First Cut Signature Blend In the ever-present Two Stacks spirit of transparency, you can see the five circles here that call out the component parts of this Blended whiskey.

I consider these circles to be an Irish whiskey history timeline of sorts. We've touched on Grain whiskey with the first whiskey that we talked about - think Corn and Column Still - and here we have 40% Single Grain that's aged in virgin oak casks and we’ve got another 40% Single Grain aged in ex-Bourbon casks. So again, going back to the Grain whiskey, we know that the column still and corn have been an important part of Irish whiskey since the mid-1800s.

Then we go to the third component - 8% Pot Still aged in ex-Oloroso Sherry butts. Pot Still is Irish whiskey's gift to the world of whiskey, a style of whiskey which we are credited with creating.

The romantic story goes back to the Malt Tax of 1785 when the British decided to tax the use of malted barley. And the Irish, being the Irish, said, “well, sure, if you're going to tax our malted barley, we'll use some unmalted barley in the mash as well.”

Pot Still whiskey in Ireland has evolved over the years, and in modern terms we consider it to be a mash of malted and unmalted barley. But historically, and very importantly, other grains were part of the mashbills of Pot Still Irish whiskeys, and oats, wheat, and rye were used back in the day. Current Irish whiskey legislation is based on a 30-30-5 “formula” where the mash bill has to contain a minimum of 30% malted and 30% unmalted barley and can have no more than 5% of those other grains.

Pot Still whiskey brings depth, texture, and a rich, oily and spicy mouthfeel to the blend

Now we head into the Malt whiskey components of this. What's wonderful about Malt whiskey is pretty much every whiskey-producing country around the world makes a Malt whiskey, so it allows us a benchmark to compare whiskeys of a similar style - made from 100% Malted Barley - against each other.

In our blend, we've got 10% Double Malt - which is double distilled Malt whiskey aged again in ex-Bourbon casks.More proof if you need it that not every Irish whiskey is triple distilled.

Then we come to the final component in this Blended whiskey, which often takes some people by surprise, and that’s 2% Peated Malt whiskey, again, aged in bourbon casks.

So I call this a kiss of peat, a whisper of peat and some people describe it as a seasoning. Think of it as when you cook yourself a nice steak, or for me, I like to cook a nice rack of lamb and get it to a medium rare. Then when I chop it up into those yummy Lamb Lollipops, I like to sprinkle a little Maldon Sea Salt on it, to “lift” the flavor from the meat. Think of the Peated Malt in this blended whiskey as doing that - it lifts all of the other flavors.

Again, going back to the history timeline, historically in Ireland, we would have used peat as a heat source in homes in the 1700s and into the early to mid 1800s. This peat was cut from the bog and it was used to warm homes, to cook food over and it was used to malt the grains that ultimately went into whiskey.

So historically in Ireland, and we don't talk about this a lot, but a lot of our whiskeys were peated a couple of hundred years ago. As we know our friends in Scotland now carry that mantle, but the 2% Peated Malt that we use in this blend is a little bit of a tip of the hat to a part of our history that not a lot of people know about.

I'm a big fan of this whiskey in spirit-forward cocktails. So think Old Fashioned, think of a Manhattan with that kiss of peat, but I also think that this is fantastic in an Irish Coffee. I find that that 2% Peated Malt component plays really, really nicely with the coffee in an Irish Coffee, and I'll probably share my Irish Coffee recipe below.

Sláinte