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.

Waterford Luna was released in 2021 as part of the Arcadia Series. Unusually it is made with barley grown biodynamically, an agricultural practice created by Austrian Rudolf Steiner in 1924 that notably takes lunar cycles into consideration. Three Irish farms were involved in the project. The blend is composed of 33% whisky matured in first-fill American oak casks, 17% new oak casks, 26% French oak casks and 22% sweet wine casks. A limited edition of 21,000 bottles.