Irish whiskey vs Scotch: and should you taste in Dublin or Edinburgh?

Three things, and only one of them is the spelling.

Triple distillation. Irish whiskey is classically distilled three times where Scotch is usually distilled twice. Each pass through the still strips out heavier compounds, so the spirit that comes off is lighter and cleaner. That is the origin of Irish whiskey’s reputation for smoothness, and it is a real structural difference rather than marketing. Some Scottish distilleries triple-distil and some Irish ones do not, but the tendency holds.

Peat, or its absence. Scotland has an entire region built on drying malt over peat smoke, and Islay whisky arrives as smoke, iodine and sea air. Ireland almost never does this. A first-time drinker who dislikes peat will find Irish whiskey easier; one who wants the strangest thing in the room will not find it in Dublin.

Single pot still. The Irish style with no Scottish equivalent: malted and unmalted barley mashed together and distilled in a pot still. It gives a particular oily, spicy texture that Irish distillers are rightly proud of, and it is the thing worth seeking out if you do get to Dublin.

Both words come from the same root: the Gaelic uisge beatha, water of life, itself a translation of the Latin aqua vitae. English shortened it, and the two spellings diverged in the nineteenth century.

The usual explanation is commercial rather than linguistic. Irish distillers wanted their product distinguished from Scottish output on the shelf, and an extra letter did it cheaply. American distilling was heavily shaped by Irish immigrants and the spelling travelled with them, which is why the United States writes whiskey too, with a few long-established exceptions.

So: Scotland, Canada and Japan write whisky. Ireland and the United States write whiskey. The plurals follow — whiskies and whiskeys. And if you searched for a whiskey tasting in Edinburgh, you spelled it the American way and you are in exactly the right place.

No, and the assumption that it is costs people a lot of good drinking.

A single malt comes from one distillery and is made only from malted barley in pot stills. A blend combines malt whisky from several distilleries with lighter grain whisky, and the blender’s job is to make the result taste the same this year, next year and in a decade. That is a genuinely difficult craft.

Something like nine in ten bottles of Scotch sold worldwide are blends, and blending is the reason Scotch became a global drink rather than a regional one. The same is broadly true in Ireland.

Where the reputation comes from is the bottom of the market: cheap blends built to a price do taste thin, and a lot of people’s first Scotch was one of them. A good blend is another matter entirely, and any decent tasting host will pour you one to prove it.

The honest position: single malts are more interesting to compare, which is why tastings are built around them. Blends are more consistent, which is why the world drinks them.