What does a growing year look like? Well, different for every farm is the answer — or distilling single terroirs wouldn’t be much fun. But it’s not often we get to see a full vintage — the entire growth pattern of barley for a year — captured in one place.

Based in Co. Waterford itself, Con Murphy lives just west of Tramore, a few miles south west of distillery. His farm benefits from a beautiful coastal exposure and much the same maritime air as our whisky matures in in the nearby warehouses of Ballygarran. Despite exposure to the elements, the lush, thick, limestone derived clay of the Elton series nourishes barley to a beautiful equilibrium of sugar and phenolic ripeness. Indeed it’s a farm we feel espeially connected to, since Con’s son-in-law, James, is part of the team at the distillery. 2022 seems to have been a superb vintage for our growers, and we’ll soon be malting and distilling Con’s own harvest at ‘The Facilitator’.

In the meantime, enjoy this wander through the 2022 growing season on Copper Coast, from 16th March to harvest day on 8th August (early, as many of our south coast growers are, to beat those late summer storms).

Photos taken by James Elickson (Distiller, WD)
Photo captions by Jeffrey O’Conner.