I have always liked Irish whiskey, but have never been overly wowed by it. Being a Scotch guy — and specifically an Islay whisky (note that the Scots leave off the “e”) — I go for peat and seawater. To me, Irish whiskey tastes like Scotch with the corners sanded off. Not a bad description because the Irish stuff is traditionally distilled three times as opposed to the two passes they make in Scotland. The extra loop makes a lighter finished product and doesn’t have that peaty aspect that puts the cowardly modern drinker off. The notable exception to this is Auchentoshan, the only triple-distilled single malt Scotch. Honestly, it tastes like Irish whiskey to me.
Monks first brought distillation to Ireland in the early Dark Ages, and supposedly thanks are owed to St. Patrick himself. Understand that Patrick gets the dubious credit for nearly everything good in Ireland, but the whiskey claim is a lot more plausible than that business with the snakes. It would be another century before another Irish monk would cross the North Sea and bring the art to Scotland. Because practice makes perfect, they got very good at it.
Then they stopped practicing.
It’s a misconception that Prohibition was strictly an American thing. The truth is that the early 20th century temperance movement was a global phenomenon: Finland, Iceland, and Russia(!) all toyed with Prohibition in the decade before the U.S. finally enacted it. Believe it or not, it was a powerful movement in Ireland as well — the upshot being that demand dropped and so did production, meaning that in turn quality also suffered. True, sales picked up in the Great Depression, but that was more about quantity than quality. The consequence to all this was that by 1950 there were only four distilleries in Ireland, and they were just barely hanging on. A further consolidation in 1966 left just three, but this was a tactical retreat. The distilleries teamed up with the goal of focusing on making a superior product, not just surviving. They started practicing again. Throughout the 1970s the quality attracted more investment, and that led to a revival boom in Irish whiskey through the ’90s.
When I saw Writers’ Tears Irish Whiskey, well, I had to give it a whirl. (To be clear, I’m not Irish; I spell my name Murff, not Murph. It is Swiss German, and yet I have no firm opinion on fondue.) I hoped that the whiskey’s name, clever as it is, was just a marketing gimmick. Being a prolific producer of writers’ tears myself, I know that they have a bitter and lonely aftertaste.
I can assure you that there is nothing bitter about this stuff. Writers’ Tears Double Oak was a 2019 Top 20 pick from Whisky Advocate magazine and has been called the most premium Irish blend. It may well be. It’s made the traditional way and finished in American white oak bourbon barrels, then French oak cognac casks. All of which gives a depth and complexity to Writers’ Tears that I don’t normally associate with Irish whiskey.
Pour a dram and you get a deep color that you might mistake for cognac or bourbon. There, the similarities end. It’s got a nose that gives you dark, rich fruit; dark chocolate; and spices. There is oak on the front end. I’ve heard other reviewers talk about a honey blond sweetness — but I think that I’m picking up the same quality as an almost cosmic smoothness of a dark, mellow vanilla. You don’t get much heat, just a finish that’s peppery with a hint of a little green apple.
To give full scope to these whiskeys would require me to go full Irish writer on you, but my handlers refused to up my allotted word count to 25,000. So I’ll sum it up: Writers’ Tears Double Oak is a whiskey that has not had its corners sanded off.