Blended

Irish Blended Whiskey

Some of the most popular Irish whiskeys are blends. The category is one of the four types of Irish whiskey: blends, single grain, single pot still and single malts. 

Blends are generally a cheaper product to produce and sell so they tend to take a lower tier in people’s minds than single malts, for example. However, the blended category is one of the bestselling. Jameson Original, Ireland’s bestselling whiskey by far, is a blend. At the other end of the spectrum, Midleton Very Rare, Ireland’s most prestigious whiskey brand, is also a blend – although many people don’t realise it.

Blended whiskey is simply the process of taking two or more whiskeys and combining them to make a more complex or more deeply flavoured whiskey. It isn’t really anything to do with quality and more to do with the mastery of blending. 

The Irishman, The Harvest from Walsh Whiskey, is a terrific example of a top-shelf blend. They take single malt whiskey and blend it with single pot still whiskey to create a 40% triple-distilled blended variant of their Irishman brand. It’s just as popular as the standard single malt version. Matured in ex-bourbon barrels, it champions all the signature notes of both whiskey types with lots of dark chocolate, oak spice, vanilla and butterscotch. 

Keepers Heart Irish + American, a young whiskey brand from Ireland and the United States, takes an even more innovative approach by blending Irish whiskey with American rye to make a 43% triple-distilled blend.  

Most blended Irish whiskey doesn’t carry an age statement. Brands producing in this category tend to use younger whiskey in their blends, although Teeling Distillery does buck the trend. Its Japanese-inspired blend, the Teeling Explorer’s Series Japanese Edition is a 15-year-old blend of whiskey made using both corn and malted barley. Matured first in ex-bourbon barrels, it is finished in Japanese Mugi Shochu casks. This cask type formally contained a traditional Japanese spirit made with five types of barley.

Blended whiskeys also tend to work very well with beer cask finishes. Hinch produces a blended whiskey called Hinch Craft and Cask, which blends two types of grain whiskey and then finishes it in an ex-Imperial stout cask. This imparts lots of honey, caramel, dark chocolate and espresso notes into the whiskey creating a much more luxurious texture than if the whiskey was unfinished. The art of blending and finishing whiskey are two interconnected skill sets that often elevate blended whiskey brands.

A brand that spins that approach even further is from Micil. Its Micil Inverin Small Batch is a blended Irish whiskey that is finished in PX sherry casks as well as peated poitín casks. The flavour of poitín is a rare entrant into the Irish whiskey market. It’s a traditional high-alcohol distilled spirit drink which is thought to have created the building blocks for the original whiskey makers. Using a peated variant of this potent drink gives a smoky edge to the 46% Irish blended whiskey, making it stand out in the Irish blended whiskey category.