Waterford was created in 2003 by Diageo, originally as a brewery for Guinness. In 2014, however, it was bought by Mark Reynier, the famous maverick and former owner of the Bruichladdich distillery, where his work focused on barley’s influence on whisky. At his new distillery, he works only with Irish barley, sourced from around a hundred farms. The barley is processed individually in order to highlight the different characteristics of each variety (of which there are a dozen), each farm and each terroir. The first spirit was distilled in 2016 and the first bottling released in 2020.

As always, Waterford pays tribute to the terroir in which its barley is grown. The fermentation is long and distillation slow, before ageing in oak casks. Each bottling uses barley grown at a single farm, in this case the Ballymorgan farm run by Robert Milne in the east of Ireland, on clay-loamy soil that is ideal for barley. The whisky was distilled in 2016 and bottled without chillfiltration or colouring.