Taste Test: Jameson’s New Triple Threat Upgrades the World’s Most Popular Irish Whiskey

Welcome to Taste Test, where every week our critic Jonah Flicker explores the most buzzworthy and interesting whiskeys in the world. Check back each Sunday for his latest whiskey review.

You don’t have to be a whiskey expert to be familiar with Jameson. That’s because this ubiquitous brand is the most popular and best-selling Irish whiskey in the world, a staple of liquor stores and bars, both dive and high-end, that nearly everyone who has ever tried whiskey before has tasted. The core expression is just fine, an easy-drinking and unchallenging dram that skirts the boundary between sweet and spice, which is exactly what it is supposed to do. However, the latest release, Triple Triple, brings a bit of extra nuance and flavor to the original, and it all comes down to the way the whiskey is aged.

Even if you’re a regular Jameson drinker, you might not be aware of precisely what’s in the bottle. The brand is produced at the Midleton Distillery in Cork, Ireland, the home of other more high-end brands like Redbreast, Green Spot, and Midleton Very Rare, as well as comparable blends like Powers and Paddy’s. Midleton is owned by Irish Distillers, which in turn is owned by the French company Pernod Ricard, and it’s a massive operation with gargantuan pot and column stills that are used to produce grain and pot still whiskey. Unlike Bushmills, which only makes single malt and sources grain whiskey from Midleton for its blends, Midleton combines pot still and grain whiskey to create Jameson (although it does make some single malt whiskey for special releases).

Jameson is matured for a minimum of three years, as is required by law, in a combination of ex-bourbon and sherry casks, which is the key to that whiskey’s flavor. The new Triple Triple, however, gets its name from the fact that it’s triple distilled, as is most (but not all) Irish whiskey, and that it’s matured in three different types of casks: bourbon, sherry, and chestnut. That appears to be different from the previous iteration of Triple Triple, a travel retail exclusive that used malaga casks as the third component (a type of sweet wine from Spain). The use of chestnut casks is uncommon but not unheard of in Irish whiskey. Method and Madness, the experimental line that is produced at Midleton’s microdistillery, released a single pot still expression finished in chestnut, and Dublin’s Teeling Distillery has a single malt finished in that type of wood.

I can’t say why the brand decided to switch it up for this U.S. release, but it is a subtle change, perhaps even an upgrade, from the original. The biggest difference is the addition of strong chocolate and espresso notes to the mix, overtaking the main show which stars flavors like vanilla, ripe apple, tropical fruit, honey, brown sugar, and caramel. Triple Triple still very much reads as Jameson, but those additional notes, presumably the result of the chestnut cask maturation, actually make this a whiskey worth checking out rather than just a marketing gimmick. This bottle isn’t going to change your life, but if you’re a longtime fan of Jameson, or even if you’ve moved on to more complex offerings in your whiskey journey, give the new Triple Triple a try to see how it compares to the classic.

Score: 84