Hey, welcome back. You're listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Pat from the Whiskey Hotline. We got a special Whiskey Hotline episode today. Welcome back, Brett. Brett from the Whiskey Hotline. Thanks for joining us. Roger's here too. What's up, Rog? Hey, good to be here. Roger from Beer. We have very special guests today. We've got the Managing Distillery Director from the Dingle Distillery, Elliot Hughes. Welcome, Elliot. Hey guys, how are you? Nice. We are good. Thanks for joining us. How are you? Good. Not too bad. Thanks for having us. How long have you been in the States here? About a week now. just a couple of days left as well. Did you do the full national tour where every Dingle is placed? A little bit. We did San Francisco. We started with our importers there. We then moved on to Dallas and Fort Worth, and then we're up in Chicago today and on to New York tomorrow morning. Okay. minus Texas, pretty good trip. I really like Texas. I believe you got some really handsome hats in Texas. We did. Yeah, we did get some hats. I feel that that's the thing to do in Texas. I can only picture the locals in Dingle seeing you march in wearing these goofy hats like the hobbits going back to the Shire after they've won. Yeah, I'm not really sure it's one of those things I'll ever wear again, but it sounded like a really good idea after a few margaritas. It's just going to hang on a wall forever. Yeah, a nice expensive wall ornament. Elliot, let's talk about the distillery for a bit. This is something we've been supporting as soon as Brett could convince them to send some stuff over really. We've both been to the distillery, it's been a few years for me. Can you give us a background on how Dingle started and why the heck you would choose to put an industrial operation in the farthest most far flung corner of Ireland imaginable? Yeah. Well, as I said, it starts back with the business, the wider business itself was brewery and bars, is how we operated generally. So we opened our first bar in 1989, and we specialized in bringing in interesting and different beers from around Europe as much as what we could get. And what bar was that? That's the Porter house. Porter house. And that's in Dublin, right? It was just outside Dublin at the time. And we would have been man in a van over to Europe, back with a few different cases of interesting beers. And that's kind of where it started, where it started effectively with my father and now my current business partner. My father, my current business partner, Laleem, who would have worked with Oliver, and they would have imported an awful lot of beers, really had a passion for beer, grew up in the UK and really liked kind of real ale, was their real passion at the time. So they wanted to bring that back to Ireland, because even as of today, the beer scene in Ireland is not great. So you were bringing all these interesting beers over through the porterhouse pub. When did porterhouse as a beer brand start then? Yeah, so we started in 1996. We opened another pub and that was a brew pub, a small brew pub, just brewing on site, just for ourselves and for our second bar as well. And it was over the course of the years. We were always, we've gone through a few stages as a company. We were very much a bar company. Then we moved to a brewery company and I was laterally moved to a distillery company. So really as a company, we always focused on just supplying ourselves. We had very little involvement in the export market bar, one or two people that we worked with, and we didn't do much in the off trade. It was very much ourselves. Until in about 2001, we moved from our brew pub into a much bigger facility, which allowed us to grow a little bit more as well. So when did the transition from brewer to distiller happen? I suppose we always used to say that as the guys, as Oliver and Liam grew up, I suppose their taste profiles changed, they moved from beer to whiskey. It was really the idea started in 2008, 2009, just in the height of the financial crash. When I said as a pub business and as a brewery business, we were really struggling, so I'm not really sure what the logic was at the time. But yeah, the guys, I suppose, always had a passion, and particularly Oliver, my father had a passion to try a distillery and to do that. There was various different options. There was talks of moving the brewery itself prior to move to our third facility, to move the brewery to another facility that we could operate a distillery and a brewery within Dublin itself. That was one option, didn't really get off the ground. And then we moved to the idea of Dingle, and especially you touched on why would we choose somewhere like Dingle. I mean, there was always a thought that I said, brewery beer is grungy, and you can brew that in an industrial estate outside of Dublin. Distilleries are a little bit, whiskey is a bit more romantic, and needed that kind of romanticism, and the industrial estate didn't quite fit that too much. Yeah. It's so remote. I mean, it's just on that little spit of rock on the Southwest Coast, right? And I've been there once, and just getting there was, it's like you're on a goat path more than a road, I think, trying to get there. Yeah. I kind of don't even notice it anymore. I feel like I'm on autopilot driving down, and people turn around and go, it's so difficult to get to. And you're like, oh, it wasn't? Yeah, it is remote. It's a kind of a town of about 3,000 people. It's a big tourist town. You've been there before. I think we worked out, we were talking the other day, it's about 22 pubs, about 15 restaurants. So it's a good time for 3,000 people. It's not bad. Yeah. Your ratios are pretty good there. When did you start distilling? How long ago now? We first started distilling in the winter of 2012. Gin and vodka in about November, and whiskey in the December period there. Okay. What are winters like in Dingle? They're not too bad actually. Dingle's got this kind of strange microclimate where it's always probably three or four degrees centigrade cooler than Dublin in summer, and probably three or four degrees hotter in the winter. So actually the fluctuation is not too bad. Pretty nice place to age whiskey. Well, you're getting the west coast of all, the west coast of Ireland, the west coast of Scotland. It's all the termination of the Gulf Stream. So you get the warm current that's coming from. No, you do get the rain as well. Yeah. I mean, the amount of times you're walking out of the pub going home, and the rain is, we have a place there, and you're walking up this hill, and you've had a few whiskeys, and you're walking home, and the rain is coming sideways, hitting you in the Cool. What style of whiskey are you focusing around there? We produce about 60% of our production of Single Malt, and about 40% is Single Pot Still. I don't think I've tasted any Single Pot Still from you guys yet. No, we haven't brought any over to the US anyway. I think some here that we might be able to show you a bit later, but no, we haven't officially brought anything over yet. Cool. Very cool. just to tease it, it's very good. Maybe we've had some discussions about having some come to the United States. Absolutely. I think it's something that we're conscious that we'd like to do. It was purely, I suppose, from our earlier days, we're now at about 60, 40 for our earlier days, we were probably less than that. And it was a challenge to acquire the raw material. So it's something that we're pushing a little bit more than we used to. Okay. Yeah. That's a question that I think would be interesting to cover. Two things. One, how you get the materials out there to actually distill with, because it's not exactly a great barley growing area of the country for one and for two. How has your staffing