Release date: June 16th 2025
 
Schema (view full Schema here)
Scene: The School
Hour: 10am
Organ: -
Colour: Brown
Symbol: Horse
Art: History
Technic: Catachism (personal)
 
Episode Storyline and Characters
Stephen is teaching a history class on the victories of Pyrrhus of Epirus. After class, one student, Cyril Sargent, stays behind so that Stephen can show him how to do a set of algebraic exercises. Stephen looks at Sargent's ugly face and tries to imagine Sargent's mother's love for him. He then visits unionist school headmaster Garrett Deasy, from whom he collects his pay. Deasy asks Stephen to take his long-winded letter about foot and mouth disease to a newspaper office for printing. The two discuss Irish history and Deasy lectures on what he believes is the role of Jews in the economy. This episode is the source of some of the novel's most famous lines, such as Dedalus's claim that "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" and that God is "a shout in the street".
 
Episode 2, Nestor // Crafted by Säntis Malt at Brauerei Locher AG, high in the Swiss Alps
Our whiskey, like Stephen’s lecture on Pyrrhus and Troy, is steeped in the past but defiant of it. Aged high in the Appenzell Alps, where time moves differently and the air smells of malt and woodsmoke, our second edition in the Ulysses Whiskey x Art odyssey draws its spirit from Switzerland, a place of sanctuary, reflection and resolve.
 
Episode 2, Nestor, draws on the themes of memory and mentorship, of history and hesitation. In Joyce’s novel, it is the episode where Stephen Dedalus, surrounded by schoolboys and shadows, reflects on the burden of inherited knowledge, and the hollowness of its keepers.
 
Our partner for this release, Säntis Malt, crafted by Brauerei Locher AG, is no ordinary distillery. Since 1886, the Locher family has brewed beer in the village of Appenzell, nestled beneath Mount Säntis. When they turned their mastery toward whisky in the late 1990's, they did so with quiet innovation: maturing their malts in old beer barrels, infusing them with a deep, alpine complexity. The world took notice. Säntis Malt has since claimed gold at the World Whiskies Awards and was named European Whisky of the Year by Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible.
 
Säntis Malt uses Swiss-grown, high-altitude barley, cultivated specifically for its Alpine distilling needs. They source two-row malted barley from Swiss mountain regions, up to 1,200 – 1,700 m above sea level, grown in partnership with alpine farmers. This highland barley is known for its high diastatic power and robust flavor profile, reflecting the harsh mountain conditions. After malting, it's distilled and then aged in their signature used oak beer barrels, imparting both malt sweetness and complexity.
 
Naturally, we had to take it to the next level! Working in close collaboration with Säntis Malt, we focused our efforts on a novel, potentially impossible finish in casks from the shuttered Löwenbräu Zurich brewery. It was here, in Zurich, during the years of the Great War and again at the end of his life, that Joyce found rare stability, and where much of Ulysses was written. Zurich was where Joyce was laid to rest in 1941. It is, in many ways, the spiritual home of the book.
 
Artistic inspiration
Discover upon the teachers desk the silver inkstand used by all the signatories of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States (made by Irishman Philip Syng), Shergar (one of Ireland's most famous race horses, kidnapped and murdered by the IRA), Tom Hanks' 1934 Underwood typewriter, Nineteen-sixty-four, Satanic Verses, Lolita and Animal Farm - all books that shared the same fate as Ulysses and were banned for their challenging of norms, a portrait of Joyce's mother and many more gems that live up to Joyce's challenge that he “‎put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries".