St. Patrick’s Day has rolled around one more time. (Although with a temperature outside at minus seventeen degrees Centigrade and still 40 centimeters of snow still residing on my back lawn it seems more like January than March.) In many places throughout the world, this is a day to revel in the Irish heritage which we either share by birth, or we share by spirit (on St. Patrick’s Day at least). We wear green; we attend parades; and some of us even drink green beer in what has become more of a secular holiday which celebrates Irish culture, than a religious holiday which celebrates the Patron Saint after which the day was first named.
And celebrating Irish culture is not a bad thing; it was after all the Irish who first distilled “uisce beatha“, which translates from Irish into English as “the water of life“. I could go into a long and detailed etymology, but suffice it to say that “uisce beatha” is probably very close to the original form of the word which would later become “whiskey”. My blog is full of reviews of this wonderful spirit, but I must admit it is sorely lacking in content dedicated to the Irish variety.
Today, I will go a small way towards correcting this imbalance by reviewing a whiskey from the Emerald Isle which embodies the character and the class of spirits we call Irish Whiskey; a spirit which can trace its heritage back to 1757, and makes the claim that it is linked to the oldest distillery in Ireland, the Kilbeggan Distillery.
Please click on the following excerpt to read the full review:
Review: Kilbeggan Irish Whiskey
Of course I have include a nice cocktail for the Day of St. Pat, The Irish Mojito Swizzle.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
(Note: Sample for this review provided by the Alberta Beam Global team)
In 2011 the Dunedin Distillery – DoubleWood was the first whisky launched as part of the 
8 Seconds is a new Canadian Whisky from 
Crown Royal Canadian Whisky is currently produced in Gimli, Manitoba, at the Crown Royal Distillery. The distillery and the brand are owned by the spirits conglomerate, Diageo, and I think it is fair to say that Crown Royal is Diageo’s flagship Canadian Whisky brand. A couple of years ago Crown Royal Black was introduced as an addition to the Crown Royal family of whiskies. This new Crown Royal Black is a bit of a departure from the rest of the Crown Royal line-up featuring a stronger bourbon profile in the whisky through the use of new charred oak barrels during a portion of the maturation process of the whisky. It is bottled at 45% alcohol by volume and is intended as a robust alternative to their best-selling Crown Royal Whisky.
Founder, John Philip (J.P.) Wiser, purchased a distillery in Prescott, Ontario in 1857, and began to produce Wiser’s Whisky. In fact the J.P. Wiser Distillery may have been the first to use the term “Canadian Whiskey’ on their labels, as this is how the whisky was proudly introduced at the 1893 Chicago’s Wold’s Fair. From the beginning, J.P. Wiser established his brand as a quality whisky with high standards of production. As a result the distillery grew, as did the popularity of his style of whisky. By the early 1900′s Wiser’s was the third largest distiller of whisky in Canada.
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