How American Brewer Alex Chasko Became One of Ireland’s Top Distillers

You can’t make good whiskey without first making good beer. Few people know this better than Alex Chasko. The master distiller and blender at Teeling Whiskey Company in Dublin oversees a portfolio that includes many styles of Irish whiskey, but his roots lie in the microbrewing scene of the 1990s Pacific Northwest. While studying for a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at the University of Oregon, Chasko started work on “the lowest of the low rungs” at Portland’s Bridge Port Brewing. “That first summer stacking cases of beer, I learned a lot about the brewing industry,” he says. After graduation, he made the rounds of the West Coast’s budding craft breweries—Sierra Nevada, Anchor, and others—seeking a way to get into beer in earnest.

“What I learned is that there’s a lot of different ways that people make beer” beyond the classic British styles of Bridge Port, Chasko says. “I was curious as to how the same thing is made in different ways. Where does that come from? And one place that kept coming up in conversation was Heriot-Watt University in Scotland.”

After securing a job at Seattle’s Pyramid Brewing, Chasko set his sights on undertaking a master’s at Heriot-Watt’s International Centre for Brewing and Distilling. But it took some time, including a stint working at Intel during the dot-com boom, to save up. “Brewers aren’t paid very well,” he says wryly.

Eventually, he made it to Scotland. “It was a great opportunity to learn from the legends of the industry,” Chasko says. In addition to a who’s who of the brewing world as his instructors, Chasko worked under the tutelage of Johnnie Walker master blender Jim Beveridge when completing his thesis on novel flavors in new-make single malt, at Diageo. “As a student, to be able to take him a bottle and with a shaky hand say, ‘Hello, sir, what do you think of this?’ And for him to say, ‘I like it. I think it’s good’—wow, that’s pretty amazing. I got a bit of confidence,” Chasko says.

During his time at Heriot-Watt, Chasko met a woman from Tipperary who would eventually become his wife and lead him to Ireland to live. They made a stop along the way in Singapore, where he ran a brewpub for a couple of years. “I learned how to survive on my own,” he says of the days spent both operating an on-premise venue and running logistics, trying to source hops, malt, and other ingredients for his beers. “It was a real kick in the pants, but it was fun.”

The couple moved to Ireland in October 2008—“just in time for the Great Recession to hit the Celtic Tiger,” Chasko says. “Everybody that could leave Ireland was leaving, and we were rolling in.” Yet the timing was fortuitous for him, as Cooley Distillery—a huge contract producer founded by John Teeling—was looking for a distiller.

Chasko settled in easily, comfortable with an environment that reminded him of his time at Bridge Port. “What myself and the Teeling family share is the same thing that got me into brewing—that idea of it being a business and a craft,” he says. “There’s an entrepreneurial spirit to it, trying to create something new—to innovate.” Although Cooley’s business centered on contract production, Chasko says, “There was scope to experiment.”

He channeled the “why not?” attitude of 1990s microbrewing into making whiskey.

So he channeled the “why not?” attitude of 1990s microbrewing into making whiskey. “My co-workers thought I was trying to break the place,” he says. His mindset was: “I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but we’re going to give it a try. We’re going to take inspiration from what other people are doing, and from textbooks, and what we know about the process, and we’re going to try and make something new.

Among the innovations Chasko remembers trialing at Cooley were Concannon, a whiskey finished in Petite Sirah barrels from the California winery of the same name, and Connemara aged in casks made from 5,000-year-old bog oak—a project that would stand out for its uniqueness even among today’s crowded field of cask finishes. He also made the whiskey that was eventually released as Kilbeggan Rye, a flavorful and unique spirit that has stirred up conversation and questions about the identity of the Irish single pot still style.

“I had seen that American interpretations of IPA weren’t the British IPA, but it changed the world to people knowing about IPA,” Chasko says. “American interpretations of hefeweizen changed the overall view of what beer was—that it wasn’t fizzy yellow lager.” That’s the sort of evolution he aimed to create in Irish whiskey. But he thought it would be limited to the place he worked—Cooley, and later Teeling Whiskey Co.—which he viewed as a “petri dish.”

