I have for you today a pretty decent dram at a pretty decent price. And it’s to Ireland we go, to West Cork Distillers in fact for their recently repackaged West Cork 10 Year Old Single Malt Whiskey – it’s hand crafted, using hand selected ingredients.

As a certain Mr R— pointed out to me (I am naming no names): ‘you’ll find “hand crafted” by Cooley Distillery’. Which is an interesting point. And it keeps bringing me back to this difference between the Irish whiskey industry and the Scotch whisky industry. So it can (potentially) be declared on the bottle of Irish whiskey that this is hand crafted by a certain company, even if the whiskey in question comes from somewhere else, somewhere much larger than you might think, and on the whole you’re not entirely sure about the true provenance.

Not that your average punter will perhaps care much for such information. But you, dear reader, are a devilishly good-looking whisky intellectual who does care for such information. And not that I’m criticising any one particular producer, merely highlighting the different landscapes of different whisky industries.