St. Patrick’s Q&A With Jack Teeling

Catching Up With Teeling Whiskey Company For St. Patrick’s Week

By Richard Thomas

Teeling Whiskey Company released their first product, the rum-finished small batch, back when The Whiskey Reviewer was still just a blog, and our first interview with company head Jack Teeling was almost two years ago. Since then, the company became the first to open a new distillery in Dublin in modern times. For the third run of our All-Irish Whiskey St. Patrick’s Week, it only seemed appropriate to talk to founder Jack Teeling about opening that new distillery and what having it means for the future of Teeling.

RT: The last time I saw you it was in November 2014. The new distillery was basically a concrete shell and you were dealing with some problems with building your loading dock. I came by again in February 2015, after you had just installed most of the distilling equipment. What came up in terms of challenges in the meantime, between February and getting the distillery opened?

JT: There were significant challenges throughout the whole process, from getting our services connected to the chaos caused when we connected the newly built visitor center with the distillery, due to the dust and all basic builders’ mess interacting with the distilling equipment. Probably the biggest single challenge we had was fitting the distillery mezzanine in after all the pipework and equipment was already in-situ. It turned into an engineering masterpiece and disrupted distilling for most of April.

RT: I wish I could have been there when you did your first run of off the stills. Can you tell me the story there? How did it go?

JT: Despite all the hiccups and issues along the way, when we turned the majority of the distilling equipment on it worked like a dream. Our beautiful pot stills from Sienna in Italy—subsequently named after my three daughters, by the way—have worked efficiently from the first day they were turned on, and more importantly have produced a lovely, clean, yet fruity spirit from the start.

Firing up the pot stills for the first time was a very proud moment for me and a huge milestone in the story of Teeling Whiskey. It had taken three years of planning, hard work and significant capital investment, but Teeling Whiskey was finally home.

RT: How long do you think it will be before some of your in-house spirit finds its way into your bottles? Might there be an in-house poitin in the works for the near future?

JT: It will have to be a minimum of three years and a day as required by Irish whiskey regulations before we can even think of potentially using any of our new Dublin whiskey. However, while we have produced a beautiful, clean and fruity spirit, and have put it in good quality and interesting casks there is no guarantee it will be “ready” by then.

However, to give people the ability to taste our new distillates, we are launching a limited botting of our new make called “Spirit of Dublin” Poitin. This will consist of our new make Pot Still spirit and will be bottled in a 50cl apothecary-style bottle at 52.5%. This will be released in April of this year and will hopefully add to the growing premium Poitin category.

RT: Now that you’ve been up and running for a little while, how is operating your new Teeling distillery different from your experience at Cooley?

JT: It is a very different experience for me, as when I joined Cooley it had already been in existence for near 13 years. As a result, I inherited an organization with fixed beliefs and attitudes with regard to production and the category. Building the Teeling Whiskey Company from the ground up has allowed me to develop an organization based on my own views of what is right for the category and Teeling whiskey. That said, at the core Cooley and the Teeling Whiskey Company share the same belief that what is in the bottle is the most important thing.

My passion and interest in Irish whiskey came from my time in Cooley. Its entrepreneurial and innovative culture was the perfect breeding ground to stimulate and formulate my own views which I have brought to life in the Teeling Whiskey Company.

RT: It seems like Teeling has expanded its distribution quite a lot these last few years, and the words “whiskey shortage” are on so many lips these days. How is your stock holding up?

JT: We are now exporting to over 40 international markets and have an established range of award winning unique expressions of Irish whiskey. We only recently did an overview of our whiskey inventory mapped against our own growth projections and luckily we are able to continue expanding our distribution over the next few years while we wait for our new make to mature for our Teeling Trinity range of expressions. We will also be releasing further limited edition releases of older expressions all drawn from our existing whiskey inventory.