Best known for the Green Spot Irish whiskey, the 'Spot' range is distilled at Midleton for the family-owned Mitchell & Son Wine Merchants. Set up in 1805, it wasn’t until 1887 that Robert Mitchell, a baker, confectioner and the sort of industrious shopkeeper so crucial in the history of whiskey (and whisky, too - Johnnie Walker was a grocer, for example) added whiskey bonding to the family business.
Mitchell devised a simple, though clearly effective colour coding scheme for casks, using spots of coloured paint on each cask in the warehouse to track the age of the whiskey in each barrel - can you see where we’re going with this? Blue Spot was 7 years old, Green Spot was 10 years old, Yellow Spot was 12 years old and Red Spot was 15 years old. A reliable ‘what you see is what you get’ approach was implemented, and Irish whiskey drinkers loved it. Green Spot was first retailed in 1933, matured in bourbon casks as well as some Sherry casks, with their Yellow Spot also using sweet Malaga wine casks. The survival of these bonder's styles adds much greater variation to the exciting single pot still Irish whiskey category. However, distillery bottled whiskey took over the market, and all four expressions disappeared, Green Spot being the last to be discontinued in the 1950s.
But wait! The range prevailed, as Green Spot was reintroduced to the market in the early 2000s, Yellow Spot was reintroduced in 2012, while Red Spot was brought back at the end of 2018. We await the return of Blue Spot…