Teeling 24 Year Old - Vintage Reserve Collection - 2016 Release

The Teeling distillery was opened in Dublin in 2015 by brothers Jack and Stephen Teeling, who had set up their Teeling Whiskey company in 2012 in the aftermath of the sale of their father John Teeling’s Cooley distillery to Jim Beam. Prior to the construction of the distillery, Teeling Whiskey were already winning awards for their bottlings of long-aged Irish whiskey sourced from Cooley and other Irish distilleries.

The new Teeling distillery was the first whiskey distillery to open in Dublin since the 1880s and has three Italian copper pot stills and a production capacity around 500,000 litres per annum. Teeling now release their own single pot still and peated Irish whiskeys, as well as a range of blended and single malt Irish whiskeys using sourced stock retained from the Cooley sale.

Distillery bottlings are, as the name suggests, bottled by or for the distillery from which the whisky has originated and are thus often referred to as Official Bottlings or OBs. Distillery bottlings are generally more desirable for collectors and usually fetch higher prices at auction than independent bottlings. They are officially-endorsed versions of the whisky from a particular distillery and are therefore considered the truest expression of the distillery’s character.

This ideal of the distillery character is regarded so seriously by the distilleries and brand owners that casks of whisky that are considered to vary too far from the archetype are frequently sold on to whisky brokers and independent bottlers. When this happens, it is often with the proviso that the distillery’s name is not allowed to be used when the cask is bottled for fear of diminishing or damaging the distillery’s character and status.