Single Malt whiskey is made using only malted barley from a single distillery in a pot still. Malting is a chemical process that breaks down the barley to make it more suitable for fermentation. The malting process gives the grain toasted biscuit aromas that are carried through into the end-product.

Single Malt is acclaimed. It’s what everyone in Mad Men orders all the time. Single Malt is referenced in every major wealth porn oriented tv show. No other whiskey style in the world dominates the global cultural consciousness quite like Single Malt. In 2019 a bottle of 1926 Macallan with a label designed by Irish artist Michael Dillon sold for a record €1.5 million.

Ireland, England, America, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Sweden, Spain, Tasmania, and India all make single malt whiskies of exceptional finesse but Scotland is at the helm of this style internationally. You can have high-quality single malts or you can have grand ones with great marketing and everything in between.

Single Grain whiskey is any whiskey made from grains other than malted barley. The grains used vary from distillery to distillery but are commonly maize, wheat, or rye. Single Grain whiskies are also typically distilled on a column still as opposed to a pot still. By law, Irish Single Malt and Single Pot Still whiskies must be distilled using a pot still, but that doesn’t apply to Single Grain.

Single Grain is an often maligned whiskey style but it has its devotees. Single Grain whiskey is an excellent entry point if you’re just getting into whiskey. It generally hovers around the 40 per cent mark and it takes on the flavour of the barrel it’s aged in really well.

It’s a relatively new category in the Irish Whiskey market after arriving with the advent of the column still. The juice itself takes most of its flavour from the barrel as the distillate is clean and clear. There is only a small list of exceptional Irish single grain whiskeys on the market but there’s enough to play with.

A pot still is like a giant copper kettle that is heated to distil grain into whiskey. They come in a range of shapes and sizes but are thought to make more flavourful whiskeys than column stills.

Single Pot Still is regarded as the quintessential Irish style of whiskey. Predominantly made in Ireland there are some tributes to it across other countries. It is made as a combination of malted and unmalted barley with up to five per cent other grains.

Single Pot Stills are temperamental and take a few years longer to round off than malt or grain but generally, they bring with them a full bounty of diverse flavours. They’re the most sought after among aficionados and there has been such a surge in new Single Pot Stills on the market that it’s almost hard to keep up. Not bad for a category that almost died in the 1970s. Unfortunately, they start around fifty euro so they’re not as easy to cut your teeth on.

'Blended' whiskey is the most affordable whiskey we have.

Blended whiskey is when you mix any two or more styles of whiskey together. Single Malt and Single Grain. Single Pot Still and Single Malt. In any proportion at all. Most entry-level whiskey is blended a la Jameson but there are high-end ones too like Midleton Very Rare. Blended whiskey can be maligned but brings its own complexity to the table.

This mixing allows the blender to reach a specific taste. There is more dexterity required to assemble a blended whiskey and it can take aeons to crack it but once you do there is so much variety to spice your life with.

“Irish whiskey/uisce beatha Éireannach/Irish whisky” must be matured in wooden casks only on the island of Ireland, such maturation being for a minimum of three years. Whiskey is matured in wooden casks, from different types such as oak which may have been previously used to store other categories of alcoholic beverages, including but not limited to madeira, sherry, port or bourbon. During the maturation phase, interactions take place between the spirit and the cask, which influences the flavour of the final product.