and distillation team evolved from when you guys started to where you are now? Yeah. I mean, it's just from a raw materials point of view, it's not overly challenging. It is something that we have to rely on. From a logistics channel, you're talking about deliveries on a more infrequent basis because they're not coming out to you. From a distillation team, I suppose, we've always kind of pride ourselves on largely employing local people, and it's something that we're quite keen on growing that and growing people's skills. A lot of the team that worked for us now have worked for us, not quite since the start, but certainly for about seven or eight years. Yeah, most of the guys, apart from our master distilleries we brought in 2019 from Scotland, everybody else is employed locally and grown locally, and none of them had really had any distillation experience, and they've grown, and actually, we've got So the whiskey production has been going since that first year of distillation, and how long did you wait? I mean, legally, you have to wait three years for Irish whiskey, right? Yeah, so we released, so we first filled casks on the 18th of December, 2012, and what we decided to do, we released a single cask on the 19th of December, 2015, as I suppose more of a token as to we've arrived, we have legal whiskey. But we didn't actually start releasing whiskey then for the following year. So we kind of had, I suppose, there was a lot of discussion between ourselves as to, right, do we go out now with a product that we know is three and a half, four years, could be an awful lot better. I suppose, there's two elements. There's a cash flow element. Can we actually actively survive without releasing us? And it's also, right, can we survive if we don't release whiskey for another few years and people forget about us? So there was kind of lots of debate between ourselves. Well, and can you survive if you release something that becomes inferior quickly because you learn that it's better if it's five or six. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and I think the one thing for us is we're all very, certainly we were learning on the job. None of us came into it with even our head distiller at the time was promoted from, I had never worked with whiskey outside of it. He was promoted internally. Neither my father, neither Liam, Peter, who's our other business partner, myself had any involvement in whiskey prior to this. So it was very much learning on the job. It was lots of debate, lots of mistakes. But yeah, I mean, I kind of look back and go, okay, there's pros and cons. I mean, definitely the aspect that people have said with our first initial couple of batches was, yeah, it's getting there. It's a bit sharp and a bit pricey for what it is. But over the years, what I've been really proud of is seeing, I suppose, that grow and seeing our average age and the quality of our product grow with each individual release. We're very much happy with the level where we're at now. And it's interesting to go back and try what we had released earlier days. It is inferior. I'd be lying sitting here saying it's not. There was really no guidance in Ireland. I mean, you guys make a strong argument that you're the original craft distiller in Ireland, really. I mean, there are a number of facilities now, but everything else that would have been popping up around the time you guys started were meant to be much bigger operations. West Cork, Great Northern, came after you. You guys in Teeling. Yeah, pretty much. There's a couple of other guys that came out, but we're incredibly small. I mean, I think Teeling is probably a million LPA per annum. I think we're about 180,000. So even that comparison, we're quite a small distillery. I think, in fairness, to be fair to the likes of Middleton, they were pretty decent with us with kind of helping train in a couple of our guys and providing a bit of guidance there, which is probably the most we did receive. The rest of it was just, right, we'll see how we get on. So speaking of the distillery itself, I was last there in the fall of 2019, but I had 33 family members going through the place with me, so I couldn't really focus on the kid as much as I would, going through a distillery with Brett. Can you kind of take us through what somebody would see in the still house itself? Yeah, I suppose the distillery is a blue tin shed. It was originally an old sawmill. The film Ryan's Daughter was filmed a few miles away, and all the wood for the production of the set and everything like that was produced there. So it hadn't really changed much. We did the entire distillery on a shoestring budget. And you walk in, blue tin shed, depends on what time of the year you go in. You go in the summer, it's incredibly hot. If you go in the winter, it's incredibly cold. September is okay. It's just about survivable. It's okay for eight weeks a year. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, I mean, as I said, it's a very temperate climate, but when it hits that uninsulated shed, it's pretty bad. But yeah, effectively, what you have is it's filled with containers that have just been ad hoc placed in there over the last few years, as well as our three stills, which kind of sit proud there. And we've got a nice kind of old school stone wall kind of reaching around the back. Yeah, so it's fairly basic. Traditional Irish triple pot still distillation. Yeah. And all the whiskeys are going through three times, whether it's malt or pot still. Yes, 99 percent would be. We have done a little bit of double distillation recently with a couple of just a bit of experimentation. But yeah, 99.5 percent, I would say. And then there's a separate still for the gin, obviously. Yeah, we've two separate stills. One, which originally was our gin and vodka still. And as our gin started to grow and we grew that, we kind of kept that for vodka. We've done a couple of experimental things like rum, which we keep on that still. And we've our new kind of larger still, which we focus on gin with. All right, so let's talk about the whisky, I guess. The first, we've had a couple of whisky releases here before, some of the numbered releases. We had number four and number five, but those are gone now, yeah? Yeah, well, I think number five was probably released in about 20, I think it was actually, no, five was COVID, it was March 2020, was when we released that, and yeah, that made life a bit difficult. We're on the tail end of batch five. I believe batch six never came to the States. No, batch six was quite a small volume product, and we didn't really sell too much of it outside of Ireland. Are you keeping on the batch system going forward, or is there an end game corp flagship whiskey that you're then going to build around? Yeah, so as our batch system is now finished, what we released last year was our new Single Malt. For us, it was a lot of discussion. This was all created over Zoom during COVID, and what we wanted to achieve was we don't want to go out, this was a low quality whiskey, we want to come out where we like to think ourselves a good high-quality premium distillery and we wanted our entry range product to reflect that. It's a Single Malt, it's 46.3 percent, it's a mixture of fully matured first fill bourbon sherry casks, so we use about 61 percent petro-hyminate sherry and 39 percent bourbon. We could have done it cheaper, we could have brought it down to 40 percent, we could have put a lot more bourbon into it, but we felt, again, we wanted to surprise people and people coming in at a price point where we know our competitors are sitting At 46.3, it's non-chill filtered then too. Yeah, it's correct. Yeah, there's no coloring, no chill filtration. Nice. We're looking to get our Dingle Single Malt into markets over the next