Magilligan 8 Year Old

Magilligan is one of the labels through which Cooley's whiskey travelled Europe in the distillery's early independent years, and this 8 Years Old, bottled at 43% for the Dutch market, shows the rarest side of its make, peated Irish single malt. Cooley, in Co. Louth, revived peat smoke in Irish whiskey when the style had all but vanished.

Eight years in bourbon barrels lay honey, vanilla and soft fruit under a drift of heather smoke, gentler than Islay's iodine and closer to the character Cooley bottles as Connemara. Double distilled and unhurried, it balances sweet malt against that mild peat, a reminder that smoke was once commonplace in Ireland before disappearing for most of a century.