel’s share” evaporative losses over the years in the warehouse. But a significant effect comes from the wood, and after a certain number of uses, a barrel is simply played out. Hard as it is to believe, it took till the 1980s to figure that out, and Midleton’s distillery staff were among the first to address it.

  They don’t use barrels till they’re worn out anymore. The barrels they do use are — like everything else here, it seems — quite a variety: used bourbon, “new” bourbon (virgin oak casks built and charred to bourbon-type specifications), sherry, port, Madeira, Malaga, and refill casks.

  The complexity of these components gave Midleton some of the range for blending that their Scotch whisky counterparts had with their multiplicity of fellow distillers. They have been using that range to create more new whiskeys, and it’s gained them the attention they deserve. Jameson has exploded, and that means there is both room and desire for more complex, flavorful, and different versions. Midleton has obliged with the 12-year-old, 18-year-old, Gold, and Rarest Vintage Reserve, an excellent range of whiskeys that vary in age and blending complexity (and, in general, have an increasing ratio of single pot still whiskey).

  They’ve also committed to increasing the number of straight single pot still whiskeys they bottle. We’ve already seen some of this with the Barry Crockett Legacy and Powers John’s Lane bottlings and an increasing range of Redbreast expressions. It’s a great time for Irish whiskey.

  Seeing Spots

  Green Spot was once a “white whale” of a whiskey, available in only one place: Mitchell & Son’s shop in Dublin. They were whiskey bonders, merchants who would buy casks from distillers and then bottle them for their own sale. The name “Green Spot” represented how they would mark the barrels they had purchased: a daub of green paint on the end. There were Yellow, Red, and Blue Spots as well at one time, but over the years, only Green Spot remained: 100 percent single pot still whiskey, carefully selected from among the stocks at Midleton.

  When I learned that Mitchell & Son had expanded availability of Green Spot to the duty-free shop at the Dublin airport, I grabbed a bottle on my next trip to Ireland. Mine! As fate had it, my wife picked me up at the airport, and we went directly to a party at a friend’s house. An Irish friend. Well, we opened the bottle, and it was very well received indeed. Happily, by the next time I went to Ireland, Mitchell & Son had, among the burgeoning growth and growing acclaim for Irish whiskey, revived the Malaga wine–finished Yellow Spot, and this time I brought back a bottle of each. Rumor is strong as I write this that Red and Blue will be back soon; I guess my next trip will need a suitcase big enough to fit a rainbow.

  Bushmills: Building on Triple Distillations

  Bushmills looks like a Scotch whisky distillery. There, I said it. There are two Charles Doig–designed pagoda malting chimneys (Bushmills used peated malt well into the twentieth century, before the Irish whiskey realignment), pot stills, and long stone buildings. If it weren’t for the “Old Bushmills Distillery” sign on the roof, I might be able to fool a kidnapped whiskey drinker into thinking he was in Speyside.

  It’s not surprising. It sits just across the North Channel from southwest Scotland: 31 miles from Port Ellen on Islay, 39 miles from Campbeltown on the Kintyre Peninsula. Trifling distances. They do make malt whiskey here, and there are no column stills. There’s no peat, either, but that’s not peculiar. Even the triple distillation isn’t unique; Auchentoshan keeps its Lowland lightness the same way.

  It’s what Bushmills does with that triple distillation that makes the difference. It’s faced with the same problem as Midleton: a need and a desire to blend, but no friends to supply blending whiskeys. So like Midleton, Bushmills has approached this as a problem to be solved internally. It does this by making “triple distillation” an understatement. Multiple cuts and redirections of spirit are made, and it’s much more complicated than simply distilling wash, doing a heart cut, distilling that spirit, and then distilling the heart cut again to make it lighter and stronger.

  Once the distillers have run the spirit all through the stillhouse, working it like a boxing trainer, they turn it into a variety of wood, and a lot of that wood is young. Bushmills doesn’t use any barrel longer than 25 years (when your oldest whiskey is 21 years old, that’s not hard).

  Bushmills Original is aged primarily in bourbon wood and blended with Midleton-supplied grain whiskey (again, that contractual thing that keeps Irish whiskey going) that has been aged separately. Black Bush, which was my reintroduction to Irish whiskey, is a full 80 percent Bushmills malt whiskey, 70 percent of it aged in sherry casks. It’s a much deeper set of fruit flavors, a bit heavier than the Original. I first tasted it at the rehearsal dinner for a friend’s wedding, and I almost missed the ceremony.

  Bushmills’s Black Bush is lush with sherry cask influence.