couple of months, and then what we're looking at is our new range of whiskeys, which we've just released in Ireland. What it is, it's a limited series of nine, which we'll be releasing from October last year through to December 2024. Will we see all nine in the States? Yeah, I think so. Okay, cool. We'd like to think so. Collector alert. Yeah, so this was the concept of what we came up with was we like the idea of Dingle. Dingle has a lot of roots in pagan festivals, and a lot of pagan festivals are still celebrated today. The biggest day they have is on the 26th of December called the Rands Day. We're celebrating the Rands, which is our logo at the distillery. Oh, the little elfin hat guy? Straw man, yeah. So effectively, that's part of pagan tradition, and we also celebrate sound, which is now Halloween, while also celebrating in particular, Balthina, which is the 1st of May, which is, I suppose to kind of talk about it clotely, is the pagan raves, where raves there, it's pretty cool. It's pretty different, bonfires and raves, and people dress up. So it's still very much celebrated down there, so we wanted to kind of say, pay homage to that. And what we've released is what we have, the Wheel of the Year, the Celtic Wheel of the Year, which is traditionally, it's just eight different events over the course of one year, starting with Samhain on the 31st of October, evening in towards the Cool. So we've probably done a little bit of creative license with spreading it over two years, and then we've brought in as our ninth release, our Rands Day, which is very much part of the same family. Kind of disappointing you don't have a whiskey named after the famous local dolphin. It's fungus or something? Fungi. fungus would be. Yeah, that's been said many, many times. In fact, I think there was a query about whether we should have a bottle design as a dolphin shape. They've got this dolphin in Dingle Harbor, Roger, that like, I don't know. The whole tour is dedicated, people see this one dolphin, there's a statue of it. There's no way it's the same dolphin. It's ridiculous. It is the same dolphin. I will say the dolphin is now gone. Really? It was a very difficult moment for the town. It's no more. It's little Sebastian in Parks and Rec. So the dolphin arrived like 1984 and effectively stayed there. It became a dingle of tourism. They brought families down, they went on boats. If you didn't see the dolphin, you got your money back, everybody saw the dolphin. Yeah, it was a big part of it. But it was the same dolphin because people always question that. It's like, well, if you were getting fed easily by all these boats every single day, you'd stick around. Yeah, that's true. He passed away during COVID. It was a challenge and then there was a lot of talk about, should we have a tribute bottle and things like that. I mean, you think I'm joking. This is a serious topic. I successfully took us off the rails with dolphins. Well, then the question is, have you thought about hiring a new dolphin? Yeah, I mean, that's a sore spot for a lot of people. Yeah, I think a lot of the guys have done a lot of the boats have been repurposed to be a bit more longer range. And I've done the Fungi Dolphin Tour a million times as you do when you're a kid. And I've been there as a kid for the last 30 years. And what I think I'd never done until about two years ago was kind of go further out past in the boat at its most amazing location. We went out and you got one dolphin or you had one dolphin in the bay. You go kind of 10 minutes further out. And there's like, is it a pod of dolphins? Is that a pod of dolphins? Kind of like 50 of them go and it's like, this is pretty amazing. Like the wildlife there is pretty class. The one smart dolphin stayed in the bay and just got free food every day. Someone just needs to troll them back, like one stray back into the bay. Like Fungi was a big dolphin. Like, you know, so I think the rest of them will probably have seen that. And, you know, they'll want that food and they'll come back. That's pretty great. All right. Sorry. Back to the back to the whisky. So we've got this series of nine. Yeah. Yeah. Covered the important stuff. And you said it was Rams Day? It's spelled W-R-E-N. And as far as it's different pronunciations, people say Rand. People in Danding will say Rand. Okay. So for these different festival, you said there's actually celebrations then that are still going on? Yes. So like a revival thing recently? No, there's kind of a lot of them we can carry through. So some more than others. I mean, I say Báltaná, which is the first May, which is our next one, sequentially coming up, is probably the most celebrated. But we've also seen Lá Le Bríde, which is actually now as of this year, a bank holiday in Ireland, Bridget's Day, has been very much celebrated for a long time, but particularly over the last few years, it's got a lot more coverage. Well, Samhain's most celebrated one, it's just called Halloween. So yeah, a lot of it's celebrated. But certainly in Dingle, we really would celebrate our Rand's Day. We'd really celebrate Báltaná and we celebrate Lunasa, which is the first of august as well. So I'm not sure how she can explain this. We do have a local druid. Julie's a lovely woman and we did a fire festival back in, it was for sound and she would have kind of talked us through, I suppose the reason, the rationale for this. I think you were there. Yeah, we were there. Was it on the back patio at Dick Maxx? Yeah. You went to a druidic festival and didn't tell us? How did you not tell everybody? For this release, it's our limited series, one of nine, and we think our bottle design, label design will fit around that. Then I suppose what we would have done previously with our batch releases was everything was fully matured and different cast were married together over the course of the six releases on the single malt side and the five releases on the pot still side. This, we've got a different route, so everything here is initially matured in bourbon cast and then finished in cast for about 18 months. Okay, cool. Yeah, so it's a different approach and it was kind of, we kind of like the idea of kind of segregating them to kind of create this as a different profile. And once we get through this, and we actually need to start thinking about it the next three or four months, what we're doing in 2025. It seems mad, but we'll be moving into that and we'll be moving that forward with, again, a different approach and trying to give people a different perspective of what Dingle's about. because I suppose our batch release series and our pot still series would have shown, again, a slightly younger profile of what we've done. These are aged a little bit more forward. And I suppose that bourbon with the finishing does provide a different flavor profile than what we've previously done. Yeah, it makes it pop more for sure. because the batch releases, they were really good. But when it's fully matured in just a couple different types of sherry or port, it does create a more consistent profile. And you have a tremendous amount of casks available. I mean, it's not the basis is the Orozo sherry and the bourbon wood. But you have a number of different port casks and red wine casks and everything. Yeah. So we try and bring in about 40 percent bourbon casks, 40 percent sherry, and then about 10 percent port. And then we leave about 10 percent for whatever we see that becomes available. So we've brought a lot of red wine casks in the last couple of years. Our master stirrer is quite keen on that. We've brought in various things, whether they add much or not. You have your champagne casks, your rum casks, your beer casks as well. Those are fun. Yeah, we tried. It's a little bit of experimentation. There's a little bit