Glendalough {The Valley of two lakes} is a deep, glacial valley nestled in the Wicklow Mountains, just south of Dublin. Renowned for its natural, scenic beauty, the area is known as “The Garden of Ireland”.
Glendalough is also home to a 6th century monastic settlement founded by St Kevin, a legendary monk, our inspiration and of course, the man on our bottle.
Monasteries like Glendalough were the birthplace of distilled drinks back in St Kevin’s time.
OUR STORY
We’re a group of guys who always loved Irish whiskey. We’d meet up for a drink and talk a good game. Eventually, we convinced ourselves to leave the safety of our city jobs, and headed into the mountains to take a chance on something more meaningful (much like our hero, St Kevin). Together we built a craft distillery near our favourite spot in those mountains, Glendalough.
FRESH FROM THE WILD
To make this extraordinary gin, we forage wild plants in the mountains around the distillery. What we pick goes fresh into the still within hours of foraging.
All the plants are sustainably picked by our full time forager, every day we distil. We take a lot of care that we don’t adversely affect the areas we find them in. That means sometimes using scissors rather than picking to make sure roots aren’t pulled, or maybe skipping a few before picking the next one, or finding different patches of the same plant, to make sure an area isn’t over-foraged.
Our aim is to leave no trace that we were ever there. It’s harder work but worth it to keep the mountains beautiful and wild.
Then these wild botanicals are painstakingly slow-distilled to tease out delicate flavours, in very small batches of less than 250 litres. Some go in the pot, and some are hung in a basket to let vapours extract their essential oils. The cut-points are decided batch by batch, by smell and taste (never timed or automated) as if each batch is the first.
This brings the flavour our Wild Gin to a whole other level. The knowledge, experience and man-hours in each bottle are what make this liquid so special.
A DISTILLER’S TRIBUTE –
MADE WITH DEPTH & MEANING
This fresh, rose-petal gin was first made to honour our head distiller’s mum, Rose, at his little brother’s wedding. Rose had recently passed away, and this was his way to have her there in spirit – literally.
Carefully-tended flowers, from her rose garden are slowly vapor distilled with wild roses and plants from the mountains around the distillery to make this an intensely floral gin.
After distilling, the gin is then further infused with even more roses to deepen the flavours and give it its lovely pink hue.
This is not “just another pink gin”, far from it. The depth and complexity really needs to be tasted to be understood. Floral, fragrant and flavourful, it is some of the best, most interesting gin we’ve made and comes after a lot of experimenting with plants, fruit, spices and flowers.
IRISH WHISKEY GIVEN BOTH BARRELS
Upon its release, this whiskey won double gold at The World Spirits Competition in San Francisco. It really is an Irish whiskey that will make you think twice about Irish whiskey. A lovely, light and drinkable whiskey, it’s also complex with a depth of flavour beyond its years.
Aged twice in barrels from far sides of the world, the flavours are a game of two halves.
American oak Bourbon barrels bring sweet honey and smooth vanilla notes, laying down the foundations of the flavours. The Spanish oak Oloroso barrels layer on dried fruit, and nutty flavours.
To find the best Oloroso casks, we go off the beaten track to the small Andalusian town of Montilla, home of the famous PX grape. Here we can talk one on one with producers, chose the bodega, the liquid, the time seasoning, and eventually the casks. This gives us more influence on the flavours in our Double Barrel whiskey.
IRISH OAK FINISHED POT STILL
Finished for up to a year in the rarest of all casks, virgin Irish oak, this is a milestone for Irish whiskey. A single cask, mainstream whiskey that makes available the flavours of Irish oak to everyone.
Each bottle is numbered and traceable to each cask and even to the tree from whence it came.
We sustainably fell 140 year-old trees from the ancient oak forests in the mountains around the distillery. This was the beginning of a year long process that ends with an Irish oak hogshead.
These special casks are filled with the most quintessentially Irish of whiskeys – pot still. The higher levels of toasted oak and vanilla flavours that Irish oak brings to the liquid complement and balance the classic pot still spices.
7 YEAR OLD SINGLE MALT
MIZUNARA CASK
A relentless search for the most flavourful oak in the world took us from our own wooded mountains in Wicklow to those in the volcanic north of Japan, Hokkaido. This is where we found Mizunara, the most sought-after oak in the whiskey world.
The whiskey is vivid, but delicate with seamless depth. It is vibrant, fruity, and floral on the nose, enjoying a luxuriously smooth mouthfeel with notes of dark chocolate orange, sandalwood and cinnamon synonymous with Mizunara whiskeys. Glendalough’s Mizunara 7-year single malt benefits from an exceptionally long finish of toasted oak and oriental spices, with the dark chocolate lingering even longer.
