The San Francisco World Spirits Competition has been running since 2000, and it remains one of the most closely watched contests in the drinks calendar. Judging is done blind by a panel of industry professionals, and the results for the 2026 edition arrived yesterday.
Ireland did well this year, and the most interesting part is how varied the winners are. They run from heavily peated Donegal malt to single pot still revivals out of Cork, and they take in a 21-year-old Tullamore blend, a Dublin landmark, a brand-new Belfast distillery, and one release that does not fit any of the usual categories. Some come from heritage names with a century or more of history, while others come from distilleries that have only just started filling casks.
So, let’s take a closer look at every Irish whiskey that took home a Double Gold medal at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition 2026.
Quick whisky question
Single malt is everywhere, but what does it mean? We want to know what the word “single” means to you. Three quick questions, under a minute.
Ardara Distillery 2025 Edition Cask Strength Single Malt Irish Whiskey
Awards: Double Gold Medal
Tasting Notes: Green melon, citrus, beeswax, pipe smoke, pear, coconut, leather, tobacco, menthol, sweet smoke, baked apple, raisins
Find Your Next Bottle: Available exclusively at the distillery visitor centre
What Will Whisky Look Like in 2027? Voices from Whisky Live Paris
READ THE STORY
Ardara is built around heavily peated whiskey, made with malted barley peated to 55 ppm and produced using an unusual “all grain in” method, where the grain is kept in all the way to the wash still to hold onto its smoky character.
Every drop is triple distilled and starts its maturation in a wooden solera vat for consistency, and the 2025 Edition cask composition is 47% Oloroso sherry, 45% bourbon, and 8% virgin oak. The cask strength version is a limited run of 2,000 individually numbered bottles, sold exclusively at the distillery’s visitor center.
The distillery sits in the town of Ardara in County Donegal and is owned by Sliabh Liag Distillers, whose founders James and Moira Doherty set out to revive the smoky whiskey tradition that once defined this corner of the northwest.
Craft Irish Whiskey The Donn Single Malt Irish Whiskey
Awards: Double Gold Medal
Tasting Notes: Orange zest, digestive biscuits, caramel, pecan nuts, marzipan, dark chocolate, caramel, toasted walnuts, prunes
Find Your Next Bottle: Join the waitlist
The Donn comes from The Craft Irish Whiskey Co., a Dublin company whose founder and master blender, Jay Bradley, builds his whiskeys around cask work rather than age statements.
For this release, Bradley started with sourced Irish single malt and gave it four years of primary maturation in ex-bourbon barrels, then re-racked it into Tawny Port pipes, moved it back into heavily toasted ex-bourbon casks, and finished it in a series of Pedro Ximénez barrels ranging from 64 to 225 liters in size — six different barrels across roughly seven years.
At around 6.9 years old, the whiskey was named Single Malt Whiskey of the Year at the 2026 London Spirits Competition. Judges at the IWSC picked up a sherry influence, with vanilla and nuttiness giving way to fig, prune, cinnamon, and toffee.
Egan’s Conviction 21 Year Old Blended Irish Whiskey
Awards: Double Gold Medal
Tasting Notes: Waffles, caramel, pineapple, golden syrup, baked apples, salt, vanilla & pepper
Find Your Next Bottle: $129.99
The Egan name goes a long way back. Egan’s Irish whiskey was founded in the 1800s by Patrick Egan, and in 1852 his two sons established P. & H. Egan Limited in Tullamore, County Offaly. This business supplied Irish whiskey for the next 116 years until the family voluntarily closed it in 1968.
Fifth and sixth-generation descendants later revived the brand in 2014, and it now operates again out of Tullamore.
This 21 Year Old version of Conviction brings together single malt and grain whiskey matured for more than 21 years and finished in XO Cognac casks, bottled at 46% ABV. The brand’s notes run from waffles, caramel, pineapple, golden syrup, and baked apples into a long finish of salt, vanilla, and pepper.
Blue Spot Single Pot Still Irish Whiskey
Awards: Double Gold Medal
Tasting Notes: Pineapple, kiwi, green banana, and lime zest, pot still spices, baked apple, hazelnut, toasted wood, exotic fruits, spices
Find Your Next Bottle: $112 / £90
The first Single Pot Still Irish whiskey on this list! Single pot still whiskey is a uniquely Irish style made at a single distillery from a mash of both malted and unmalted barley, distilled in copper pot stills, which gives it a spicy, creamy character.
Blue Spot is matured for 7 years in bourbon casks, sherry butts, and Portuguese Madeira casks, and bottled at cask strength. The whiskey behind it comes from Irish Distillers, who distill and mature the spirit while Mitchell & Son, a Dublin wine merchant family in the trade since the 1800s, remain brand owners.
The name has an unusual origin: Mitchell & Son once marked their maturing casks with a daub of colored paint to show age potential, which left them with Blue Spot at 7 years, Green Spot at 10, Yellow Spot at 12, and Red Spot at 15.
Blue Spot was discontinued in the 1960s, but was relaunched after 56 years of dormancy in late 2020. The official notes mention pineapple, kiwi, green banana, and lime zest, then pot still spices, baked apple, hazelnut, and toasted wood, with a finish of exotic fruits and spices.
Yellow Spot Single Pot Still Irish Whiskey
Awards: Double Gold Medal
Tasting Notes: Mown hay, cracked black pepper, nutmeg, green tea, honey sweetness with coffee, milk chocolate, and crème brûlée, red grape, and dry barley
Find Your Next Bottle: $100 / £83
Another entry from Spot Whiskey. What sets Yellow Spot apart is an unusual third cask. Alongside American bourbon barrels and Spanish sherry butts, the whiskey spends time in Spanish Malaga casks, which bring an exotic sweet note.