of that will come through with these releases. So we're interested to see what that's like. Now, I've seen the distillery, but I didn't see any warehousing. Is the warehousing down in Dingle as well? Yeah, the warehouse is about a mile down the road. Okay. So it's something we picked up. We used to store everything on site. So in about 2016 or maybe 2017, we moved up the road. We were just full. We're now in the position where we probably only have a year or two left before we fill up. So we were going down the process of looking for planning permission to build another warehouse just beside as well. For us, it is important to keep maturation in the peninsula. Yeah, I agree. It's the identity of the distillery. I think that's something like Scotch has become so big and so much run by the accountants and stuff. The most highly sought after Islay Whiskies, barely any of them are actually aged on Islay anymore, for example. They're all aged on the mainland somewhere, wherever it's easiest to bring a truck in and out and stuff. I think it's cool to maintain the presence on the peninsula there. Yeah, we really don't let the accountants get involved. I mean, it's something that even I will tell our financial controller that I don't really want them to involved in this. And he's okay with that, I think. So yeah, it is important because I think you can go down a route very quickly. Yeah, I talk about our single malt, that if we wanted to go down a route where we're reducing costs, we could have done an awful lot more to do that. But for me, it was more important than actually, especially for people that hadn't really tried Dingle before, because for a lot of people, that's the case. This is the first impression that they're trying. It's got good flavor. It's at a good price point. We could have tried to push it up. Price point wise, we definitely could have reduced the cost, but it wasn't something we were really interested in. And the same thing across the way we do things. We don't try and cut corners. We're a small distillery. We need to effectively be at that premium level. If we wanted to go cheap and go low quality, at the end of the day, there's only so much you can do with 180,000 liters of alcohol per annum. Yeah. It's probably about time we taste one of these whiskeys. I've been staring at them a while. This is probably the longest you've ever made it in a podcast without demanding that you be served something to drink. I wasn't sure what the etiquette was. You mentioned the actual company, the distillery company's name is in Irish. Yeah, so I suppose when we started, we kind of wanted to make sure that we were tying in with the Geltac. So, it's Dingle Distillery, but it's company name is Driglaan Ischgabáha Dángeanní Cúis Tóirnta. What? Yeah. Effectively, it just means Dingle Whiskey Distillery, but yeah, there's an awful lot of words there. Dingle had a funny period with the Irish language where, like 15 years ago, the government decided to change the name from Dingle to its Irish name because it was based in the Geltac. But Dingle is, for those who don't know, it is a very, very well-known town. It's a very, very tourist driven town. That's the economy there. Big vacation town. Suddenly, people are putting in, not quite Google Maps, but they're opening their map at this page, and they can't find this town that they've heard of, and there's this Drighlán, or Dangany cush. I was like, okay, that's not the town I was told about by my friends. There was a vote and everything like that. There was a lot of animosity from people who wanted to keep the tradition of the Irish language. Now we have two names. Everything has two names on each side. Yeah, I can see the logic, but yeah. ridiculous. What's this first whiskey we're tasting here? So this is the first in our series. So this is our Samhain release. So this is again, as I say, it's matured in Bourbon Cask for probably five, five and a half years, and for the last 18 months, it's been matured in muscatel Cask as a single malt, and it's 50.5%. 50.5 and Samhain, S-A-M-H-A-I-N. Correct. Yeah. Okay. You keep trying to get that spelling right later, you could get into a bit of trouble now. Some of these are a bit more challenging. That's muscatel. You don't see that every day. How did you land in on that? Our master distiller is just quite keen on bringing in different flavors. I mean, it's not something to be perfectly honest that I get too involved in. For me, we brought in a master distiller. It's not for me to turn around and say what he should and shouldn't be doing. I'd like to give people a bit of autonomy. The guy sitting here beside me probably don't agree. I like this a lot. It's got a plush sweetness to it, but it's not as overly resonated as some other winecast finishes can be. Yeah, the nose is beautiful. It's very layered, honeyed, floral. A lot going on. Yeah, and we made a decision, and actually talking to Brett there about it was ABV or proof, but he assures me that ABV is fine for me to talk about. Oh, ABV is fine, yeah. Yeah, so we decided to move up from all our batch releases were 46.5 percent, and we also had a cast-strength series with that. So for every release, we had about 500 or 1,000 cast-strength. We kind of wanted to move away from that a little bit. We kind of simplifying our brand architecture. And what we decided to do is bring out this, which all our single malts in this release would be 50.5, and our pot stills would be 52.5. Okay. And this release or the series itself is a mix of single malt and pot still. I think it's about six single malt and three pot still. And is that just the distiller finds the pot still is showing better at that slightly higher proof? Yeah, very much so. It was a kind of conversation that we had that we didn't want to, again, we didn't want to just do something for the sake of making things simple. And we'll just have everything at the same ABV. There was a good bit of conversation about like, okay, can we just put this at a different price point, which obviously changes, different ABV, which obviously changes the price point. But it was like, look, I think that's fine. And it's something that's a better product. So let's just go with it. And this one is a single malt. This is beautiful. Being brewers first, has that impacted your decisions and views on which malts you're using to distill with? Or are you just, is that separate and you're using pretty standard distillers malts? Have you ever messed around with the brewer's malts? No, we usually would use pretty standard distillers malts. We were starting to experiment a little bit, particularly on our pot still with different varieties. But now largely we've kind of kept with distilled malts. I mean, a lot of our beers would have would have used somewhat traditional malts. We've only started experimenting with more interesting IPAs and things like that in the last few years. So, I mean, our founder, who's also our head brewer, would have been a kind of traditional brewer and kind of wanted to see the traditional style replicated in the distillery as well. Brett, what do you think of this salmon here? Salmon? Am I pronouncing that right? Samhain. Samhain? Yeah. I was way off. Usually people go with Samhain. I mean, that's closer than salmon. I didn't have a clue. Salmon, huh? You're aware there's no W in there. I see, Roger. The first four, Salmon, through Lá Le Bríde, through Bealtine and Lunasare, the fire festivals. But the second four are spring and autumn equinoxes. And our solstice is winter and summer. And the pronunciation of them is like, I struggle with that. So I have no idea. You're aware you have to sell these, right? Yeah. It was always a conversation that we had about how much Irish do we want to integrate into the brand. And with our Single