We Sampled and Ranked Five Jameson Irish Whiskeys

St. Patrick’s Day is here, and you’d better believe the world is going to drink a lot of Jameson. The long-producing distillery makes the world’s number one-selling Irish whiskey even on a slow day, and March 17th is its biggest day of the year.

But which Jameson should you order? There are many varieties. To figure it out, I turned to an authority: Mark Roy, the director of marketing, merchandising, and warehousing for the New Hampshire Liquor Commission (NHLC). New Hampshire is a control state, meaning the state government is your actual liquor salesman, and thanks to the “live free” aesthetic, offers some of the best prices in the northeast. That means a lot of turnover from both locals and savvy tourists making cargo runs — $700 million in sales each year, in fact — so Roy has seen both the breadth of the whiskey industry and the high-speed turnover of what succeeds on the shelf in his 31 years working at NHLC.

Even better, I met him at the Irish Consulate for a tasting of different distilleries. So when Mark recommends a bottle of Irish whiskey, you can trust he really knows his stuff. He’s been personally responsible for sampling and selecting what New Hampshire outlets stock, down to single-barrel picks. Here are his thoughts on my ranking of the Jameson family, kindly furnished by the NHLC.

Some recommendations are based on firsthand impressions of promotional materials and products provided by the manufacturer.

The nose is actually stronger coffee than Kahúla, which I cracked open a bottle to smell side by side. However, if you’re looking for a truly perfected coffee liqueur, Mr. Black remains supreme. Even so, this is a serviceable pour both on its own or in cocktails; it’s just limited in its applications. It already tastes like a spiked coffee, so you’re more likely to add it to milkshakes and the like than to your actual Irish coffee. I think its best application might be in a homemade Irish cream, since that gets frothed up to live atop the coffee itself. But you might want to play around with a splash of this in whipped cream. Either way, this one’s life is more likely as an additive than just sitting around sipping cold brew whiskey. Save it for when you want the flavor minus the staying awake until dawn. If, however, you are making cocktails that use coffee-flavored liquors already, Mark Roy has a word of advice for you.

“Let’s take a classic cocktail, which also happens to be one of the hottest on every list now,” Roy says about the espresso martini, and turn it up. “A simple swap of your vodka to Jameson Cold Brew will give you your classic coffee bean notes but add a touch of vanilla and nut notes from the cold brew. I must admit my wife loved this blind switch I did to her favorite drink.”

“As a self-proclaimed whiskey specialist, I was skeptical at first for sure,” says Mark Roy. “But I always give an open-minded try to all spirits. This one is truly versatile and good used on its own to a simple Irish mule, giving that ginger beer an additional kick of orange zest. This is a truly refreshing cocktail to enjoy. Who needs extra dashes of orange bitters if you use this as your cocktail to start!”

Roy’s being humble. He’s actually proclaimed as a whiskey specialist by both a state and two countries. He’s also right. You can smell Orange Crush from three feet away when you open this bottle, but as with all Jameson, the nose and the taste live on different blocks. The actual flavor is a little more orange rind than orange juice. Its sweetness dominates the normally pleasant level of Jameson’s bite, even though it’s one of the smoother whiskeys out there. As mentioned above, the real strength is as a mixer. Your intrepid Table Tasters added it to a pour of the Jameson Orange Spritz RTD, and it upgraded both the orange and the whiskey to a degree where we were a little irked after the take-it-or-leave-it neat tasting of this spirit. Add it spritzes and old fashioneds as ye will. Also, this double-orange spritz is strangely good with a splash of cold brew? Life takes you weird places, buddy.

Fittingly in third place, whether you’re counting up or down, it’s Triple Triple. I gotta be honest with ya; I wanted to put regular ahead of this. I wasn’t the biggest fan after compiling the ultimate bottle guide to Triple Triple. My second outing confirmed the experience: Strong start, but boy does it start to compile and drag you down. Nevertheless, my co-taster and Mark Roy both show a strong favoritism to this arguably elevated version of Jameson. As Mark Roy says:

“This one hits the mark for me in two ways as it is made. One, my bourbon needs are filled, and my sherry cask finish is there, too. I love a 12-year or 15-year sherry cask-finished single malt Scotch and as I led with, I am a bourbon lover. On this one, I am going with my personal can’t-miss, 1-2-inch ice sphere (not a cube for this guy) and three-ish fingers of Triple Triple in a large-mouthed rocks [glass], and let sit and then sip away.”

