While Teeling Distillery was founded in 2015, a quick look at their offerings will show releases carrying much older age statements. This is because when John Teeling sold the Cooley Distillery to what is now Beam Suntory, one of the stipulations of the sale was the family taking 16,000 casks of whiskey with them. It is from these casks that many of their older bottlings are derived, whiskey essentially sourced from themselves. The Brabazon series from Teeling kicked off in 2017 and was named after William Brabazon, the 3rd Earl of Meath, who oversaw the development of the New Market area in Dublin that would eventually become the Liberties district where the current distillery resides. There have been four entries in this series as of this writing. The Brabazon 2 was bottled in September 2017 and matured in a various sizes of ex-port casks.
Colkegan Single Barrel Apple Brandy Cask
It is always good when distilleries produce a good regular line up. What’s even more exciting is when they get to the point where single barrels start being offered, because that signals individual barrels are aging enough to be good on their own rather than being part of a larger blend to achieve some homogenous whole. Davidsons is a large and diverse liquor store in Centennial, Colorado that bought their own barrel of the Colkegan Single Malt. This store pick was a single malt finished for a year in apple brandy casks, an offering that first appeared in April 2017. These apple brandy casks were from the apple brandy made by Santa Fe Spirits, making this whiskey a complete circle.
Copper Fox Wasmund’s Single Malt
Virginia has a long tradition of whiskey, with companies like A. Smith Bowman among others. As with many other states, it is currently enjoying a craft whiskey boom, with younger distilleries like Reservoir popping up. Copper Fox, though being a little on the older site of the current boom (founded 2005), is doing something slightly different: an American Single Malt, made in the Scottish style using apple and other fruit woods as a source of the smoke. No surprise given founder Rick Wasmund interned at the fabled Bowmore Distillery.