Malt, there was a big discussion about, yeah, okay, staying true to your local roots. But it's also like, okay, we have to sell the product. For this, I think it was a good balance, or we think it's a good balance, and it may go horribly wrong, of trying to bring in our heritage and our Gaeltacht region into our brand without necessarily trying to confuse people too much. In saying that, so I think it's the autumn equinoxes, Connacht an Fháir, like, and it doesn't even look like that. There will be a lot of pointing, I think, is really what people will pick up. This sounds like a social media opportunity with pronunciation. I mean, you need to do quick videos. Yeah, it won't be me pronouncing it though. I have to bring somebody else in who's not butchering the Irish language. But yeah, we might have to do that. If you didn't tell us you were butchering it, we'd have no idea. Yeah, I'm sure if there's anybody listening that's gone through Irish school, we'll know I'm butchering it. Is turnip carving still alive and well? What? Well, that's the origin of jack-o-lanterns, supposedly. It was for sawing, they would carve turnips. Then in America, we translated that into pumpkins. I'm going to say yes. Get this druid on the phone. I want to know. Yeah, I'm not sure. TBD. Yeah. Yeah, these are gorgeous. This is I was digging through my office to try to find what I brought back and the greatest compliment to Dingle is that I don't have any of it sitting in my office anymore. It's all in my house. It's all in my house. Didn't want anybody else taking it. That's all right. Yeah, no, this is this is the summon is beautiful. Yeah, I think it's a little bit different for us. Again, it's the first time we've ever finished a finished whiskey and we kind of moved into that sphere. So, you know, it's quite interesting. But bright. I mean, it's just it's bright. And it's not dominated by the finishing cask either. No, I don't necessarily think so. I think that proof is such a nice proof level, too. You know, it's it it's brings more without being overwhelming. You know, a lot of people to sometimes want a little bit of water ice. And I think it could stand up to a touch. And it gives it more structure, too. Yeah, I mean, it was it was something when we discussed why we just go out again and kind of that kind of north of 46 just about. And we felt that, you know, at a flavor profile point of view, it deserved a little bit more. And then the question was, again, from a from a duty rate point of view, from a flavor profile point of view, were people going to put up with it? And I think at the balance of it, we like to think we got the balance right. Nice. But, you know, I'm probably wrong. Very nice. Which one should we try next? We're going to try Lá Le Bríde, which was celebrated only last week, first of February. Oh, it's my birthday. Nice. Oh, yeah? Lá Le Bríde. Yeah, so the same Bridget's Day, it's also, so the Celtic terminology would be imbolg, is I-M-B-O-L-G, but in Ireland, we would refer to it as Lá Le Bríde. So I think it's one of these festivals that Bridget was a, I'm going to actually get this wrong, Bridget was a pagan character but also a Christian character, and so it's a bit like Christmas where Christianity has moved into that space and taken Yeah. No, imbolg wouldn't be, if I said that to anybody, they wouldn't have a clue in Ireland, would I say, Sam Bridget's Day, that they'll all know. So Lá Le Bríde is the direct translation, Sam Bridget's Day. Okay, so same base whiskey, same base single malt, yeah? Yeah, there's still a single malt, so again, 50.5 ABV. And about five and a half years in Bourbon? Yeah, and about 18 months in Rye Cask. Rye Cask? Yeah. So this is the first time we've ever, and actually same as muscatel, was the first time we'd used or released muscatel or Rye Cask. So again, it's just, I think a lot of that's down to, our head distiller started back in October 2019. So it just gave him an opportunity to experiment a little bit more. There's a lot more kind of full maturation stuff that he's brought in, but obviously we're not going to see that for a number of years, but the finishing has kind of allowed him to fly his wings. Yeah, well, I mean, he came from Glen Murray and Glen Murray is one of the most famous stillers in Scotland for cask finishing. This is gorgeous. It's so broad and creamy on the palate compared to the last one. I mean, the last one was no joke as far as mouthfeel goes, but this is appreciably different and I don't think I was expecting such a difference just on the weight of the whisky itself. You thought there might be a bit more similarities with the finishing? I don't know. It just changed the mouthfeel so much. Right. Yeah, there's an oilier character. Yeah. There's a viscosity to it that the Samhain was a step below. That baking spice that probably from some of the rye, right? It's beautiful. That and American oak too because the rye you'd assume is American oak. And the muscatale was brighter. There was like this doesn't have quite the citrus character. Yeah. It's more baking spice, vanilla. This is awesome. Yeah. And I think I suppose even over the next 18 months, that can even be five and a half year. But we'll start to stretch as well a little bit. Do you have an end game with a particular age or are you guys just approaching this as they're ready when they're ready and we're going to construct whiskeys as we do? Yeah. I think we're quite flexible. For us, it's more about what we're releasing and the quality of that. So, I mean, this series is lined up. We know exactly what we're doing. We know the volume of what we're doing and what cast we're using. But when we move in to our next series, I'd like to think that we will start using age statements at that point. And whether it's part of the series or whether it's kind of ancillary to that, when we get to 2025, we'll be able to release it at a decent level where it's kind of, I suppose it'll be limited, limited edition of kind of 10-year-old product. You know, we will be coming out with a 10-year-old Single Malt in the next few weeks, which is just a single cask. Something that we look at doing kind of single casks over a couple of years. Well, our stock, as I say, is so limited that we can't release too much. But as we get to kind of a year or two after that initial date, we can release age statement. So 12 years in, we can release a 10-year-old volume, if that makes sense. Yeah. And the cask finishing series with all the Irish names, does that series have an official title covering the whole thing? No. OK. It's yeah, that was a big discussion for a while of we kind of it's the wheel of the year is what it is. But that's just I says more to the way people would describe some people call it Celtic Wheel of Year. We didn't, we actively decided not to put something on the bottle that was this series, which yeah, I can understand why people might question that one. It's a bit of a bad idea and maybe it makes it less collectible in people's eyes, because it's a part of a series and doesn't explain that. But for us, we wanted it to be, you know, it's Dingle Distillery and it's Samhain or it's Lá Le Bríde. And that's what's talking about it. And each of them are individual in their own right as well. But yeah, it's the Wheel of the Year. A lot of people would describe it as the Wheel of the Year. It's something even with our Dingle Single Malt, we kind of realize that, look, whatever we call it, people are going to have their own name for it. And people, better people call it the Core Whiskey, better people call it the DSM. And it's the same with this. I've heard various different versions of it. So a lot of people call it the Celtic Wheel or Wheel of the Year. They would be the two. Pagan's Promise. We should have brought