In 2025, Teeling celebrated a decade of distilling at its Dublin city centre home. On arrival, the brand heralded a new dawn for Irish whiskey outside of the centralised powers that had become the entirety of the category.
“Timing is everything, and our timing was pretty good,” says managing director Jack Teeling, who co-founded the brand alongside his brother, Stephen.
“We launched in 2012, and we opened the distillery in 2015. When we launched, there were four distilleries. The category was around six million cases, and it has already gone through 10 or 12 years of dynamic growth.
“At that time, Irish whiskey was really a Jameson growth story with a bit of Bushmills and Tullamore Dew. There had to be innovation; there had to be smaller guys doing interesting things that could drive the bigger guys. That’s where we came from. People thought we were mad, but we thought it was a no-brainer. The opportunity was there, obviously, we had some background experience, but because Irish whiskey had been very one-dimensional, there was so much room to innovate and bring something different.”
In 2012, the Teeling brothers were newly minted as brand owners, but the pair have plenty of Irish whiskey pedigree – their father, John Teeling, had founded Cooley Distillery in 1987, breaking the Irish Distillers monopoly in the process.
It was at Cooley where Jack and Stephen learnt the trade, with both leaving after the distillery was purchased by Beam Inc, now Suntory Global Spirits, in 2011. By then, Stephen had diagnosed a lack of innovation within the category.
“Back in 2010, a lot of the dynamic growth came from the entry-level Irish whiskey, so there wasn’t a need to have a huge amount of innovation. It was an oligopoly, all of which were mainly multinationals that were focusing on the core offering. What began in 2012 was that the category started maturing, people were becoming more curious and looking for something new.
“Within the rules and regulations of Irish whiskey, there’s lots of scope to innovate. So, it was easy for us to take inspiration from other spirits categories, bring that to Irish whiskey to see if it could connect from a liquid perspective, but also allow us to connect in a meaningful way with consumers.”
Teeling, alongside other distilling startups, counteractively found some benefit from the collapse of the Celtic Tiger in 2008, which left the country in a recession that would last until 2014.
“From a financial perspective, 2012 was very challenging in Ireland. There was a lot of recession with the fallout from the financial property crisis,” says Jack.
“We were seen as a good news story. We grew quite quickly and we went international, and as a result got a lot more coverage than we probably deserved in the early days. But because we were painting a picture for Irish whiskey on the world stage, that wasn’t just Jameson, it opened other Irish entrepreneurs’ eyes to that opportunity.”
Rapid expansion
The 2010s saw rapid expansion. According to a 2020 report published by Drinks Ireland, Irish whiskey was the fastest-growing spirits category during the decade, enjoying 140% volume growth. By 2019, exports had reached almost €900m.
“It’s still very early in the medium to long-term growth opportunity for Irish whiskey. We’re still a relatively small pool at 16 million cases.
“In context, Scotch is 100 million cases, American whiskey is around 60 million. The opportunity for us, as an industry, to take a bigger slice of the global whisk(e)y pie is very large. We had decades of underperformance from the 1930s to the ‘90s, and we’re still playing catch-up.”
That growth opportunity for the category has hit a potential road bump in the shape of a 15% tariff on Irish exports to its most important market.
“One in three bottles of Irish whiskey is sold in the US, so it’s a very important market that has driven a lot of the growth over the last 20 years.
“It will continue to be an important market for Irish whiskey. What probably will happen is that the volume growth won’t be as dynamic, but the value growth, as the category evolves and people become more knowledgeable, that’s not going anywhere.
“Everyone has short-term challenges, but Irish whiskey in the US is still relatively young in its evolution, there's an opportunity for us as a category to bring breadth with higher-value SKUs.”
And Irish whiskey is finding success in other significant markets, particularly in the EU, where, following the exit of Scotland, the country has become the single market’s most significant whiskey-producing region.
“Poland is now the number two for Irish whiskey and is growing very fast. Younger consumers are bringing energy to the highest-volume segment of the market, and bigger brands are tapping into that.
“That trend is happening across central and eastern Europe, it’s happening in India, it’s happening in Africa.
“These growth markets, which traditionally would have been seen only as Scotch markets, are interesting opportunities for Irish whiskey.”
