Every Pearse Lyons on the shelf asks well over what its taste-peers charge. The oldest bottle, oddly, asks the least in proportion.
Three bottles from this small Dublin distillery are on offer, and all three sit above their flavour-crowd, the ten whiskies the model rates nearest each on taste. Not a little over, either: the smallest gap in the range is more than half again above the going rate for its peers. That is a lot for a young Irish whiskey to carry, and it is the thing to go in knowing. The pattern runs against the usual one, too. The five-year-old carries the widest proportional premium, and the twelve-year-old single malt the narrowest, even though it costs the most in dollars.
A word on the distillery, since it is not a household name here. Pearse Lyons is a small Dublin operation, set up in a deconsecrated church on James's Street in the Liberties, the old brewing and distilling quarter of the city. It is boutique by Irish standards, and boutique Irish whiskey tends to be priced for the story as much as for what is in the glass. That is the backdrop to every figure below. You are buying from a maker without the volume of the big Irish houses, and the shelf price carries that.
1/Whisky-Twitter would never shelve a boutique Irish single malt beside Glenlivet 12. The engine does. It ranks Pearse Lyons Founder's Choice 12 and the Speyside everyone's had as its third-closest pair in the whole catalogue.
2/That closeness is flavour make-up, not two glasses poured together. Both sit in the orchard-and-cereal camp, the Pearse carrying a green, citrus-tea edge over the top. Profile arithmetic, nothing more.
3/Both are on a My Dan Murphy's member deal this Thursday. Pearse Lyons is $110 against a $132 shelf; Glenlivet 12 is $74 against $76. On those member prices each dips just under its own peer-group floor and to the bottom of its recent range.
4/Read it straight: Glenlivet 12 is priced about where its jury puts it, and the Pearse only slips under for members. So which 12-year single malt goes in the glass, the everyday Speyside or the Irish one the model calls its match? Both Dan Murphy's.
Spend more on a Pearse Lyons and you move closer to a fair price, not further from it. That is the opposite of how most ranges work.
Pearse Lyons is a small Dublin maker with a church for a distillery and a genuinely good founding story. Neither of those things makes the whiskey cheap, and this week the shelf is blunt about it.
Some distilleries tuck a bargain somewhere in the range for the sharp-eyed. Pearse Lyons is not one of them.
| bottle | region | latest ticket | read | window price | CE 360° mean | premium | shelf rank | per std drink | drink rank | content |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pearse Lyons 5 Year Old Whiskey | $101.99 | observed | $101.99 | $95.99 | 5.9% | #10 of 28 | $4.29 | #22 of 28 | 0 | |
| Pearse Lyons 7 Year Old Whiskey | $109.99 | observed | $109.99 | $98.77 | 10.2% | #13 of 28 | $4.63 | #25 of 28 | 0 | |
| Pearse Lyons Founder's Choice 12 Year Old Single Malt Whiskey | $131.99 | observed | $131.99 | $127.39 | 3.5% | #7 of 28 | $4.63 | #26 of 28 | 1 |