you in for the initial consultations. You would have had a turnip carving competition. It's not too late. How is this so floral? Am I nuts? And I just can't. This is amazing. The bouquet of this is phenomenal. I think it helps that it's triple distilled, certainly. You get a level of florality, you know, when you're distilling three times in a pot still, for sure. Yeah. And I think the process, if you go through just the hard distillation process, if I remember from going through the distillery, it was designed to do that. You were trying to get something. You have to have some substance so it ages well, but you also want to keep those. It's very difficult to keep those really pretty bright high tones. And floral character, I think, comes with Esther a little bit. It was something I was involved in the initial design of the stills, but it was something that there was an active discussion about trying to create certainly a unique character for Dingle as well. And it's something that the more we release and the more people taste of us, there is something a lot to be said for people knowing that this is Dingle's character and this is what it is, especially in a broader scheme of a lot of whiskey coming from two or three distilleries that can all taste very similar. This gives us something, a little bit of a point of difference, which we quite like. Sure. And what's your, remind me, what's your fermentation time? It's about 36 hours. Okay. So that's quick. That's usually very quick for malt. What do we got next there? We've got Baltham, which is, again, I should repeat myself, a bourbon cask, but this is finished in Shiraz Red Wine Casks, and it's a Potsdale. This is the first Potsdale. Okay. Wow, look at the color on this thing. I was going to say, yeah, the color is pretty impressive, isn't it? We've talked about it on the podcast before, found it kind of interesting the way. So many people are fans of Sherry-aged whiskeys, yet interest in Sherry remains pretty low. What would you say? Do you see people talking about Sherry in Ireland? Is it something that people still enjoy and-? No. I've been over to Rez a couple of times, and actually I really like Sherry. Yeah, we love it. I think it's fascinating, and it's just all the different styles. Even just sitting there having a Fino at lunch, and then your PX after dessert or something like that. I really love it. I mean, you go over there and you get your cheap Sherry for a euro and your expensive Sherry for two, and you can have a nice day in it. But I come back home and I probably haven't drank Sherry outside of a whisky tasting that we brought it in two since. All right. How do I pronounce Bealtain? So that's Bealtain, so it's a... Bealtain. Yeah, pretty much. I think that it's fantastic that Irish distillers are making single pot still, because one, it's unique and definitive style for Ireland, because nobody else in the world does it. But two, the whisky is just so damn good. Like there's some depth and some core sweetness, fruit, vanilla. There's just such a richness to it that I think you don't even get in single malts. What percentage of unmalted barley, I suppose, are you using in this? 50. 50, yeah. And that's as high as you can go now, yeah? Yeah, and it's something that we kind of kept since day one. I know Graham is keen with the kind of review of the technical file happening at the moment. He's kind of keen to, there's a little bit of experimentation we've had with different malts. How's that changed your yield on, say, all things equal a distillation run of single malt versus single pot still? What's the yield difference there, if any? It certainly, it is lower. Yeah. It's not overly considerable. It's a more expensive product to buy or to produce purely because of the yield. We probably get a 10% lower yield, yeah. And do you, same fermentation time and everything? Yeah. Okay. It's just a difference of raw materials. Yeah. Okay. Doesn't create any cleaning issues? No. I mean, you've seen our mashton and you've seen our mashton. It's interesting. It's a, so for context, it was a wooden mashton. It's cleaned out by hand. It's very manual. Labor intensive. Did you get in? I did. I got in and shoveled a little bit. Pretty hot, wasn't it? Yes. Which is funny. You can't complain. That would be miserable during the summer, probably. I mean, it's great during the winter. I'm honestly surprised you don't have more, some modern brewery equipment considering the family business. Well, you didn't have the money. Okay. Well, there you go. I can tell you that it's the big ground plan. Now, we like the rustic feeling. It's something that I, myself and Graham, our head distiller would have different opinions on the new facility and how much we're going to bring in. Yeah. So, I mean, we've had conversations about, kind of, it was up to Graham. Graham would only have stainless steel vessels and could later mash it on, and that's where he would like to see it. I like the aesthetics of what we have at the moment, and I like the characters that it develops. It's very rustic, yeah. Yeah, it is. And it's something that we'll probably end somewhere in the middle between what he wants and what I want. It's probably where we'll be. But no, we've all of these things where temperature controlling, warehouses, the brewing equipment. Realistically, it was a shoestring budget. We've never had an outside investment from somebody coming in. So we're cutting our cloths to suit our measure, I suppose. This Shiraz cask is fantastic. Yeah. I like that the pot still character, like Brett was talking about, comes through so much. I mean, it's oily and there's definitely an added level of spice to it. But then it's got this stewed dark fruit type of thing going on. The stewed plum character, it's just awesome. Yeah. I must say, I probably have a preference more for Sherry's than our red wine casks, but people just tell me to not get involved. I agree. I'm the same way, but I can appreciate this. It's very interesting. Sherry can be tough though, because sometimes I think people equate. There's a certain Salfira character which has to do with processing the casks that has nothing to do with Sherry, that I think sometimes people enjoy and they equate a little bit too much. With the character, because we'll have, you know, it's interesting to talk to somebody who professes to love Sherry cask whiskeys to find out if they like raisins or sulfur. because those are usually your choices, right? You either get raisins if the cask has been handled well or you get sulfur if they loaded up too much sulfur when they shipped the barrels out of the bodega. Yeah, and actually the Sherry ones are interesting. I mean, we've brought Sherry casks from a number of different places, but we've kind of started working with Sherry Bodega, Fernanda de Castilla, since 2017. So pretty much all our Sherry barrels we brought in since 2017 have been with them. And I'm looking forward to using that a little bit more. We haven't released anything fully matured in those casks yet, just for an age. How big are those? They're all Sherry boats. They're all about 500 litres. Sorry, I'm not sure what that... Translate that to gallons. Well, let's taste the original or the Dingle Single Malt, and then see how that compares to these cask finishes. You ever thought about hand selecting a sherry cask and having a house sherry pour, and you can fill it with your whiskey? No, but there's always opportunities to do that. Might be a good way to get people more interested in sherry. Yeah, I mean, to go back to your question, it's something that, yeah, I've struggled. I mean, port, I think, is coming a bit of a race on in Ireland, but sherry is nowhere near. Right. It's so crazy. We talk about that all the time. Port and Madeira, or sherry and Madeira both, I think, are woefully underappreciated. