Guinness Is Entering The Whiskey Market

The first bottles of Roe & Co will debut next week

The team at Diageo, the company behind Guinness, has been taking a break from downing pints at the pub to focus on making Roe & Co, a blended whiskey that will debut next week, just in time for St. Paddy's Day. Master blender Caroline Martin spent two years sampling, blending and aging Irish whiskeys in bourbon casks to find the right balance, which, according to the company, has a creamy nose with "notes of soft spice and mellow spun sugar along with warm hints of woody vanilla."

While limited bottles will be available in select European markets starting next week, large-scale production won't start until early 2019, VinePair notes. When it does, the whiskey will be made at a new distillery on the site of an old Guinness plant in Dublin, which was a longtime neighbor of Ireland's one-time largest whiskey producer, George Roe, the namesake of the new brand.

No word yet on when the bottles might make it to the U.S., but for those visiting Europe, we're sure a bottle would fit nicely into your suitcase.