Price: €25

I toured Roe & Co. just after arriving in Dublin for work so didn't have an advanced booking as I wasn;t entirely sure when I would arrive. Arriving at the distillery I was able to get booked onto the next tour which was only 20 minutes away.

The tour started a few minutes late as they were waiting for a couple of people to arrive. This was a Chinese couple who had been on a tour elsewhere in the Guinness estate (both Guiness and Roe & Co are owned by Diageo).

The distillery is a fairly compact one, based in the old Guinness power house. All of the equipment is in the one room and you view it from an escalated walkway across the middle of the room. This does mean that some of the equipment isn't well viewed, although the walkway includes a partial glass floor. For example, the mash tun is almost directly below you along with the wash backs. That said the walway does mean you get a view of this kit which you don't usually see at other distilleries.

On way up to the walway from the shop, you get a brief history of the original Roe & Co distillery and the creation of the new one; the design of the bottle is explained which uis quite interesting for all of the nods to history which it includes.

The tasting was quite an unusual one which was done with the assistance of a wooden box in front of each visitor. This box contained a few jars for smelling and samples of barley andcorn wich you can touch and smell.

Tasting is done using a box of jars to smell and barley and corn to see and touch. The sample of whiskey to taste is the 106 blend; as part of the tasting yuo hear about the process the headdistiller went through to develop this whiskey collaborating with some of the top bartenders across Ireland to come up with the whiskey they wanted to produce.

After the tasting you're taken to a lab to create your own high ball cocktail. You get to choose between five flavour profiles as the type of cocktail; I opted for a bitter type cocktail which turned otu to be very nice.

This is an approach I've not seen elsewhere and wouldn't expect to see in Scotland as Scotch is more targetted for drinking neat, whereas Irish whiskey, along with bourbon, is often intended for mixing. The Roe & Co whiskey is a blend which is targetted towards cocktails.

Following this task we were then taken down to the bar where we got a sample of their other blend to try (I thought it was better than the 106, but others in the tour disagreed, although I am a whiskey drinker and they were not) as well as a cocktail. I'm not sure what it is called, but it contained raspberry and ginger ale which was quite nice.

All told I was at the distillery for almost two hours. About 30 minutes of this was sat in the bar with the cocktail chatting to a group of ladies on the tour; one from Dublin and two from Brooklyn. The one from Dublin had toured other distilleries, but the Americans hadn't. They'd enjoyed the tour here and after I mentioned a distillery in Brooklyn (Van Brunt Stillhouse) they talked about visiting. It's always nice to see others enjoy their tours of a distillery.