If you do decide to roll with Triple Triple, get ready for those floral notes to lead strong before the sunflower-chestnut taste starts to accrue to the detriment of the drink. I will grant you, Triple Triple has an even better nose than original Jameson, though not the taste.

“There’s nothing better than the original. It’s so versatile — sipped neat, on the rocks, or if you’re feeling festive, as a shot. Serve mine with a splash of ginger ale (which I do not drink ginger ale on its own) it actually makes ginger ale elevated and drinkable for my palate. That’s all you need for St. Paddy’s Day.”

Even so, I’m going to put it in second place — higher than I would have guessed of myself, but still with room for something, in fact, better. Black Barrel is the better in every way but one and all the ways that matter. Jameson original has a fine nose, but as we will see proving a theme, it’s got almost nothing to do with the taste that awaits you, which is a steadfast shot or double that bartenders in Irish pubs around the world keep at easy reach for a reason. Personally, I think Bushmill’s has it beaten at both base and scale (some of my colleagues disagree in their Irish whiskey rankings), but within the family, I can say this is the mainstay for a reason. 

I’ll catch flak for placing it ahead of Triple Triple, but I guess I prefer a reliable six over a contentious seven. At least I don’t regret my original Jameson order more as time goes on, barring that time I drank nine of them. Ah, to be 24 and invulnerable …

Black Barrel adjusts the Jameson blend’s balance with an eye on strength, and lets it sit a while in bourbon barrels that have been charred a second time (thus the name) for smokiness and sweetness. Accordingly, you discover everything that’s great about bourbon: Black Barrel ripples with citrus and brown sugar, and … there’s something like potassium or oxalic acid, a metallic umami that will make you wonder if someone managed to deduct all the actual earth from potting soil. Jameson mostly uses bourbon or fortified wine barrels to age its whiskey, and we know bourbon’s at play here, but even so, good luck escaping the sense that agave barrels entered into the mix.

Polishing off a theme of the gulf between scent and taste, Black Barrel has the worst nose of the five, but even still, it’s a good nose. Black Barrel is a mystery, but worth your investigation even if you never solve it.

Despite its standalone strengths, it’s great in cocktails. Although this is presented as the thinking man’s Jameson, with more nuance than those bottles kept within easy reach on the bar for shot-callers. Mark Roy says, “I recently enjoyed my first ‘Irish old fashioned’ with Black Barrel on a trip to Ireland to buy cask-finished whiskey for NHLC in Ireland. There was something about the richness and complexity of Black Barrel that was a surprisingly easy substitute for bourbon. I now have a clear backup.”

If you’re looking for the Caskmates editions, Stout and IPA, we didn’t include them because the rumors that they’re being discontinued appear to be true. They’re vanishing from New Hampshire’s shelves and brokers and whiskey lovers online are both spreading this chatter. In fact, no joke, the very minute we were testing all of these bottles, Jameson updated its website to reflect the discontinued and reinvigorated releases, so we had no choice but to plunge ahead into the five bottles in hand while the black freighter bore down on us. (Crested is back on the main menu, by the by.) Stout might be sticking around, but IPA is gone, baby, gone.

We also didn’t examine the limited-editions like the 18-year or Gold Reserve because nobody’s got $200 to spend on St. Patrick’s shots in this economy. And we skipped the ready-to-drink canned cocktails because those are just your flavored seltzer of choice with Jameson added.

That leaves you with five bottles laid out by two guys who taste whiskeys for a living. I can’t speak for Mark Roy, but like many good Irish Catholic boys, my first ever whiskey was a Jameson, and I have a pretty good idea of where it stands in the Irish whiskey landscape. We’ve given these unorthodox flavored whiskeys the same shrift we would any other expression, and it plays out how you’d expect. The best Jameson out there may, by lineage, still be Redbreast 15.