A new dawn 100 years in the making

Today we roll back the years once again, returning to the barley varieties of times gone by in search of the precious natural intensities and diversities of flavour that once thrived unchecked in the Irish landscape.

Indeed Heritage: Goldthorpe takes us back more than a century, to a variety not used in Irish whisky since 1923, yet remembered for decades thereafter for its superior flavour and quality. With today’s limited release we reintroduce those flavours to single malt connoisseurs once more.

The hundred-year-lost barley

Heritage: Goldthorpe represents our greatest journey yet into the lost flavours of forgotten heritage barley varieties. Back to a time before barley was bred solely for yield and disease resistance – before the gene pool was homogenised, when diversity and intensity of flavour reined above all.

Our last adventure, with Heritage: Hunter, took us to 1959. With Goldthorpe we venture into the 1880s, to a random, natural mutation in a field of Chevallier that led to one of the greatest barley varieties ever grown in Ireland.

Goldthorpe itself was not an Irish barley – it was discovered in Yorkshire. But it was in Irish barleyfields that it achieved true greatness, with the legendary barley breeder Dr Herbert Hunter declaring ‘it was, & still is, one of the best quality varieties in existence.’

Lionised for its flavour, championed by brewers and distillers alike, Goldthorpe’s only weakness was its prodigious height, comfortably topping out well over six feet. That made it prone to lodging, reducing yield, and so in the 1920s it was quietly phased out.

50 Grams to 50 Barrels … again

As with all the heritage barley we’ve revived, our Goldthorpe began as a mere 50g bag in the Irish seedbank – of which we could only take half.

Over years that 25 grams was slowly, slowly upscaled to enough to sow a field. In the distillery everything had to be adjusted to accommodate this resurrected grain – milling, fermentation, distillation. We had to work with what the barley gave us.

Years later, following Ned’s composition drawn from the 50 barrels of our first distillation, the results more than justify the effort. A whisky of truly singular flavour, with a flavour profile that simply does not – cannot – exist elsewhere.

Extraordinarily rich, and front-loaded with unparalleled barley flavour that manifests as granola, honey, hay and the deep savoury tones of dried fruit, beef gravy and spice, Heritage: Goldthorpe is a time capsule to the past lovingly brought to life with the most modern and flavour-driven distillery practice.

Limited by its very nature; though it has taken 100 years to bring back to you, this isn’t a whisky to wait around on. Not least since, the very day of writing this, the great Serge Valentin has awarded it a mighty 90 points on whiskyfun.com, saying:

‘It feels a bit strange to sip on such a historical – and splendid – whisky as though it were just any other dram. Surely, this deserves at least a lecture, if not an entire seminar, delivered by some wild-haired, veteran university professors. Still, we absolutely love it—it’s cutting-edge… History.’

 Buy a bottle today and taste that single malt history for yourself.