Waterford was created in 2003 by Diageo, originally as a brewery for Guinness. In 2014, however, it was bought by Mark Reynier, the famous maverick and former owner of the Bruichladdich distillery, where his work focused on barley’s influence on whisky. At his new distillery, he works only with Irish barley, sourced from around a hundred farms. The barley is processed individually in order to highlight the different characteristics of each variety (of which there are a dozen), each farm and each terroir. The first spirit was distilled in 2016 and the first bottling released in 2020.

Waterford Bannow Island was distilled in 2016 and made with barley harvested in 2015 by Ed Harpur at the Bannow Island farm (Wesford). This edition is part of the first series of bottlings released by the distillery in 2020.