Episode 119: The Past and Future of Irish Whiskey With Mark McLaughlin of The Dead Rabbit

Exploring Irish whiskey’s rich history and promising future.

Photo: Simon Hutchinson

March 17, 2025

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Paul Clarke

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Radio Imbibe from Imbibe magazine. I’m Paul Clarke, Imbibe’s editor in chief.

And if you’ve been a reader of Imbibe or a subscriber to the magazine for any length of time, then you may have noticed a certain pattern in recent years. For the past eight years or so, every year for our March/April issue, we’ve been selecting a different aspect of the spirits world. And we then explore that spirit from every angle we can think of. In the past, past, we’ve done these kinds of deep dives into American whiskey and Scotch whisky and gin and brandy and agave spirits, among others. This time last year, after we wrapped up our 2024 installment, I was looking ahead to this year in figuring out which spirits categories had undergone significant change in recent years and would merit this kind of extended exploration. And while several candidates in mind, one in particular stood out.

Irish whiskey has undergone a tremendous shift over the past decade and a half. We’ve gone from just a few large distilleries making all the whiskey in Ireland to a situation today where producers number in the dozens, many of them innovating with recipes and techniques and barrel types, the sum total of which is a vastly different world of Irish whiskey than the one we knew just a few years ago.

For this episode, we’re continuing our coverage of Irish whiskey with a conversation with someone who has particular insight into the category: Mark McLaughlin, the director of Irish whiskey for the Dead Rabbit in New York City. Dead Rabbit made its debut just as the Irish whiskey category was starting this current period of growth and evolution. And over the years, the owners and the staff there have helped define how many American drinkers first encounter and first start exploring the category. So for this episode, we’re talking to Mark about the creative opportunities that Irish whiskey producers have today, good ways to break down the world of Irish whiskey into understandable components, and about some of the ways today’s producers are creating a new future for Irish whiskey.

One quick note before we get into that interview. This episode is sponsored by Teeling Irish Whiskey, the award-winning Dublin distilled Irish whiskey, founded by Jack and Stephen Teeling, who come from a long line of Irish whiskey makers. Teeling is known for their flagship small batch, a blended Irish whiskey made in small batches, finished in rum casks. 46% ABV and non-chill filtered. It’s a beautiful and flavorful sipping whiskey that also elevates cocktails like the classic Irish coffee. Head to teelingwhiskey.com to learn more.

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Paul Clarke

Mark, welcome to Radio Imbibe.

Mark McLaughlin

Hi, Paul. How are you? Thanks very much for having me.

Paul Clarke

Absolutely. It’s my pleasure. And it’s so great to have you on as part of the podcast, because at the time that this episode goes out, it’ll be March of 2025 and the March/April issue of Imbibe will be available then, and that explores all aspects of Irish whiskey. Now, you, as the director of Irish whiskey for the Dead Rabbit, are in a position to know a little bit about Irish whiskey. So to start off with, here’s the great big softball question for you to get us rolling. Why Irish whiskey? Why for whiskey drinkers who might ordinarily be turning to their favorite bourbons or Scotch whiskeys or Japanese whiskey? And why is Irish whiskey a direction they should consider exploring right now?

Mark McLaughlin

Irish whiskey offers something that’s quite unique in its versatility. So if we look at the kind of just a technical definition for Irish whiskey and Irish whiskey as a protected term under a geographic indication or a GI, which means if you’re going to put Irish whiskey on the bottle, you have to make it a certain way. But that kind of definition is actually quite broad and essentially in kind of layman’s terms, as it needs to be made from grain, water and yeast. It needs to be distilled and it needs to be matured. All this has to happen on the island of Ireland for it to be called Irish whiskey. So that gives you a whole load of different ways you can go about creating spirits.

Now, I know we’re going to talk about we do have kind of four signature styles that are generally the kind of common grounds for Irish whiskey, but also you can kind of go off on tangents, which is the kind of modern Irish distilling industry is no experiment doing more than ever. So previously it would have been very much of like barley and barley has reigned supreme over the last kind of two, three decades.

But if we look back historically and then we look at the modern day, we’re seeing much more wider uses of oats, wheat and rye, where you see in double and triple distillation. We’re seeing column distillers used a lot more. We’re also seeing hybrid stills used. From a maturation perspective, Irish whiskey can be matured in any type of wooden vessel, so that opens your door to kind of Acacia wood, cherry wood, mulberry wood, all different types of oak varietals that are used. So you get a lot of versatility and variation and flavor.