“What I didn’t realize and didn’t really have a perspective on,” Chasko says, “is how it would influence other people, too.”

Ten years ago, Irish whiskey was a fairly uniform category, dominated by Jameson, which held about 80 percent of the U.S. market. Most other brands—whose whiskey came from just a handful of distilleries, dominated by Cooley—followed a similar formula: 80-proof blended whiskey, packaged in a green bottle with a name and symbolism recalling verdant fields, cozy pubs, cheeky lasses, or some combination there of.

Chasko made much of the whiskey that went into those bottles, and is proud of it. But when he joined Jack and Stephen Teeling, the sons of John Teeling, at the new distillery they opened in Dublin in 2015, he had the chance to stretch further and help shift the prevailing notion of Irish whiskey as a single style. “I think that the writing was on the wall, and I did my bit to try and push it,” he says. And in the decade since, many others have followed in his wake.

In 2015, there were fewer than 30 distilleries operating in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The number has grown appreciably since, with many new distilleries opening under the guidance of Chasko disciples. Among them is Paul Corbett, who worked with Chasko from 2015 to 2018 and went onto help open Clonakilty Distillery. Corbett now serves as distillery manager at Powerscourt, where he makes whiskey from specialty brewers’ malts—something he learned from Chasko.

“He taught me to always be looking for new and crazy ways to get new and novel flavors into your spirit.”—Paul Corbett

“He taught me to always be looking for new and crazy ways to get new and novel flavors into your spirit,” Corbett says, adding that Chasko has guided him in other ways, too, including building up his confidence. “He always said, ‘Remember that you are the expert when you’re talking about whiskey and when you’re blending. Most people out there will never have the knowledge you have.’ And those words always stuck with me.”

The stills started running at Teeling Whiskey Company in November 2015, and from the start, Chasko played around. One of the first areas he experimented in was cask finishing, carrying over experience from Cooley, where he was the first distiller to finish Irish whiskey in a stout cask in a collaboration between Dublin’s Porterhouse Brewing and Kilbeggan. The whiskey was never released, to Chasko’s knowledge, likely lost in the shuffle of Cooley’s sale to Beam Inc. in 2012.

Since Teeling got started by selling Cooley-made stock while its own spirit aged, Chasko used novel casks to create a diverse range right out of the gate. In the early days, there were single malts finished in Muscat, white Burgundy, Carcavelos, and even aquavit casks. “Alex is the first distiller to make Irish whiskey sexy again,” Corbett says, explaining that Irish whiskey maturation was hitherto limited. “Before he was at Teeling, it was single malt in bourbon [casks] and pot still in bourbon and sherry [casks]. Alex kicked off this entire trend which now every other distillery in the country has copied using all these new and exotic barrels.”

Beyond cask finishing, Chasko pulled other levers: employing white wine yeast and other strains to coax novel flavors from fermentation, and tinkering with grain bills, using specialty malt varieties typically found in beer, like crystal malt and chocolate malt. And he chose to bottle all of Teeling’s whiskies at a minimum 46 percent ABV, without chill-filtration, enhancing their body and texture—unusual for most Irish whiskey at the time.

Now 10 years into Teeling Whiskey’s story, Chasko still gets excited about the capacity to experiment. “Whiskey is a very long game,” he says. He’s isolating wild yeast from hives atop the distillery’s roof to try out in fermentations, and collaborating at every opportunity. “To work with brewers and winemakers and other spirit producers, that’s what I really like,” he says. “I like to go and see what they’re doing, what’s unique about their process, learn what’s going on in another area, and then hopefully a little bit of that magic rubs off.”

Like much of the spirits world, Ireland’s whiskey industry is facing challenges at the moment. But Chasko compares it optimistically to Portland’s beer scene in the ’90s: on the cusp of more flavor diversity and creativity, despite a potential looming correction of the industry. He offers advice to new brands and distillers. “You have to have something that’s unique to you, that people can taste,” he says. “As long as you do that, you probably are going to find your niche. I hope that people make unique and unusual and different and wild spirits, and I hope that they find their following.”