  The 16-year-old is a three-wood whiskey. It is all malt, aged in bourbon, sherry, and port wood, and it’s a regular in my flask lineup for its rich, fruity, nutty depth. I wish I could find and afford the 21-year-old, but only 1,200 cases are released each year. It is further aged in Madeira wood, and my, oh, my, does that give it added heft and richness.

  Bushmills was sold to Diageo by Pernod Ricard as part of a complex acquisition deal in 2005. While Pernod owned Bushmills (as part of Irish Distillers Ltd.), they were not really interested in promoting a competitor to Jameson, their global growth giant (it’s only fair, then, that Diageo killed Bushmills Irish Cream Liqueur after they bought the distiller; why compete with their blockbuster, Baileys Irish Cream?). Now Bushmills is a true com-petitor, and Diageo has been gearing up for increased bottling. The pipeline is filling, and a few new products have been introduced: Bushmills Irish Honey flavored whiskey, and the Bushmills 1608 400th-anniversary bottling, made with some crystal malt (a toe dipped into the wide variety of malts that brewers regularly use, and one that I hope is being ex
panded upon in other distilleries as you read this). So keep an eye on Northern Ireland for some fun.

  Irish: Flavor Profile For Iconic Bottlings

  This chart rates five core characteristics on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 = faint to absent, and 5 = powerful and fully present.

  Cooley: Making a Run

  The cooley distillery is the result of a conversation struck up in a Boston bar almost 50 years ago. That’s where John Teeling, a risk taker and a true entrepreneur, started talking about the possibility of creating a real Irish-owned competitor to what was then a foreign-owned Irish whiskey monopoly. Once he got the idea, he stopped talking and started gathering money, while continuing to pursue his main career in commodities exploration and acquisition. By keeping the negotiations and capital sourcing well under wraps, eventually he was able to buy an industrial alcohol plant in Cooley, about 60 miles north of Dublin. The plant had column stills, and he bought the pot stills out of an old whiskey distillery. His Cooley distillery finally opened in 1989.

  Teeling was bucking trends — whiskey was far from taking off in 1989, and Irish whiskey was definitely not a growth market yet — and he had a business plan that would turn out to be flawed, but when I asked him why he took such a bold move, he shrugged it off, noting the higher risks of his primary job: “The risk was high, but that is what we do — we explore for diamonds, gold, or oil, so whiskey was no worse.” Put that way, whiskey looks like a walk in the park.

  But Teeling was banking on being able to sell 200,000 cases of whiskey a year. When Pernod Ricard took over Irish Distillers just as he was about to open Cooley, the plan changed. With this one company now controlling almost 100 percent of Irish whiskey, distribution became a problem; no one wanted to get cut off from selling Jameson or Bushmills just because they agreed to sell Cooley’s whiskey. Teeling would find a way to make money by selling bulk whiskey to other people with the same vision he had: bucking the Irish whiskey monopoly.

  That was Teeling’s part of the vision. The rest would come from Cooley’s initial — Scottish — distiller, Gordon Mitchell, and his wry successor, Noel Sweeney. All involved are unapologetic about not following the triple-distillation gospel for Irish whiskey, and why shouldn’t they be? “Historically there were multiple types and expressions,” Teeling told me. “Peated [whiskey] was common, as there was no coal; Bushmills had peat in the 1960s. Double distilled was common; Jameson was double distilled in the early days. There were numerous pure single malt distillers, like Allman’s, in Cork.”

  Sweeney put it more succinctly, with a sideways grin: “Making peated whiskey was a kick in the arse for Scotch. Look, 70 percent of whisky is Scotch; they must be doing something right.”

  The fact is that Cooley has had an absolutely outsized effect on Irish whiskey. Even with only about 1 percent of the total sales of the category, it is regularly considered as a major player. Beam Global bought Cooley (for $95 million, which may turn out to be a major bargain) in 2011 and began giving it the capital and promotion money it needed. Now that Japanese whisky giant Suntory has bought Beam, little Cooley has true global reach.

  The Cooley whiskeys are punching out of their weight class as well. Connemara, the iconoclastic peated Irish, is boldly smoky, balanced by a solid malt underpinning. Kilbeggan is a tasty blend, sweet and juicily fruity. The Tyrconnell, a double-distilled single malt (and doesn’t that sound familiar), is quite Scotch-like indeed, and a series of cask finishes have reinforced the impression by skillful handling.

  That’s the big three — Midleton, Bush-mills, and Cooley. With three of the world’s biggest spirits producers each backing one, none can be discounted. Tullamore Dew is a major player as a brand, but we’ll have to wait and see how the new distillery shapes the whiskey. It will be interesting to see what the whiskey will become when it is no longer dependent on the supply of another distillery.

