Jameson Irish Whiskey: The Range, the Prices, and the Kosher Question

Two questions come with this bottle, and they come in this order: is it kosher, and what does it cost. We will take them in that order.

Jameson Irish Whiskey, 750ml, is $34.99. Jameson Black Barrel, 1L, is $54.99. Now the harder part.

Is Jameson kosher?

Jameson is not certified kosher, and the cRc lists it as not recommended. The reason is the barrel, not the whiskey.

Straight whiskey is grain, water, yeast and time in oak, and there is nothing in that list that raises a kashrus question. The question starts when a distillery finishes its whiskey in a cask that used to hold wine: sherry, port, Madeira. Some Jameson bottlings are finished that way. That is the whole of it.

We carry the bottle because customers ask for it by name. What we will not do is tell you it is something it is not. Ask your rav before you buy it. If you want the full picture of how this works across the whole whiskey aisle, we wrote up what actually makes a whiskey kosher: bourbon, Scotch, sherry casks and all.

What Jameson actually is

Irish, from the New Midleton Distillery in County Cork. John Jameson set up on Bow Street in Dublin in 1780 and the name has been on a bottle ever since. It is a blend of single pot still whiskey and fine grain whiskey, triple-distilled, aged a minimum of four years in seasoned oak, bottled at 40 percent.

Triple distillation is the Irish signature and it is the reason Jameson drinks the way it does. Scotch is usually distilled twice. The third pass strips out more of the heavier compounds and leaves a lighter, softer spirit. That is why Jameson is the whiskey people who do not like whiskey can usually drink.

On the nose, light florals with spicy oak and toasted wood and a faint sherry sweetness. On the palate, vanilla, hazelnut, mild spice and that silky triple-distilled texture. The finish is clean and gently warming with a touch of butterscotch. It is a whiskey built to be drunk rather than analysed.

Is Jameson a Scotch? Is it a bourbon?

Neither, and both questions get typed into Google every day, so here is the short answer.

It is not Scotch, because Scotch has to be made in Scotland. It is not bourbon, because bourbon has to be made in America from at least 51 percent corn and aged in new charred oak. Jameson is Irish whiskey, made in Ireland, from a mash that leans on barley, and spelled with the e. Scotland and Canada drop the e; Ireland and America keep it.

The difference that matters in the glass is smoke. Scotch, especially from Islay, often carries peat. Irish whiskey almost never does. We laid the two side by side in Irish whiskey against Scotch.

The range

Jameson is not one bottle, it is a house with several expressions, and the two on our shelf sit at either end of the everyday range.

• Jameson Original, 750ml, $34.99: the green bottle. The house style. Light, smooth, endlessly mixable.
• Jameson Black Barrel, 1L, $54.99: a small-batch blend of single pot still and grain whiskey, matured in double-charred ex-bourbon barrels alongside Oloroso sherry casks. Toasted oak, vanilla, butterscotch and dried fruit; creamy pot still, charred oak, nutmeg and dark honey; a long, warming finish of toffee and spice. Richer and deeper than the Original, and a full litre rather than a 750.

Above and around those sit Caskmates, finished in beer casks, and Crested and the older single pot still bottlings. Note that Black Barrel spends time in Oloroso sherry casks by design, which puts it squarely in the category the kashrus question is about.

Twenty dollars between the two bottles

Worth pausing on, because the gap is not as big as it reads. The Original is a 750ml and Black Barrel is a litre: a third more whiskey. Per ounce the two are much closer than $34.99 against $54.99 suggests.

What the extra money buys is depth. If Jameson is going into a ginger highball or an Irish coffee, the Original is the right bottle and the Black Barrel is wasted in it. If it is going into a glass with one large cube and nothing else, the double-charred barrel is the reason to spend the twenty. If you want the general shape of what a bottle of whiskey ought to cost, we walked the whole price ladder from the bottom shelf up.

The rest of the Irish shelf

If the cask question matters to you, it is worth knowing which Irish bottles are aged in ex-bourbon barrels only and which take a turn in sherry or wine wood. We are not paskening here. We are telling you what is on each label so you can ask a real question.

• Writers' Tears Copper Pot, $54.99: a marriage of single pot still and single malt with no grain whiskey at all, matured in ex-bourbon barrels. Honey, vanilla, orchard fruit.
• Proper No. Twelve, $34.99: golden grain and single malt, ex-bourbon only. Easy, sweet, built for shots and mixers. There is a full write-up on it.
• Redbreast 12 Year, $69.99: the benchmark for single pot still, matured in ex-bourbon and Oloroso sherry casks. Christmas cake, dried fig, baking spice.
• The Sexton Single Malt, $31.99 to 100 percent Irish malted barley, four years in European oak ex-sherry butts. Dark fruit, honey, chocolate finish.
• The Busker Triple Cask, $34.99: three whiskeys aged separately in ex-bourbon, Marsala and sherry casks, then blended.

The pattern is worth seeing: the richer and fruitier an Irish whiskey tastes, the more likely a wine cask put it there. Lightness and honey usually mean bourbon wood.

How to drink it

Jameson handles every pour without complaining, which is most of its appeal. Neat. On the rocks. In a ginger ale highball with a lime wedge, which is the drink the brand itself pushes and the drink it is genuinely best in. In an Irish coffee. In a hot toddy in February.

Black Barrel earns a better glass. One big cube, or an Old Fashioned where the toffee and charred oak have room to show.

The full whiskey shelf runs past a hundred bottles if you want to keep looking. And we ship anywhere in the country.