So if you want to go like from, say, a bourbon drinker who’s predominantly drinking whiskey made with corn, high percentages of corn, maybe some wheat in there, some rye, depending on whether they like spicier or kind of lighter, kind of sweeter styles. Again, you can get Irish whiskeys that are, say, predominantly matured in bourbon casks. So you’re going to have a lot of the familiar flavor profiles like vanilla, honeycomb. And then depending on the distillate type, if you take a grain Irish whiskey generally made with corn as well, you’re going to get very similar flavor profiles, maybe a little bit lighter and Irish whiskey, but then you can take malt or pot style depending on what it’s matured and as well, and get very similar flavor profiles.

But then if you jump to Scotland, if you’re a Scotch whisky drinker, there’s actually more similarities to Irish whiskey than there are differences. You know, people that try and create many, many myths about how different they are from each other. To be honest, they’re very, very similar in the way that they’re made. Scotch whisky generally is a malt whisky distilling country, so you see a lot of single malt in Scotland and then a lot of blends the blends are made up with malt and grain. Where in Ireland we have blends that are made up of malt and grain, and pot still and grain, and malt and pot still and grain as well. So there’s a little bit more variation, but they’re very similar in style.

And you know, a lot of people think that all Scotch whisky is peated, actually a very small percentage of Scotch whisky that is actually peated. But if you like smokier styles, we have smoky whiskies in Ireland as well. You know, not all Irish whiskey is triple distilled. We do have double distilled whisky so that you know, there’s a lot of similarities and I think I truly believe that if you’re a fan of whisky in general, like whether you’re bourbon or Scotch or whether you’re Irish, you should be trying from different categories because there’s a whole world of flavor out there that’ll only serve to kind of open your eyes and develop your palate.

And I might have director of Irish whiskey in my title, but I’m not opposed to any whiskey at all. You know. So it’s more exciting globally now than it ever was. And we’re I think we’re quite lucky that Irish whiskey is quite innovative at the moment and it’s quite exciting. So we’re playing a role in that kind of global whiskey journey as well. So it’s really, really fun.

Paul Clarke

And, you know, not all that many years ago, if we were talking Irish whiskey, especially here in the U.S., we were really talking about Jameson and Bushmills and Powers, and that might have been just about it. And all of it made it just a very few distilleries, I mean, you can count on the fingers of one hand. In the past 10 to 15 years, that has totally changed. What does that mean in terms of the diversity and range of styles now available for Irish whiskey?

Mark McLaughlin

So if we go back to the late ’80s, it was three distilleries and you know, it was Jameson, it was Bushmills, and then we had Cooley Distillery and that remained the same up until 2012. In 2012 the Dingle Distillery came along, 2013. Then we’ve seen a huge array start to open. We had the Rademon Estate distillery. Shortcross, We had an Echlinville distillery. We had the Shed distillery and Drumshanbo we had lots of different ones. A note today in Ireland, I think we’ve had 50 working distilleries, so we’re at a much more different space, but it’s still within its infancy as such because you’re talking like 2012. There’s there’s a few distilleries that are hoping this year to release their first 10-year-old whiskey. So it’s still quite young terms of the kind of category.

Now, if you if you search and you go looking, you can get about 17, 18 different distilleries. And each distillery does have its own character, has its own profile. And I think when you’re assessing these whiskies, especially when they’re young, that’s what you’re looking for. You’re looking for a different kind of distillery character you’re looking for kind of whether it’s vibrant or fruity or whether it’s kind of spicy or oily or creamy or kind of heavier distillates. Then of course, the playground that they have is with wood and with maturation to kind of impart flavor and maximize the flavor. We also have whisky bonders in Ireland as well that are choosing parcels of whisky from all of these distilleries and bringing them together. So definitely the variation has started in the last two or three years to become more and more apparent.

But I think the next kind of five, 10, 15 years is going to be where we’re going to see Irish whiskey really start to diversify. We’re going to start to see distilleries kind of pop up that are going to, you know, have maybe not cult followings, but garner their own followings and start to kind of emerge from being these small kind of craft operations to be maybe worldwide respected distilleries. While we’re well, we are the oldest distilling country. kind of the youngest distilling country in a way as well, where we have a lot to do over the next kind of 10 or 15.