  But then there are interesting times ahead for every part of Irish whiskey as this category gets revved up to reclaim its place in the world market.

  A warehouse at the Midleton distillery in County Cork. Note the bourbon barrels in use in the background, and the much larger sherry butts, or casks, featured in the foreground.

  Go With The Flow

  No matter where we’re looking at distillation, when we talk about “cuts,” the diversion of heads (or foreshots) and tails (or feints), and the selection of the hearts, we don’t mean “cut out.” When the flow of spirit is cut, it is redirected. That redirection is not into a waste stream; it’s usually into a holding vessel, where it will be redistilled. There’s still alcohol in there, because distillation is not a precise process, and there are flavor elements in there the distiller wants.

  The trick is in how you combine cuts with each other, with fresh wash, and with multiple charges from the same source, then redistill them, and how you redistill them. Which still you use to redistill makes a difference, as does how you drive the still (how hot and fast), and adjustments can be made on the still as well.

  Eventually these redistillations reach a point where all that’s left are compounds — flavors, aromas, sensations — that are not desirable. Some distillers dispose of them, some burn them, some sell them as chemical feedstock. Those are the only products that are truly “cut.”

  American: Bourbon, Tennessee, and Rye

  The term “American whiskey” covers three well-known types of whiskey that are relatively similar — bourbon, Tennessee whiskey, and rye whiskey — and a number of other, lesser-known types, like corn whiskey, wheat whiskey, blended whiskey, and spirit whiskey. (We’ll talk about the multitudinous other types of whiskey being made by small American craft distillers in chapter 12.) They are the result of centuries of experiments, evolution, and commercial success or failure, honed down to these categories by making what Americans liked to drink.

  They are also the result of a fairly detailed set of “standards of identity,” set by the government in the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 27 (Alcohol, Tobacco Products, and Firearms), Part 5 (Labeling and Advertising of Distilled Spirits), Subpart C (Standards of Identity for Distilled Spirits), paragraph 22 (Standards of Identity), wherein Class 2 is all about “whisky.” That’s right: the American government calls it “whisky,” with no “e,” even though almost every American brand uses the “whiskey” spelling. (As I told you before, the spelling is not really that important, and I’m going to continue to use “whiskey” through this discussion.)

  Legally, interpreting and enforcing these rules in their application to labeling is the job of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (ATTTB, or TTB), an agency that was spun off from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) during the shuffling of law enforcement agencies in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The ATF law enforcement duties (mostly smuggling interdiction, in the case of alcohol) were transferred to the Department of Justice and the agency was renamed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the TTB took the taxation and labeling approval functions and stayed with the Department of the Treasury. The TTB is responsible for enforcing the standards of identity.

  We need to pry them open to understand American whiskey. You may not think that a bunch of rules and government regulations are going to make interesting reading, and you’d be right. To tell the truth, reading them is like reading most regulations: painful and dull. But it also reveals a lot about why American whiskey is made the way it is, and tastes the way it does, and even something about why Scotch, tequila, and rum taste the way they do. So I’m going to help you understand them. That’s my job.

  It’s not easy. There are rules and identities wound within rules and identities here, and parsing them out is a frequent topic of discussion in the online whiskey discussion sites. Whiskey writer Chuck Cowdery has made something of a specialty of interpreting the rules and has on occasion brought inaccuracies to the attention of the TTB, resulting in label changes; one case involved a spirit made from potatoes that the TTB approved as
“potato whiskey.” That’s definitely not in the standards. Let’s have a look at what is.

  Give It to Me Straight

  To begin, there are three parts to the standards. The first identifies whiskey, the second delineates two classes of whiskey — corn whiskey is one, and the other contains bourbon, rye, wheat, malt, and rye malt whiskeys — and the third makes a further definition of “straight” whiskey.

  Part 1: Defining Whiskey

  The first part’s pretty basic stuff: whiskey is distilled from grain. Specifically, whiskey is a distillate made from a “fermented mash of grain.” The final distillation must be to less than 190 proof (95 percent ABV, which is very high; above that, a distillate is considered “neutral spirits” or “alcohol” . . . or “fuel”) “in such manner that the distillate possesses the taste, aroma, and characteristics generally attributed to whisky.”

  That’s kind of odd, because the definition goes on to say that the distillate has to be “stored in oak containers” (unless it is corn whiskey). But it has to taste and smell and have the “characteristics generally attributed to whisky” when it comes off the still? It’s the storage in oak containers, not the fermentation and distillation, that gives whiskey its flavors, aromas, and colors. Like I said: it’s not easy understanding these rules! Finally, to be labeled “whiskey,” it must be bottled at no less than 80 proof.