The A to Z of Irish Whiskey
- single cask
The bottled product of a single matured cask.
In the normal case when whiskey is ready for bottling, a selection of casks is chosen, emptied into a vat and thoroughly mixed. Only then is it filled into bottles. This facilitates consistency between batches and also allows the master blender to fashion the final product from whiskeys of different type (grain, malt or pure pot still), of different ages or matured in different types of cask (bourbon, sherry or rum, for example).
A single cask release, on the other hand, is the bottled product of a single cask. Only the best casks are chosen and the whiskey is typically released at cask strength.
The cask number is typically noted on the label, along with the type of wood and the dates of distillation and bottling.
- single grain
A grain whiskey that is the product of a single distillery.
Greenore is a single grain whiskey, made by Cooley.
- single malt
A malt whiskey that is the product of a single distillery.
With only two distilleries in Ireland making malt whiskey this is not a very useful designation. But it has acquired cachet from the Scotch industry so you will see it on bottles of Irish whiskey too, for example Bushmills 10yo and Tyrconnell.
- vintage
A premium whiskey marketed by year of bottling rather than length of maturation.
Whiskey is matured for years, or even decades, before bottling. Distillers sometimes find that they didn't accurately predict demand all those years ago when laying down maturing stocks and so run short when bottling a particular aged expression.
To ease this problem they produce some whiskeys as vintages instead. Thus they print the year of manufacture (or "vintage") on the batch of whiskey and the age remains undeclared. Then they can use some 9 year old whiskey, say, to smooth over a temporary shortage of 10 year old without needing to relabel the whiskey to reflect that.
Midleton is a good example of a vintage whiskey. It also illustrates that vintages are not necessarily inferior to whiskeys with defined ages. Indeed they may incorporate some very fine old whiskeys along with much younger grain, say. They also vary from year to year which adds interest for afficionados.