Paul Clarke

You talked about a number of different styles just a moment ago and you talk about maturation. I want to get at each of these one by one a little bit, because really this is where the fun stuff is and this is where some of the excitement is going. And, you know, most Irish whiskies that people first encounter are likely to be blends. Those are the biggest sellers and they’re lovely.

And blends, of course, are obviously blends of different types or styles of whiskey, all selected and mixed to create a particular kind of character. But I want to break down each of these building block styles. Start off with it’s arguably the signature of Irish whiskey category, and that’s single pot still whiskey. First off, what is this and how is it different from the other stuff on the shelf and why is it such a big deal for Irish whiskey?

Mark McLaughlin

So pot still whiskey? I suppose it goes back a long way and it kind of became an emerging category back in the late 1700s. So it’s been around a long time. And in that age we were under British rule here in Ireland and the distilling industry was in its infancy where we had a few emerging distilleries opened in the 1750s, in 1757, to be exact. And then we had a Jameson emerge, 1780. We had Midleton was 1824, Bushmills was 1784, although they claim 1608, the distillery was 1784.

So around that time there was a lot going on. And what the British decided to do was they wanted to tax production and the easiest way to tax production was actually to tax the malt itself. So nearly all of the whisky produced in Ireland was produced with malted barley at the time. And so they decided to tax the malt. And what the Irish decided to do then, as we do, is we are quite resourceful we like to think a little bit differently.

We started using unmalted barley, so green barley that hadn’t gone through the malting process. And what we found was that if you mix the green barley with the malted barley, you would get quite a different distillate. So it would be oily or it would be more viscous, it would have a lot more kind of spice characteristics and that would carry through then through maturation and through even double and triple distillation.

The majority of pot still whiskies we see on the shelves today are triple distilled. But you still get that bigger characteristic, those oily spicy natures to them. And then when you’re maturing the spirit because of the denser nature of the liquid that actually draws flavor from the casks a little bit more efficiently because it’s heavier, essentially in a can grab more of the kind of lignans and the polymers from the wood. You get lot of wood interaction. So depending on the types of casks that you’re using, you’re going to get a lot of flavor.

So they kind of synonymous brands that we would, you know, we would have in the Dead Rabbit nearly every bar we’d have in terms of anybody worth their salt in Irish whiskey would be Redbreast and we would say like Redbreast is the kind of quintessential single pot style Irish whiskey. It’s got malted and unmalted barley. It’s matured in bourbon casks and then they use Oloroso sherry butts as well.

And what people say about Redbreast is Redbreast, they’re like, you know, it’s sherry matured. It’s big, full sherry flavors. And it’s actually a kind of a testament to the whiskey makers at Midleton as Redbreast 12 actually only uses a small percentage of sherry casks about 23 to 28%, somewhere in there. But you get those clear kind of lovely dried fruit notes, the lovely nutty characteristics from the all are also coming clearly through the palate of the whiskey, and I think that’s a testament to the distillate itself.

Other ones to watch out for are ones like the spot whiskeys, Green Spot and Yellow Spot, and we have Blue Spot as well. Some of the Powers whiskies, there’s a pot still range there. One of them as a 12-year-old called Powers John’s Lane, which is fantastic. And then in the newer distilleries, the more modern distilleries, what we’re seeing and the definition for pot still is that while over the last kind of two or three decades, it’s been predominantly malted and unmalted barley, there is a little bit of wiggle room in there where you’re allowed currently allowed to use up to 5% of other grains.

So we’re seeing distillates that have oats and wheat and rye in there as well. One of them in particular from Drumshanbo, their single pot still whiskies contain 2.5% barrel oats, which again gives it a slightly different textural element. If we see rye used, we get a little bit more pepperyness. If we see the wheat used, I would describe wheat in a distillate as kind of silky and soft.

So with that little small percentage you can do a lot to change the flavor, but you’re still always going to have that oily and kind of bigger nature to spare while still remaining quite refined and elegant where it needs to be. So still it’s a unique style to Ireland. I probably didn’t say that it’s defined here in Ireland. It was created here in Ireland, but it’s a great, definitely a great category to kind of enter into Irish whiskey and to explore.

