Get your own cask for Dingle whiskey ageing

Dinglew as the first purpose-built whiskey distillery in Ireland in over a century, opening in 2012, and pre-dating the rush to get a slice of what is now a burgeoning industry. It was the brainchild of the late Oliver Hughes who was told, by virtually everybody, that he was mad to contemplate such a thing. A prophet in his own land, to be sure.

Dingle produces no more than four casks of whiskey a day and the first 500 were sold to the Dingle Founding Fathers as they were called, although there were a few founding mothers too. Some have cashed theirs in, a few have had their whiskey bottled, while most are content to let their eight-year-old whiskey get older and rarer.

Coinciding with the launch of their Fourth Pot Still Release, possibly the best whiskey from Dingle to date, they are launching the Descendants 2020 Cask Programme where you can buy a cask and have it aged for you.

You get to choose what sort of cask: Bourbon, port or sherry, all somewhat different sizes with proportional price tags. Bourbon is 190 litres, port 225 and sherry (actually oloroso) 250. The outlay is €11,500, €10,000 and €12,500 respectively and these figures buy you not only the whiskey (on which duty will be payable when you decide to take it out of bond) but various other privileges. See dingledistillery.ie/descendants.

I was there to see the first spirit trickle from the Dingle stills back in 2012 and there was a genuine sense of participating in a piece of history, in the renaissance of an industry that at the turn of the last century was in rude health but which was on the verge of extinction when PernodRicard pulled it back from the brink in the 1980s when they bought Irish Distillers.

Nowadays, everybody wants a slice of the action but only a few are prepared to make t he i nvest ment t hat whiskey requires. You can distil gin this morning and sell it this afternoon; whiskey must be at least four years old before it can be called that. Many distilleries buy whiskey from the likes of Teeling’s, Great Northern, Bushmills, even a little from Irish Distillers, and label it as their own while their own ages. There is no harm in this, although greater transparency would be benefit everyone.

There was a sense of history being made in 2012