Yellow Spot 12 Year Old

Winner of the Flaviar Community Awards 2017 in its respective category!

Mitchell & Son have been wine and spirit merchants in Dublin since 1805. Sometime later—likely around 1887—they started contracting their own supply of Irish Whiskey. By the early 1900s, they were selling more than 100 casks of their special recipe out of their store front each year. They would keep track of the different versions by dabbing a colored spot onto the outside of the casks and pour bottles fresh for customers in the store.

Little has changed. Mitchell & Son still have their stores, and they still sell their specially crafted, unique Irish Whiskey in two forms—Green Spot and Yellow Spot. And they produce a very limited batch of each, most of which they sell in their shop so it can be hard to get outside of Ireland. But Uncle Flaviar knows a guy who knows a guy, so get it while you can.

Mitchell & Son actually stopped production of the Yellow Spot Whiskey after 1960. Seems that there were a few dark decades in which Irish Whiskey fell out of favor. But, those days are over and they have brought us back our cherished Yellow Spot.

Yellow Spot Irish Whiskey is old-school style Irish single pot-still Whiskey aged a full 12 years in 1/3 Bourbon, 1/3 Spanish Sherry, and 1/3 Malaga casks. It is absolutely Uncle Flaviar’s favorite dram from the Emerald Isle. Those Bourbon casks do their thing, and the Sherry casks bring their magic, but those Malaga casks really make this Whiskey stand out. Malaga is a sweeter fortified wine from southern Spain, and the sweetness it adds is simply marvelous.

SmartAss Corner:
We get asked all the time about the difference between Scotch and Irish Whiskey. There used to be quite a bit, but processes have merged quite a bit over the decades. Traditionally, Irish Whiskey was “single pot-stilled” barley. Single malt Whiskey can be distilled in a pot still, but a “single pot still” Whiskey uses some unmalted barley for character, so it cannot technically be called a single malt.