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# Learning my Scotch: a classroom autumn
- URL: https://www.ciaran-murray.com/learning-my-scotch/
- Published: 2026-10-01T09:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-22T06:36:43.000Z
- Description: On Tuesday I told you I was still learning my Scotch and happy to be taught. On Monday morning, the lessons start.
- Author: Ciaran Murray
- Tags: People & Craft, Cork to the Highlands

*Written on 1 October 2026\. The three days in the Highlands planned for the following week, and the Thistle Awards dinner, didn't happen: a shoulder injury kept me in Cork, as I wrote on* [*19 October*](https://www.ciaran-murray.com/eighteen-days-and-a-drop-of-oil/)*. The rest is as I wrote it that day.*

On Tuesday I told you I was still learning my Scotch and happy to be taught. On Monday morning, the lessons start.

A box of thirty small bottles is somewhere between Dublin and Cork right now: the tasting kit for the WSET Level 2 Award in Spirits, which I'm taking online with the Irish Whiskey & Spirits Institute. In November it's wine, three Mondays at The River Lee in Cork with Vinspire Academy.

![A glass of red wine against a sunset over water.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7e/0c/7e0cc755-8e3f-401d-be56-1e2d9109123e/content/images/2026/10/2-body-2.jpg)

## My own side of the water

I know my own side of the water. Twenty minutes from where I'm writing this, Midleton makes a whiskey that exists nowhere else: single pot still, malted and unmalted barley in the same copper. The Irish Whiskey Technical File puts it in law: a mash of at least 30 per cent malted barley and 30 per cent unmalted barley, distilled in pot stills. Redbreast 12 is the dram I'd hand a Scottish bar manager on his first night. Yellow Spot, if the night deserved it.

![A row of copper pot stills in a distillery still house.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7e/0c/7e0cc755-8e3f-401d-be56-1e2d9109123e/content/images/2026/10/3-body-2.jpg)

Scotch whisky I know the way a good guest knows it. I can tell you which bottles people ask for. I can't yet tell you what peat does in the kiln, what a sherry cask does over twelve years that a bourbon cask won't, or why the regions matter and where they don't. A manager can bluff a name. He can't bluff the why to a team he's training on a Friday afternoon.

![A back bar lined with shelves of whisky and spirits bottles.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7e/0c/7e0cc755-8e3f-401d-be56-1e2d9109123e/content/images/2026/10/4-body-2.jpg)

## A classroom autumn

So the rest of the autumn is more classrooms than bars, and I've come to like the classrooms. The Scottish personal licence exam this weekend. Food safety twice, the Irish certificate and then the Scottish one, so nobody has to take my word for it. Allergens, properly, because the guest who asks about nuts is really asking whether she can trust the room. Two days in Dublin building cocktails the way a chef builds a plate. First aid before Christmas. A barista course, because the best hour at Aghadoe was the first one, with the machine warming up and the mist still on the lake. And a course in how to teach, since a tasting kit is only worth anything if I can pass it on.

## On the ground

Then, next week, three days in the Scottish Highlands to taste it on the ground. A hire car out of Glasgow. Glenturret in Crieff, on a local's recommendation, and Strathearn nearby, which fills one barrel a day. Pixel Spirits, distilling gin in a restored barn beside a hotel on Loch Leven. And on Friday the 9th, the Highlands and Islands Thistle Awards in Inverness: a room full of the people who make Highland hospitality what it is.

![Green hills under a pale sky.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7e/0c/7e0cc755-8e3f-401d-be56-1e2d9109123e/content/images/2026/10/5-body-2.jpg)

So here's a trade. Redbreast 12 is the dram I'd hand you. What would you hand me back, and what should it teach me? Tell me in the comments on LinkedIn, or hit reply if this came to you by email.

![A log fire burning in a hearth.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7e/0c/7e0cc755-8e3f-401d-be56-1e2d9109123e/content/images/2026/10/6-body-2.jpg)

The wine side of the same autumn is [here](https://www.ciaran-murray.com/wset-level-2-wines-the-studying-starts/).

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### References

- Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (2014) *Technical File setting out the specifications with which Irish Whiskey / Uisce Beatha Eireannach / Irish Whisky must comply*, s. 2.2.1, Irish Pot Still Whiskey. Copy hosted by Blackwater Distillery. Available at: [blackwaterdistillery.ie](https://blackwaterdistillery.ie/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Irish-Whiskey-Technical-File.pdf?ref=ciaran-murray.com) (Accessed: 21 October 2026).