Importantly, this is not a finished whiskey, since the spirit is matured for a full 12 years across all three cask types rather than being moved into the Malaga casks just for finishing. Again, it is single pot still whiskey, made from malted and unmalted barley and produced at Midleton Distillery in County Cork.
Yellow Spot had not been bottled since the 1950s or 60s when it was brought back in 2012, and Mitchell & Son were only able to bring it back after finding a supply of 12-year-old Malaga-matured pot still whiskey in Irish Distillers’ inventory that matched the original recipe in logbooks.
Teeling Single Malt Irish Whiskey
Awards: Double Gold Medal
Tasting Notes: Tropical fruits, caramelised sugar, oak spice, ginger, chocolate, mixed berries, orchard fruits, passionfruit, pineapple
Find Your Next Bottle: $49 / £50
Teeling opened its distillery in Dublin’s Liberties in 2015, the first new distillery in the city in well over a century, founded by brothers Jack and Stephen Teeling, whose family has a distilling history in Dublin going back to 1782.
The single malt is made from Irish whiskeys distilled from 100% malted barley, matured and finished in casks that carry the influence of five wine casks: Virgin American Oak, Ruby Port, Caravelos White Port, Madeira, and Bourbon. It carries no age statement and is bottled at 46% ABV with no added color and no chill filtration.
Teeling describes the result as “a symphony” of flavor, and the official tasting notes are melon and tropical fruit with hints of chocolate, then a full mix of fruit flavors with bitter-sweet chocolate, soft spice, and mixed berries, finishing with oak and tropical passionfruit.
Titanic Distillers 8 Year Old Single Malt Irish Whiskey
Awards: Double Gold Medal
Tasting Notes: “A clear, golden spirit exhibits fresh green banana and citrus on the nose, with a light, fruity palate featuring tropical and white fruit notes, balanced by subtle spice and wood hints, finishing medium with pineapple and apple nuances.” – LSC Judges
Find Your Next Bottle: N/A
Titanic Distillers is built inside the old Thompson Dock Pumphouse in Belfast, the red-brick building that in 1911 helped drain the dock where the Titanic itself was prepared, and it is the first working whiskey distillery in the city in almost 90 years.
Belfast was once the biggest whiskey-producing city in the world in the early 1900s, before that industry largely collapsed in the decades that followed due to prohibition, and the distillery now positions itself as part of bringing whiskey-making back to the city.
Distilling on the site first began in 2023 under head distiller Damien Rafferty, who was named Craft Distiller of the Year at the 2026 London Spirits Competition, where this 8 Year Old Single Malt also picked up a gold medal. The whiskey is a triple-distilled single malt bottled at 42% ABV.
However, it is not listed on the Titanic Distillers website, nor can I find much information about it. If you know more about the Titanic Distillers 8 Year Old, let us know in the comments.
West Cork 7 Year Old Single Malt Irish Whiskey
Awards: Double Gold Medal
Tasting Notes: Green fruit, marzipan, red berries, malt, tannins, green fruit, spice, citrus
Find Your Next Bottle: $70 / £50
This 7 Year Old single malt spends its first four years in first-fill Bodega Oloroso sherry casks, sourced from the Tolerina Rodriguez bodega in Cádiz, Spain, and then moves into first-fill bourbon barrels for another three years. It is triple distilled from 100% local Irish grain and bottled at 46% ABV.
The whiskey comes from West Cork Distillers, one of Ireland’s largest independent distilleries, which three childhood friends, John O’Connell, Ger McCarthy, and Denis McCarthy, started back in 2003 in a small room at the back of one of their houses. The business grew and moved into Skibbereen, where it now operates from a 12.5-acre site on Marsh Road.
YUTUMOMO Milk Candy Whiskey
Awards: Double Gold Medal
Tasting Notes: Butterscotch, vanilla, caramel, chocolate, coffee
Find Your Next Bottle: Coming soon to the U.S.
This is the most unusual name on the list, and the obvious question is why a whiskey tied to a Chinese company is sitting among the Irish winners. The answer is in how it is built.
According to ChinaBev, YUTUMOMO is made in small batches using bourbon barrel-aged Irish whiskey combined with natural milk candy flavors, which is what earns its Irish designation even though the producer is listed as ChinaBev (Ningbo) Trade Co., Ltd, with the country of origin given as Ireland in the SFWSC results and at the earlier London Spirits Competition.
The idea behind it is to recreate the taste of the milk candies that are popular across Asia, and the brand suggests serving it chilled over ice or in a cocktail.
It is worth being clear that this is a flavored whiskey rather than a traditional Irish single malt or blend, which makes its Double Gold one of the quirkier results in the Irish field this year.
A Cork Mystery: MJM Co. Irish Whiskey
One name on the Double Gold list is harder to pin down than the rest. MJM Co. Irish Whiskey appears among the winners, listed under Cork, but at the time of writing we could not find anything verifiable about it: no producer, no distillery, no tasting notes, and no details about how or where it is made. If you know more about who is behind MJM Co., we would be glad to hear from you in the comments
A Category in Good Health
What stands out across these winners is the range. A Double Gold is only handed out when every judge on the panel scores a whiskey Gold, so it means something that a unanimous vote went to bottles this different from one another.
Whichever of these you reach for, you are drinking something a room full of judges agreed on.
So, do you agree with the Irish whiskey medallists this year? Let us know in the comments
Latest On The Whiskey Wash
