Meet Powerscourt Distillery’s award-winning Distillery Manager, Paul Corbett.
In conversation with Meg Walker
Paul Corbett joined Powerscourt Distillery as Distillery Manager in 2022, bringing with him a passion for flavour and a unique approach, developed from an exciting career that saw him previously head up the distilleries at both Clonakilty and Teeling. Just a few short months into the new role, he was named Master Distiller/Master Blender of the Year at Whisky Magazine’s Icons of Whisky Ireland 2023 awards. Here, the Cork native shares his thoughts on what makes Powerscourt Distillery so special.
I visited Powerscourt Distillery just a few months prior to taking on the new role and was immediately blown away by how beautiful it was. Then when I went through the equipment – which is the Rolls-Royce of distilling equipment, with an onsite warehouse – it was just like a playground for someone like me.
The attention to detail in every aspect of production is what makes our whiskeys special. We grow 100 tonnes of barley ourselves, so we’re nurturing that from the ground and know the quality is 100%. It’s a completely manual distillery – you pay a lot more attention to the process when you’re actually turning valves and turning on pumps yourselves. Where a machine would just see the numbers, the distiller or brewer is actually there, nosing and tasting the wash and the spirit so that if there’s any problem, it can be adjusted, and that really comes through in our spirit.
I originally started my career as a microbiologist. Fermentation is obviously a very important part of distilling. What I am hoping to achieve here is to try and isolate a unique yeast from the gardens – the best place in nature to find the yeast is from insects, and insects move from flower to flower. So in collaboration with TU, I want to try and isolate a completely unique yeast strain and use that in conjunction with our own barley and we’d have a complete 100% unique Powerscourt Estate whiskey. Also, instead of using the usual lightly kilned distillers malts, we brought in a crystal malt or chocolate malt that you’d use in a porter and some brewer’s yeast to bring a new dimension to Irish whiskey.
I am really big into food – I grow vegetables and do a lot of live fire cooking, so from my own perspective, what I love about our visitor centre – which won the Visitor Attraction category at the Icons of Whisky Ireland 2023 awards – is the food pairings, curated by our Food and Beverage Specialist, Santina Kennedy. Whenever she was experimenting with a new offering, she’d bring me an incredible plate of snacks to sample.
Sustainability is key to our mission here at the distillery. This year, we achieved Gold Membership status with Origin Green Ireland, a sustainability programme that operates on a national scale, encompassing the full supply chain of the food and drink industry. In our distilling process, we will recover heat wherever we can; so for instance, the distillery itself with three stills gets quite hot, so we’ll take the ambient hot air and put it through a heat pump which then heats the underfloor heating in the visitor centre.
We’re extremely proud of our most recent release, Fercullen Single Malt, which is the first 100% whiskey that was produced in this distillery and the first distilled whiskey from Co Wicklow in over 100 years. It’s been a great privilege for me to blend that whiskey – I got to decide the DNA of what Powerscourt single malt is going to be for the future. It is a really nice whiskey for a four-year-old release – really sweet, really fruity… It drinks much older than it actually is.
For the novice whiskey drinker, I would generally recommend they start with Fercullen Falls. It’s a blended whiskey – 50% malt, 50% grain. We don’t produce the grain ourselves, but the malt is produced here on site and it has 5% virgin American oak barrels used in it, so it’s got the soft grain with a robust malt and then that virgin American oak adds a bit more sweetness and caramel to it. For new whiskey drinkers, the sweetness can make it a little less intimidating than a heavy single malt.
When it comes to serves, I would generally advise people drink whiskey in whatever way they personally like it. That said, I don’t personally have a sweet tooth so if I was recommending someone try whiskey in another way besides neat, I would first suggest they try a bit of seltzer or serve it with an orange peel and some bitters.
If you’re looking for the perfect gift and unsure where to start, we have a trilogy pack with a selection of the three whiskeys, going from the lighter blended whiskey up to the single malt, offering a progression through the different styles of whiskey.
My job is not as glamorous as some people might think, it’s actually quite labour-intensive, but what I love most about what I do is flavour creation. I love going through a whiskey and how complicated it is. You might think just turning grain into spirit and putting it into some wood you’d keep getting the same whiskey coming out all the time, but any slight variation in that process makes a massive difference to the final product. So really keeping on top of the process and nosing barrels – because wood was essentially a living tree at some point, so they’re all different – and the blending of all the different barrels together to make a consistent product is something that never gets old.
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