Paul Clarke

And, you know, you mentioned the use of unmalted barley. This is being kind of, the signature move in a way, along with malted barley. And you mentioned also that use of very small amounts of other grains, oats, wheat, rye and so on. It’s tempting to think of this as like modern innovation coming in to it, but this has a strong historical foundation in the category. Is that correct?

Mark McLaughlin

Oh 100%. Like the pot still category, if you went back into the 1800s, there was a vast majority of distilleries in Ireland were producing pot still whiskey. And the thing about the grains were it was very much depended on the harvest. So if they had a great barley harvest, it would lean heavily on the barley, of course. But if the barley harvest was poor on a particular year, you would see the percentages of the other grains go up and up, especially in illicit distilling which was prevalent in Ireland all through the years.

But there’s been massive historical research undertaken by a guy called Fionnan O’Connor, who wrote a book on pot still whiskey called A Glass Apart. He’s currently doing a thesis here in Ireland on pot still distillates, and he’s found that the majority of distillates produced from the 1700s right through to the mid 1900s and the pot still category actually used up to 30% other grains.

So the industry as a whole has come together through different lobbying bodies and they’ve applied to the Irish Department of Agriculture, which then goes to the EU to change the definition for pot still, from that 5% that I mentioned to 30% other grains, which that will blow the Irish whiskey kind of Irish pot still category wide open because if you’re thinking like 30% oats or even like 12, 15% oats, 10% wheat, 5% rye, you could do that along with the malted and unmalted barley.

With the malted and unmalted barley it needs to be a minimum of 30% of each. So we see 50-50, we see 60-40. It needs to be 30% of each. But that older, the other grains, 30%. There’s lots of distilleries in Ireland that are already making whiskies in that style. If the GI doesn’t get changed, they won’t be able to call them pot still whiskies, but they’ll be able to call them Irish whiskey because it’s made in Ireland and it follows all the rules for Irish whiskey. But we do expect it’s in its final kind of back and forth at the minute and I seen the latest draft and the amendments are very, very small, know that they’re looking at so it looks like maybe not in 2025, but it looks like in 2026 we could see that pot still category become much bigger.

Paul Clarke

That sounds really cool. I mean, this is, you know, first off, you know, going back to some of those kind of more historical styles, but also seeing what contemporary distillers can do with that kind of aspect. Going back to our relative newcomers to the Irish whiskey category, if people are more accustomed to drinking Scotch whisky and they’re looking at Irish whiskey, then single malt is a clear throughline there. Single malt means pretty much the same thing in both categories and in American single malt and Japanese single malt, I should say. Malted barley from a single distillery. That said, how does single malt Irish whiskey offer some different avenues for exploration that you might not find in other categories? And what might be some fruitful directions to look for in single malts?

Mark McLaughlin

I personally think single malt is probably the most important category globally right now for whiskey in general. So whether you’re an Irish whiskey distiller or an American whiskey distiller or a Japanese, the single malt, the phrase single malt is synonymous with quality across the world, no matter where you go, whether they’re English speaking nations or not. If you say single malt, they’re going to think whiskey. So there’s a huge advantage in that.

Within Ireland, I think the great thing about single malt is we can pick a lot of brands that have very different flavor profiles and single malt. So the big one from a single malt perspective is Bushmills Distillery, triple distilled Irish single malt, and they’ve been doing that since the 1700s. They have got this lovely fruit, full, delicate, elegant, refined, distillate that is just all so drinkable. So whether you’re drinking like their 10-year-old, they know you have a 12, they have a 14, they have 21, they’ve the 25 and 30-year-old. If you’re into the kind of more luxury end of the sphere, they’re 25 and 30 or older. Absolutely incredible.

And the cool thing about Bushmills is and what is really their key differentiator to any of the other malt whisky distilleries in the world is because they’ve been around for so long and they’ve been producing whiskey for so long, they actually did an audit in the late ’80s of all their casks, essentially. So they were owned by Irish distillers at the time. There’s a great master of maturation, a guy called Brandon Monks, who decided that he was going to do an audit of all the casks under the Irish distillers umbrella, and he found that the quality wasn’t good enough. So they went and they started sourcing better casks from around the world and they recasked an awful lot of their stock. But it was really cool as they started to lead own stock and different barrels from the beginning.

