Thursday, 23 October 2008

The return of Redbreast 15yo

As an anonymous commenter pointed out (thanks!) on a previous post, Redbreast 15yo has reappeared in the Celtic Whiskey Shop. This whiskey has almost mythical status among serious Irish whiskey drinkers thanks to its uncompromising Irishness. In other words, it's a traditional, unblended, pure pot still whiskey that has been bottled without chill-filtering at 46%.

This style is sadly very rare, with Irish Distillers (IDL) strangely reluctant to commit to its production, despite demand.

The story goes that there was one last pallet of the stuff at IDL allocated to Germany. The distributor there declined to take it, having apparently found it hard to shift existing stock. So Ally of the Celtic Whiskey Shop jumped in and snagged it. As far as I know, no other shop is receiving a new allocation (if I hear different, I'll update this).

As far as we know, this is the last of the last (though there is nothing preventing IDL from making it again, if they choose to). IDL, unfortunately, cottoned on to the latent demand for the Redbreast and bumped up the price. So this time around it's €120 rather than €90. I don't think it will last long, even at that price.