SB visits… Teeling Distillery, Dublin
As Dublin’s Teeling Distillery marks its 10th anniversary, we discovered how the family-run Irish whiskey maker is shaping the future of the category.
Anyone who’s watched The House of Guinness recently will know Dublin’s most famous drink. However, the city is home to another brand that is celebrating its 10th birthday this year, but leans on a far-reaching history.
When Teeling Irish Whiskey opened its distillery in 2015, it was the first brand to bring distilling back to Ireland’s capital city of Dublin in more than 125 years – and, unlike Guinness, it remains family-run. Jack and Stephen Teeling are brothers with deep roots in Irish whiskey – their father, John Teeling, founded Cooley Distillery in 1987, and is now behind the Great Northern Distillery in Dundalk.
But the brand’s connection to Cooley runs deeper than family – Teeling kicked off its whiskey career using stocks from Cooley while its own distillery was under construction. But more on that later…
It was in the distillery that our Dublin experience began, with an introduction from Jack and Stephen underscoring the importance of the city to the Teeling brand. While Cooley is based in County Louth, the brothers were determined to bring distilling back to Dublin – not least because their ancestor Walter Teeling once operated a distillery in the very same area.
As well as reviving the family name, the Teelings wanted to restore Dublin’s status as a whiskey-making city. It was previously home to around 37 distilleries, most of which were congregated around Teeling’s home, the Liberties. However, due to the World Wars and Prohibition, Irish whiskey struggled. By the mid-1970s, Dublin had lost all of its distilleries, with only two remaining in all of Ireland.
Ironically, it was another global crisis – the 2008 financial crash – that paved the way for Teeling’s debut. When property prices fell, the brothers were able to secure a site in the Liberties, sparking Dublin’s whiskey renaissance.
Inside the distillery
When the Teeling brothers set out to build their distillery, they didn’t just want to make whiskey – they wanted to create a real guest experience, leaning on the rise of whiskey tourism. With the success of the Guinness Storehouse just down the road showing a clear appetite for drinks tourism, Teeling proved the point: more than a million visitors have walked through its doors since opening.
Guest experience was, therefore, front of mind from the start, which is why all of the ‘interesting’ elements – from the wet mill to the lauter tun and the gleaming copper stills – are proudly on display. The less glamorous kit, such as the boiler and barley silos, are kept discreetly in a neighbouring building.
In a similar vein, the distillery opted to have a wet mill rather than a dry one, because it’s less prone to explosion – an important consideration when the equipment sits in view of the public. A wet mill is also better suited to working with unmalted barley, a key component of traditional Irish pot still whiskey. The mill is also capable of handling speciality malt and rye, offering flexibility for experimental mash bills.
Innovation continues into fermentation, where Teeling takes an unconventional approach by combining distillers’ yeast with South African white wine yeast. “Distillers’ yeast is a lovely workhorse,” explains global brand ambassador Robert Caldwell. “It converts sugar to alcohol at a high rate, which means profitability. But if you use something like white wine yeast – like we do – it imparts flavours that you’d see in South African white wine. There are thousands of yeast strains that can produce these lovely flavours and aromas – or esters, as we call them in the whisky industry.”
The addition of white wine yeast brings delicate, fruity notes of guava, papaya and grapefruit to the spirit. However, because it’s significantly more expensive than distillers’ yeast – and aggressive by nature – the team uses a mix of both. “It puts out enzymes that try to destroy other bacteria and other yeast,” explains master distiller Alex Chasko. “We tried to switch to another company’s distillers’ yeast, and the results were horrible.”
The resulting wash then passes through Teeling’s trio of copper pot stills, affectionately named Alison, Natalie and Rebecca after Jack Teeling’s three daughters. Built in Sienna, Italy, the stills have capacities of 15,000 litres, 10,000 litres and 9,000 litres respectively, and the spirit runs through them in that order – from wash to intermediate to spirit still.
In a fitting parallel, Stephen Teeling also has three daughters – though the brothers decided against adding another set of stills. Instead, Ferne, Holly and Zoe each have a dedicated cask filled on the day they were born, which rest proudly alongside the distillery’s very first filled barrel. These are the only four casks maturing on-site – a nod to history and caution combined, since no barrels are stored at the distillery itself due to the devastating Dublin whiskey fire of 1875.
The warehouse
While Dublin is a vital part of the Teeling story, the second day of our trip took us north to Greenore, home to the brand’s maturation warehouse. It might initially seem surprising that Teeling’s whiskey matures more than an hour away from its distillery, but there’s a simple reason. When Beam Inc – now called Suntory Global Spirits – acquired Cooley Distillery, the Teelings struck a deal to take ownership of some maturing whiskey stocks – but, of course, they had to handle the transportation themselves. The solution was a warehouse just 10 minutes from Cooley, in Greenore, perfectly positioned to look after both the inherited casks and those filled in Dublin.
When we visit, around 21,800 casks are ageing in the warehouse. During the tour, the team is busy disgorging barrels of Teeling Small Batch from rum casks into a trough before sending the liquid off for bottling.
While that trough of Teeling Small Batch is likely to be on the market in the next few months, perhaps the most exciting part of a warehouse like this is the sense of what’s to come. “There’s whiskey in this warehouse that’s going to represent the next year or two years of Teeling whiskey sales,” says Chasko. “But there are other casks that will be sold in 10 or 20 years. That’s the thing that is exciting about coming to a warehouse like this – whatever we are going to do in the future, it’s already here. It’s just about trying to pick it.”
As Teeling celebrates its 10th anniversary, that sentiment feels particularly poignant. The past decade has been about building – first reviving Dublin’s distilling heritage, then establishing a signature Teeling whiskey style. But the next 10 years are already quietly taking shape in Greenore.
“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” adds Chasko. “It’s also about trying to figure out the logic between the different casks we have, how we fill them, the age that’s in them, as well as what the market is looking for. What kind of flavours, what kind of price point? Trying to figure that out is definitely a long-term project, as opposed to, like: ‘Oh, we’ll just write it all down on a piece of paper, and there’s the next 10 years.’”
A decade in and Teeling has certainly cemented its place at the heart of Ireland’s whiskey revival. As the brand now looks to the next 10 years, its focus is clear: to keep pushing Irish whiskey forward, one cask at a time.
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