So bourbon casks were dominant at that stage, but they started to lay down rum casks. They started to lay down Sherry casks, port casks, all different styles, but they also recasked kind of ten and well anywhere from kind of 5 to 15 year old casks into other barrels. With selected Bushmills 25 and the Bushmills 30 year old, I can’t quite remember the cask make up, but you’re seeing one of them in particular is like five years in bourbon casks and then the finishing period is like 20 years in a port cask.

So you’re seeing these ultra long maturation and secondary casks which just completely changes the flavor. So Bushmills incredibly exciting distillery to watch. Now, it was a bit of a sleepy one there for about a decade or two or three maybe, but in the last like two or three years, it’s become very, very exciting. And we’re seeing those whiskeys release both sides of the pond, which is great as well.

Then we have double distilled whiskey, single malt whiskeys, which by nature the more times you distill the can a softer, more elegant to get. So when you compare double distilled whiskeys to triple distilled whiskeys, the double distilled whiskeys are going to be a little bit more boisterous, a little bit more robust, and we see double distilled single malts of varying ages because the Cooley distillery, when it opened in 1989, focused on double distilled single malt. So they have their own brands, they have Connemara, which is a peated single malt brand so you can get peated single malt from there, they have Tyrconnell as well. But they actually sold an awful lot of stock to independent brands. And there’s been some shining lights in the independent scene.

One in particular to watch out for is Dunville’s Irish whiskey. And Dunville is a very, very historic brand that has its roots in Belfast a couple of hundred years ago, but it was reimagined by the Ecklinville distillery. So Ecklinville is a distillery in the Irish Peninsula of County Down and they’re producing single estate whiskey. So they grow all their own barley, they produce malt whisky, they produce pot still whiskey, the produced gin all in the one site. But they’ve had this independent brand, Dunville’s, that they’ve been sourcing stock and they’ve been maturing it and the very best sherry casks that they can get. But if you ever get an opportunity to try to Dunville’s 10- or 12-year-old, they’re finished in PX casks and they’re absolutely fantastic.

This year, now, they’re bringing their 20, 21, 22 year olds to the U.S. They’re finished in things like PX and oloroso and also palo cortado sherry casks. And these are they full flavor generally cask strength whiskeys that will absolutely fill your palate full of flavor. And they’re very, very good value. Like they’re 22 year olds are somewhere in the region of kind of two, $250 to $300. And they’re generally single cask releases as well. So you’re getting very, very particular flavor profile. So from a single malt perspective, you can get elegant, refined, triple distilled, single malt. Then you can get bigger, robust and boisterous, double distilled. And then the key is watch out for the casks. All these casks are going to give you a different flavor.

Paul Clarke

Right, right, right. And can we talk about grain whiskey for a minute? Because this one often gets overlooked. It’s typically the workhorse of a blend, but grain whiskey and single grain whiskey really deserve a mention.

Mark McLaughlin

Oh, 100% grain whiskey is the most important style because the majority of the whiskey sold across the world is actually the high percentage of grain. If you consider the blended whiskey brands, grain whiskey produced in column stills in Ireland generally either made with corn or wheat. A lot of the whiskey that we would see on the market are made with corn. But in recent years some of the distilleries have started to transfer it over to wheat, which is gives you a different flavor profile. But corn gives you lovely, sweet, soft light. Just let the wheat the same, it’s going to be sweet, maybe a little bit more textural with wheat.

But if we consider the single grain whiskey category, we see brands like Kilbeggan Single Grain, which has been around for a long time, generally matured in bourbon casks maybe, and the recent Kilbeggan single grain they added a little bit of virgin oak which gives it that little bit of spiciness that would be very easily comparable to bourbon whiskey.

But another fantastic single grain whiskey, which is widely available is the Teeling single grain whiskey that’s produced from Cooley’s single grain distillate again, using corn and a little bit of malted barley. They fully mature that whiskey in California red wine casks. So Cabernet Sauvignon barrels from California, but the oak itself is actually French oak. It’s Californian wine, French oak, Irish whiskey, which is really, really nice. So you’ve got a lot of different flavor profiles there.