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I mean, I'd say the last four or five years, port has really, really grown. I suppose white port has become a much more kind of common drink for people to try in the summer. And yeah, it's really interesting. It's great to see, but yeah, you don't see that in sherry. You don't see that in Madeira. Okay, so we're tasting the Dingle Single Malt. Dingle Single Malt, yeah. Dingle Single. And you said about 60% bourbon casks, 40% sherry, or do I have that reversed? Reverse, yeah, 60% PX casks and 40% bourbon, yeah. So this is a little bit lower in ABV, it's our 46.3. We wanted to keep it above the level of chill filtration requirement. That PX is large and in charge on the nose here. I really like that. That was what Roger's known for being as well. Yeah, I mean, for us, it's cherries becoming more and more important to us and it has been over the last nine years. And it's something that we've been known for locally producing a lot of sherry based whiskeys. And yeah, it's something I quite like doing. Definitely the richest, most indulgent expression of what we've tried, I feel. Which is funny because this is a building block for everything else, right? How much the wood changes it, but it's interesting that the richest and most expressive definitely changed by the finishing woods. Yeah, what I saw is that an element of, I saw there's Sherry, that's Sherry sitting there for seven years, full maturation, first Phil Cass, you know, he was bringing an awful lot to that. This is great. First Phil Sherry Cass, that's the whiskey nerd, Rickle-a-horn, blow it off and they come running from the hills. Well, but this is also going to be an incredibly important bottle to put Irish whiskey on the map or even more on the map than it already is. Yeah, I think, yeah, it's something we're, I suppose, we're very small, you know, it's something we haven't even launched this really in the US. It's been in a couple of states already and it's something that we're hoping to grow. But, you know, I look around, it's an amazing, pretty amazing Irish whiskey selection you guys have here and what we see at home. And for me, we're one of the few distilleries that, you know, we have no interest in producing a bottle for $40. You know, that's not something that we have on shelf. It's not something we're actively planning to do. You know, this is something that our entry range, yeah, it is going to be a bit punchier. But all of our whiskeys, you know, this will be, as you say, well, it's the most expressive, but it should be our base whisky and everything else over the next few years. I suppose on that on that journey that people go on, you know, when we start releasing our 10 year olds, we start releasing our 12 year olds and it's kind of going back to the foundation of the base brand, as you say. What would you say interest in Ireland in blends versus single malts is? I know here, in the past, I feel there are just so many people that when they hear Irish whiskey, they think of the big blends and it's taken some time. And in the recent years, you've seen interest in things like red breast explode. So I think we're finally catching up, but I'm curious what it's like over there. Yeah, I know you're probably right. But people think of the top two or three blends and it's they dominate. Now, look, there's a there's a positive that kind of puts Irish whiskey on the map and it kind of provides a foothold for us, likes of us to kind of go, OK, look, you liked that. Well, maybe like, let's try something else. Let's try something a bit more different, a bit more unique, a bit of an older age profile. Yeah, Irish whiskey is a shot drink and it's something at the bar with your beer. And it will take a bit of time to change. I mean, Red Breast is a great example of doing a terrific job of kind of trying to drive that change and provide a kind of an image of Irish whiskey that isn't, I suppose, just a value proposition. It almost is at the point. We talk about category killers and 900-pound gorillas, and it's almost at the point where Jameson isn't, for some people in Irish whiskey, it's just Jameson. It's sort of ubiquitous. It's whiskey. It's a lot of things. I agree. It's like Guinness isn't a stout. Guinness is Guinness. Guinness is Guinness. Well, the reason being you see consumer behavior where somebody might come in and say, I want a Jameson and Coke. I'm sorry, we don't carry Jameson. Give me a vodka tonic. It's like, what? Yeah, yeah. You get a shift of gear because they're drinking that specific brand. They're not necessarily drinking in that category. Yeah, yeah. 100%. And that's yeah, I completely agree. That's it's something that and it is a challenge and it's you kind of call it a category killer and there's more and more variety coming out. I mean, it was a couple of years ago, tram to the airport, come back here. And I'm not sure if it's necessarily changed much, but you walk in and it's kind of Scotch whisky and you got eight bays of Scotch whisky and Irish whisky is Jameson and has Tullamore Jew and it may have had a tealing. And that was the kind of level there. I'd like to think we're improving. I'd like to think there's a bit more facings for Redbreast, for the spots, for tealings, for other brands like that, maybe ourselves and Ty as well. But I think the more exposure people get to Irish whisky. But I also think it's difficult to turn around and say that there should have been more exposure previously because it was like two or three distilleries. And liquid can be, you're talking about a lot of liquid coming from very similar places. And I think the more interesting and new distilleries, like I love saying water for an opening up and doing something completely different to what we're doing. It creates variety in Irish whisky. And I think that's really needed because if we all came out and just did the exact same thing, it's pretty boring. Yeah. So I think it needs a little bit of that to try and grow that category. Yeah, 100% because in the, I mean, John Teeling probably did it first at Cooley, at least you could get like John Locke's, was a different than just bushmills, Jameson, Tullamore. Connemara. Powers when he did Connemara, when he did Turconnel. I mean, I think those were the predecessors to probably Red Breast and Teeling, really. And now the next wave coming through, Powers Court now has liquid that is coming to the United States. I mean, that whole wave of Craft Irish Distillers that started after you guys is just about starting to hit the shelves. Yeah, I mean, a couple of good independent bottles, like Two Stacks, and things like that. So, I mean, yeah, there's kind of a lot more interesting things going on, which is great to see, because I don't think it's possible to grow the category just with a bit like Come Back to the Star talking about, if you go to a bar in Ireland, all you're getting is getting as good as an Icon. And you might get varieties of beers from those two companies. I think we're in a much better space that you can get an awful lot of Irish whiskeys from various different companies, various different production styles, you know, ageing, different cast being aged. And yeah, I think it's important that we go that way. I know with a lot of distilleries, it makes fiscal sense to start with a gin, especially while you're waiting for whiskey, but was that something that you had always intended anyway? Are you passionate about gin, or how did you approach selecting botanicals for it, and what your gin was going to be like? Yeah, I think the origination, I think if I was to turn around and say that we designed it that way, I'd be lying. I mean, it was designed, I think, I can't speak for everybody, but