Single Grain - Double Barrel Now to the Single Grain Irish whiskey, let's jump into that and talk about it in more detail.

The Single Grain - Double Barrel is a celebration of Grain whiskey. Now most people don't know this, but the majority of whiskey made in Ireland is Grain whiskey and that Grain whiskey is used in Blended whiskey.

And just to try and explain that briefly as it can be a little bit awkward to wrap your head around this one. Grain whiskey is a legally defined category or style of Irish whiskey, and it can be made from any of the grains that we make whiskey from Interestingly enough, the majority of grain whiskey in Ireland is actually made from corn or maize. And we've made whiskey from corn or maize for hundreds of years.

No, we don't actually grow much corn or maize in Ireland, so we import it to make whiskey, and the majority of this corn or maize now comes to us from France.

In the spirit of transparency, we talk here on the bottle about how this is a column-distilled whiskey, as legally Grain whiskey has to be distilled this way. A Column Still, or Coffey Still, or the Patent Still, or a Continuous Still, known by all those names, is an Irish invention. Invented in 1830 by a tax-man turned distiller, Aeneas Coffey.

So in Ireland, we have known that corn and the column still work really well together and we have been using that process to make Whiskey for an awfully long time.

The history books tell us that the aforementioned Dundalk distillery installed a Coffey Still in the mid-1800s and that there was a fire in a Corn Kiln in 1862.

So, let's break it down. Single on a whiskey label in Ireland means that the whiskey is made at one single distillery. Again, with transparency to the fore at Two Stacks, we tell you that this whiskey is distilled and matured at the Great Northern Distillery, which is, coincidentally enough, in Dundalk.

We also let you know the breakdown of the cask that we use to craft this whiskey with 50% of this aged in ex-Bourbon casks, and 50% of this aged in ex-Oloroso Sherry casks.

And there’s some great history wrapped up in those cask types. Historically, up until the 1950s or so, the vast majority of Irish Whiskey was aged in ex-fortified wine barrels. So think Sherry from the south of Spain, Port from northern Portugal. Think Madeira from the Madeira islands, and think Marsala from Sicily, Italy, those being the fortified wine regions that most people would know.

So, back in those days, a wine merchant in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Galway, etc. would bring their fortified wine into their cellars, in the cask. They would arrive on a boat from those regions into their cellars, and then the wine would be bottled by the wine merchant there. What did they do with all of those empty casks? Well, the Irish, being the Irish, decided they would send them down to the local distillery, and they would fill them with some of the new-make spirit that would go on to become whiskey. So for hundreds of years, we've used ex-fortified wine casks in our whiskey maturation.

Now, in the 1950s our friends at Powers discovered that the wonderful Americans had written their bourbon production laws so that the Virgin, Charred, American Oak barrels that are used in bourbon production could only be used once - so they weren't allowed to be used for a second aging of Bourbon whiskey.

So we started using those for Irish whiskey maturation from the 1950s onward. The vast majority of Irish whiskey is now aged in ex-bourbon barrels, and our friends in Scotland, Japan, and in Mexico love the fact that we get these beautifully, softly seasoned ex-bourbon barrels that we use to mature our Irish whiskey in.

So, Single Grain. We are celebrating Grain whiskey with this bottling. In Ireland, Grain whiskey is the workhorse whiskey. It is more often than not, the base whiskey in the majority of blended Irish whiskey that you see out there and we don't really talk about it as a style, and rarely do we celebrate it. We love to give the impression that all Irish whiskey is made from barley, from those beautiful fields that you see, with a gentle breeze blowing through it surrounded by mature oaks.

But the reality is that the majority of Irish whiskey grain whiskey is made from corn, and it is the workhorse whiskey in Ireland.

So mashbill wise in this we have a mash of 95% corn and 5% malted barley. And as we've already touched on, we divided in two into both ex-bourbon and ex-Oloroso sherry casks.

It weighs in at 43% ABV, 86 proof. So just off the floor and in terms of its aromas and flavors everyone will obviously have their own take on this.

Grain whiskey, to me, is a lighter and fresher style of Irish whiskey that allows flavor to be added from the influence of the casks used in its aging. To my palate, there is a fresh floral character, a light creamy nuttiness, and a hint of caramel and vanilla that come from the ex-Bourbon casks. The ex-Oloroso sherry cask brings a punch to the palate - think a boxer’s uppercut to follow up on the jab of the ex-Bourbon - of dried fruits - raisins, currants, figs, and dates.

And I know that a lot of our bartender friends out there love working with this from a flavor perspective.

Sláinte