And then another one to watch out for in the U.S. is the Method and Madness Single Grain, which is an experimental brand by the amazing Middleton Distillery. But the Method and Madness grain is matured in bourbon casks and then it’s finished in virgin Spanish oak barrels. And again you get all these lovely kind of textural tropical fruit notes while it’s still very light as grain whiskey tends to be. But you get that lovely European oak influence which gives you this just lovely textural spice in the back.

So grain whiskey is very much a sleeping giant and if you get an opportunity over time to try older grain whiskeys, which welcome our own every now and again, Method and Madness had a 31-year-old. I know even in Scotland, Cameron Bridge, some of the independent bottlers have done 30-year-olds and 35-year-olds. Middleton I’ve had the privilege of trying some cask samples from Middleton that are like 25-, 30-year-old upwards, and the flavor profiles are unlike anything else. So I’m proponent for seeing like a luxury single grain category emerge in the future, because now that even though the distillate by nature is very calm and light and soft, you can impart incredible flavor there. So it’s definitely a category worth, you know, introducing yourself to exploring.

Paul Clarke

Right. Right. And then there are the blends where we started off, with the established ones are still out there, stronger than ever. But blends aren’t just an entry level into the category. They can provide some true beauty in style. there particular aspects in the blended category that you’re finding really exciting that you really like to show to people?

Mark McLaughlin

Yeah. I think blended whiskey, right? No. And from an Irish perspective, the excitement is kind of in the premium, kind of low end range, you know, something anyone can afford to like $60 a bottle. There’s a huge amount of blends in there, but you’re seeing a lot of different distillates used. So you’re seeing pot still, malt, and grain being brought together a lot of the time. You’re also seeing peated distillates being added into that mix as well to give you a different flavor profiles.

I obviously work with the Dead Rabbit and Dead Rabbit first and foremost is an Irish pub, but you know, arguably first and foremost is a cocktail bar. So like the blends offer you amazing versatility when it comes to cocktails and whether it’s a refreshing highball that you’re looking to have or something that’s much more complex, blended whiskey gives you lots of different flavor notes that you can pull out in terms of brands. The Silkie Irish whiskey, if you like smoky whiskey, they have an edition called Dark Smoky. It’s got this lovely pipe tobacco kind of smoke to it and a kind of salted caramel textures to it. It’s gorgeous.

And then we have really kind of young and exciting brands like Foxes Bow and The Lost Irish Whiskey. Lost Irish is a really, really interesting brand. It’s been started by a young guy who used to work for Tullamore Dew in the U.S. for over a decade, Tim Herlihy, an amazing character and a great storyteller and through and through an Irishman, and I love him to bits, he created this Lost Irish whiskey to represent all the Irish people that have got lost from Ireland and went all around the world because Irish people are everywhere. But with that, he’s taken pot still whiskey, single malt whisky, and grain whiskey and put them together. But he’s matured them in five different casks from five different continents. So from Australia, from Japan, from America, from Europe, from Ireland. And it’s a, it’s a really, really interesting product.

But again, incredibly good value and you’ll see it across top cocktail bars in America are all pouring Lost Irish, which is really cool and it’s modern, it’s young and it’s being run by young people. They’re a brand to watch out for in the blended category.

Paul Clarke

Right. Right. And we’ve given folks a lot to work with. But before we wrap up, can we talk about maturation for a moment? You’ve touched on this a little bit. I just want to focus on a little bit, because this is one aspect where Irish whiskey really shines and is really kind of offers alternatives to what the what else is out there. Irish producers have to a much greater degree arguably than any other whiskey region, a flexibility or an abundance of options they can use when it comes to the type of barrel to use what was in the barrel previously and how you put those together. When we’re looking at barrels, how are those figuring into the bigger equation in in these whiskeys?

Mark McLaughlin

There’s kind of a consideration of the style of whiskey that you want to make as a distillery or a brand owner. And, you know, we’ve seen maybe over the last few decades that a lot of people lean very heavily on bourbon casks and sherry casks. And you’re getting a lot of flavor profiles that are similar to each other. But it’s become as though global whiskey categories become more competitive, but also as it’s become more kind of exciting and innovative, it has become more and more important for these whiskey makers to really start to look at what they’re doing.

So when we look at casks, it’s almost like a chef’s spice rack. You can take all of these different styles of barrels and you can pull different flavor profiles from them. Traditionally, we’ve seen I’ve mentioned bourbon and sherry casks, but even with sherry casks, it’s diving a little bit deeper into the style. So there’s lots of different styles of sherry. There’s Amontillado, Palo Cortado, fino, cream sherry casks that are all starting to pop up. We’ve seen fortified wine casks heavily used over the years, like Madeira and Port. We’re seeing more and more kind of red and white wine casks, sweet wine casks being used, rum casks, a ll spirit barrels. We’ve seen tequila and mezcal barrels experimented with as well. But where Ireland kind of stands out is and with the opportunity to use wooden casks as well.

Now recently it’s still, this is a very kind of emerging category, but we’re seeing distilleries either bottle single casks that have been finished in these wood wooden barrels or have a little components of the wooden barrels in there. So I’m talking about things like acacia wood, French chestnut, things like cherry and mulberry have all kind of popped up already, which is great to see because they give very different flavor profiles while still having a lot of the similar properties to what oak has and that’s why they can make barrels from them.

But where I see that going in the future is I think we’re going to get whiskies that are using like five, six and seven different cask types as whiskey makers and blenders in particular start to go, Well, if I use a little bit of this and a little bit of this and I use a little bit of this and a little bit more of this, I’m going to get flavors that we’ve never seen before. And that for me is where is the most exciting part of Irish whiskey in general. And if I was starting a brand in the morning, that’s what I would want to do.

What I would love to do is I would love to take all of these distillates, all the single pot still distillates that are there, all the different variants, all the single malt variants, all these different grain variants that are right there in Ireland and bring them together from all these different distilleries with their unique characters, and then take as many cask varietals as I can, work closely with cooperages and bring it all together, because all of a sudden you’re going to have a plethora of flavor to play with and you can actually create whiskies that have never been seen before and will be impossible to replicate by any other category. And you can do all that in Ireland. And that’s one of the things that we hold over everybody else.

Paul Clarke

We’re coming near the end here now. Any final thoughts you’d like to share?

Mark McLaughlin

For me, being a young Irish man and Irish whiskey is, while it’s one of the oldest categories in the world, it’s an emerging category. And I think if you enjoy spirits in any way or form, I think there’s an Irish whiskey out there for you, whether it be in a cocktail or in an Irish coffee. Irish coffee is one of the most important drinks out there for Irish whiskey, or whether it be neat or with ice or with Coke, whatever way you want to drink it.

I truly believe there’s an Irish whiskey out there for everybody, and it’s just about asking the questions, you know, whether it be going into a retailer, your local liquor store and asking, do they have anything new or following things like Imbibe and seeing new products coming along and new stories coming along about great whiskey makers or getting into bars.

I’m a massive proponent for the hospitality trade, especially with how hard it has been for hospitality over the last decade. Get into your bars and ask the bartenders. Most bartenders love talking and love the sound of their own voice and love to make recommendations, especially places like the Dead Rabbit, where we invest heavily in our education program.

And we want people to ask questions, but we want our staff to be empowered to make recommendations that actually are meaningful to the customer sitting in front of them and to have the knowledge to be able to do that. So only advice I think I ever give anybody and I get asked the question a lot, you know, how do you learn more about whiskey or how do become an expert in this, that and the other? All I can ever say is just taste, taste, taste. Get out there and taste and you’ll eventually find something that’s for you.

Paul Clarke

Mark, thanks so much for joining us and for sharing all of this insight in Irish whiskey.

Mark McLaughlin

Thank you for doing all the work on it and I can’t wait to see it.

[music]

Paul Clarke

You can find Mark Mclauchlan on Instagram @mark_ whiskey and head to thedeadrabbit.com to find out more about the Dead Rabbit and its locations. We’ve got those links for you in this episode’s notes. And thanks once again to this episode’s sponsor, Teeling Irish Whiskey.

And that’s it for this episode. Be sure to subscribe to Radio Imbibe on your favorite podcast app to keep up with all our future episodes. We’ve got plenty of articles and recipes for you online at our website ImbibeMagazine.com. Keep up with us day to day on Instagram, Pinterest, Threads, and Facebook. And if you’re not already a subscriber to the print and or digital issues of imbibe, then here’s your opportunity to come on board. Just follow the link in the episode’s notes and we’ll be happy to help you out. I’m Paul Clarke. This is Radio Imbibe. Catch you next time.