I think most people would be the case that it was designed around whiskey. We went down a route where we decided we weren't going to sell whiskey, that we didn't reproduce ourselves. So we were waiting for this. I mean, there's a lot of other distilleries. That's just a different business model. They want to produce or they want to release whiskey that they're buying from West Cork, Great Northern. That's absolutely fine. It's not a route we wanted to go down. We went down a gin route, which this is largely, and this is pre-gin, I mean, exploding in Europe. I mean, I don't think it's been as strong in the US, but certainly exploded in Europe. I suppose what happened was we wanted to produce gin for the town, and we wanted to produce gin for our own pubs, and at the time we had about eight pubs. We thought, right, okay, we got good volume going through there, good volume going to the town. And actually, well, really, the main one was vodka. We thought, okay, we get pouring vodka going throughout our accounts of the town. We'll do really well, and there'll be a cash flow basis here to try and keep us going. I don't think we ever foresaw where gin was going. We had to be right place, right time. We had a good product, we had a good bottle, and we were ready to go when gin started to explode. I think we were only three or four other competitors in the gin space, and then no real Irish competitors in the premium gin space when we launched. So when gin started to grow, we were there along with a couple of other people that followed us quite soon after. And it came to the United States pretty quickly. Yeah, we brought in the United States a few years ago, I'm trying to think, it was probably about seven years ago. Yeah, it's something that we'd like to try and push an awful lot more. It's a product that we won World's Best Gin in 2019. We probably could have done a little bit more with that than we probably did, and now you're kind of going, it's now 2023, and I can't keep talking about something that happened four years ago. But no, it's something where we really want to try and grow. because I said to the US, I don't think, and maybe you can tell me wrong, I don't think we really saw the gin boom to the same degree as we would have seen. No, not to the same degree. Not to the same degree as the UK. We had a mini boom off-premise during the pandemic. So how many of these botanicals were virgin harvested? Six. I'll make that up. As I say, the gin is really the foundation of the distillery. The distillery wouldn't exist in its current state without the success that the gin has had, particularly in the Irish market. I remember in our earlier days, the idea was really to create a gin of its place. So the idea is that there's 13 botanicals that we have within the gin. Six of them are found locally and seven of them are, I suppose, pretty quintessential gin botanicals. Our flavor basket, we bring that all through. It does get that floral impact that we look for. A lot of the botanicals, you're talking about your bog myrtle and your rhombus berries. I'm trying to remember exactly all of them that are particularly local. But I mean, bog myrtle would be probably the dominant one that we would take locally. If you drive along, I don't know if you guys had been to Dingle before, but if you do any of the drives and you see these pretty amazing bright colored flowers, and that's a lot of what it is. So it is a gin of its place. It's something that we're really fond of, is that we won World's Best Gin in 2019. It's a product that in Ireland has absolutely taken off. We're trying to grow that a little bit more in other markets. It's a tough category. I love that it's floral without being perfumey. That's a trap so many floral gins fall into. Yeah. That's a needle to thread. Yeah. It's a good point actually. I struggle with two perfumey gins. It's kind of quite off-putting. Floral, but there's citrus notes, but there's a rock candy. Yeah. There's a sweetness to it. It's not a sweet gin, but it's just a balance, I guess. Yeah. It's something that in Ireland, it's just interesting to me here for the last week where the way gin is treated. In Ireland, gin is a gin tonic. There's no straight gin, very few martinis. You could be right into some cocktails, but really 90 percent of the volume we do in the entree would be cocktails, or sorry, would be a gin tonic. Whereas you come over here and every time you seem to walk into a pub, it's going to get a dingle gin martini. It's just a different style of drinking. It's something that seems to lend itself really well to that. Yeah, I could see this being really nice with a white vermouth. Right. Something, it's some acidity. Toss in some citrus or something on top of it too. When you're running the gin through the silt, do you have any botanicals that are compounded or is everything going through the vapor basket? No, everything's through the vapor basket, yeah. Very cool. It's beautiful gin. All right. Well, you want to talk about the vodka, I suppose? Yeah. I mean, that seems to be the way we always talk about the vodka. It's kind of at the last pitch. Now, yeah. Not that this is a throwaway thing, but. This isn't making it in. Probably not. Yeah. The vodka is five times distilled. It's a very, what are your buzzwords for vodka? Like cream, smooths, pure. Which stills are you running the vodka through? just our dedicated copper pot still. Yeah. Now, I can throw out. I mean, worth noting that it's pot distilled vodka then. Yeah. No, it's good. Which also means it's expensive vodka. Yeah. What's the base grain for the vodka? Wheat. Yeah, it is expensive. It is a challenge in the same way you're talking about. It is a ludicrously good vodka. Yeah, we like to think so, but I mean, I'm going to add ludicrous to it. Well, it's damn good vodka. because it is. It's funny because there's a whole argument, it should be vodka be flavorless, odorless and completely neutral. And there would be no point to it, which is why I think this is good for vodka drinkers, because there's like a fat, creamy. Yeah, the creaminess is the standout here. Right. And there's no propyl character, so you don't get that rubbing alcohol in the back, which is a big bugaboo, I think, for a lot of craft vodkas. Yeah, and I'm not a huge vodka guy, but I mean, when you try that, it is good. Yeah, very good. The cask finishing releases, when do you expect those to make it stateside? I think over the next few months is as vague as I can probably. Okay, cool. Well, I mean, I'm glad they're coming because for a long time, you mentioned Dingle being a big tourist attraction, is for both Irish and American people. And so we've had a consistent flow of Americans who go there on vacation, taste stuff at the distillery at a local pub and have come back, or have bought casks even and have come back and asked us for stuff. And that's always been like, well, they're still aging, they're still kind of coming along. It's coming along. You know, we're working hard on trying to get it too. Yeah, no, it's something that we're conscious of. We want to make sure that, yeah, we do have a lot of Americans who are founding fathers. And as you say, a lot of people have visited the distillery or visited the bars in the town. And yeah, we want to make sure that we can have the product here. As soon as we're releasing in Ireland, we want to have it, get that time frame a lot tighter. Cool, excellent stuff. Yeah. Cheers, guys. Thanks for having me. Appreciate your time today. Hey, thanks for tuning in to this episode. If you got any questions, hit us up at comments at binnys.com or at Binny's Bev on social media of your choice. Till then, we'll be back in your feed with something interesting next week. I'm Pat. I'm Roger. I'm Brett. I'm Elliot. Keep tasting.