The Teeling Whiskey Company was set up in 2012 by Jack Teeling, following Jim Beam's 2011 purchase of the Cooley whiskey distillery founded by his father John Teeling in 1987. Jack Teeling had been managing director at Cooley but left soon after the Beam acquisition to found TWC. 

As part of the $95m Cooley deal, the canny Teelings secured a parcel of 16,000 casks from Cooley's maturing stock to bottle while their new project was under construction. Crucially, this parcel included not only casks of Cooley whiskey, but also some outstanding casks from other Irish distilleries that the Teelings had amassed through reciprocal arrangements and judicious acquisition during their tenure.

In 2015 the new Teeling Whiskey Distillery was opened in Newmarket Square in the Liberties area of Dublin - just a few hundred metres from Marrowbone Lane, where the Teeling’s ancestor Walter Teeling had founded a distillery in 1782. The new Teeling Distillery was the first to open in Dublin since the 1880s and is equipped with two wooden and four steel washbacks and three Italian copper stills for a distillery capacity of 500,000 litres per annum. In 2017 a non-controlling share of the Teeling company was acquired by Bacardi, the details of which have remained private.