Killowen Rum & Raisin Single Malt Irish Whiskey

I'm going to take you to Killowen, Small Batch Irish Distillery, and the Single Malt Rum & Raisin. It should also be noted that Killowen won Craft Producer of the Year in the World Whiskey Awards in March 2025, against some extraordinary international and domestic competition.

KIllowen’s ethos of empowering the consumer with transparency and hands-on, small scale production have generated their strong international ‘Kult’ following, the envy of every Irish distillery.

Killowen is headed up by Brendan Carty and there is a relationship between Two Stacks and Killowen with Liam and Shane of the LSD mentioned previously being partners in Killowen Distillery.

So Brendan, like me, and like a lot of us Irish, left Ireland. Brendan, I jest is a recovering architect, and Brendan ended up in Australia back in the day. While Brendan was plying his trade there, he fell in love with a number of the New Wave Australian whiskeys that we're starting to see.

Now Brendan is a keen student of Irish history, and he’s also a Gaeilgeoir, a fluent Irish speaker. Brendan knew that us Irish ruled the world, whisky wise, back in the day, in the Golden Era of Irish whiskey in the late 1800s.

So Brendan packed his bags in Australia, returned to where he hailed from, and built what is the smallest, by square footage, distillery in Ireland, the townland of Killowen. It’s literally on the side of a mountain in the beautiful Mourne Mountains and from here Brendan plies his trade making unique whiskeys and other spirits that pay homage to our distilling past.

So what do we have here with the Rum & Raisin, and how did we get here?

Brendan founded his distillery in 2017 and at that time was trying to figure out where he would go style and flavor wise. So Brendan bought in a number of batches of malt whiskey of different ages, and then aged and finished them in lots and lots of different casks finishes.

He used wine casks - red wine casks from Bordeaux and Burgundy in France. Txakolina wine casks from Basque in Spain. He used a raft of different fortified wine casks including Port and Sherry and he used other spirit casks including Caribbean rum casks and casks from Tequila in Mexico.

Brendan’s early experiments were bottled under the Bonded Experimental Series and the Signature Series and it’s fair to say that everyone's favorite from this time was the Rum and Raisin, Single Malt, bottled under the Signature Series label.

So the Rum & Raisin & Raisin, Single Malt, that we have here is offered in a 700ml bottle at 55% abv or 110 proof. It’s a Non Age Statement (NAS) whiskey but contains 4 to 5 year old whiskeys.

The Rum in the name comes from Caribbean Dark Rum casks from Appleton Estate in Jamaica, and the Raisin in the name comes from Pedro Ximenez or PX Sherry casks from southern Spain. PX is renowned as a rich and sweet sherry that must be made from at least 85% Pedro Ximénez grapes.

The rum casks bring sweetness to the whiskey, think vanilla and coconut while the PX casks bring a raisiny, dried fruit richness.

In the interests of transparency, there’s a lot of detail on the back label of this whiskey. Brendan, being as small as he is at Killowen, doesn't have the volume to make this whiskey at the distillery for export. So he gets this made to his bespoke recipe by the good folks at GND in County Louth. GND is Great Northern Distillery who are the go-to operation in Ireland for making top notch custom distillates.

And then Brendan is able to piggy-back with Two Stacks and that allows us to get our hands on this wonderful offering here Stateside.

What's interesting about this offering, is that within the Irish whiskey category, there are very, very few cask-strength Irish whiskeys available, particularly here in the Sates.Redbreast 12yo cask strength comes to mind as does Blue Spot, 7yo, and offered at cask strength. There are a couple of others out there, but Brendan's comes in at a price point that is below pretty much everything else and at 55% ABV, 110 proof, it makes the Rum & Raisin relatively affordable.

So this definitely has a place in, I would say, in a lot of serious whiskey bars on their back bar. This is, to me, the whiskey lovers, Irish whiskey with that wonderful Cask Strength of of 55%

It allows you the choice at what level you are going to enjoy this whiskey. I personally love to start sipping it neat. Then, when I get about a quarter of the way through it I'll drop in three drops of water, and encourage it to open up. Now I’ll use distilled water to respect the craft of the distiller, and then I'll drop in another three or so. And that brings it to a different place.

And then what I will do for the last quarter of a pour of this is I will drop in an ice cube, which obviously dilutes the whiskey as it is mels. But what I love to do is then take that whiskey into my mouth, chilled from the ice cube, and I hold it in my mouth, and I love to savor it as it warms up.

I love the changes in the flavors that I get from this higher strength whiskey, so a real gem here from Brendan.

Sláinte