whisky, Irish is, along with its cousin scotch whisky, one of the twin roots from which the whole family tree of whisky stems. The question of which of the two roots is older is one that is argued passionately based on very limited original evidence, with no definitive answer. The first unambiguous mention of scotch whisky is earlier, but the first one of Irish whisky indicates wider use. See whisky.
That first, incontrovertible, dated mention of grain distilling in Ireland comes from 1556, when an act of the (Anglo-Irish) Parliament of Ireland was passed “to prevent the making of aqua vitae,” or distilled spirits, a drink “nothing profitable to be daily drunken and used.” See aqua vitae. The rationale given was that this drink, made “especially in the borders of the Irishry [i.e., the parts of Ireland outside the pale of English settlement], and for the furniture [i.e., supply] of Irishmen,” consumed “much corn, grain, and other things” to the “great hindrance, cost, and damage of the poor inhabitants of this realm” (large property holders and peers, who would be English, were of course excepted, as long as their distilling was for personal use).
This establishes several things: that grain distilling was widespread and that grain spirit was drunk by the common people—the Irish, not the English—but made, and possibly introduced, by the English (or else the distillation would be in the “Irishry,” not on its borders). This English trade in grain aqua vitae with the Irish seems to date at least to the 1530s, when in an undated legal note Baron Finglas, one of Henry VIII’s magistrates in Ireland, recorded that only one distiller was to be allowed in each town and that the only way wheat malt could be exported to the Irishry was in the form of “bread, ale, and aqua vitae.”
In 1603, the English traveler Fynes Moryson, who was secretary to the commander of the English forces in Ireland from 1600 to 1603, gave a description of this “usquebaugh” (the English mangling of uisce beatha, the Irish Gaelic translation of “aqua vitae,” or “water of life”). “The usquebaugh,” Morison wrote, “is preferred before our aqua vitae, because the mingling of raisins, fennel seed, and other things, mitigating the heat, and making the taste pleasant, makes it less inflame.” Indeed, he noted that this spirit, consumed by men and women alike, often to excess, was “held the best in the world of that kind.”
But this appears to have been the manor-house spirit, so to speak; the version made from good barley malt, flavored with expensive, imported botanicals (saffron was another that was often used), and served to important English guests like Moryson (Irish usquebaugh would go on to be exported widely and, under the name “escubac,” become a standard European apothecary’s recipe; see usquebaugh). But if usquebaugh was, as one Dublin historian put it in 1772, the “entertainment … of the great men at their feasts,” the “entertainment of the vulgar” was something quite different.
By the 1600s, the Irishry was distilling its own grain spirit from rough black oats, perhaps with a little barley malt mixed in to help fermentation, and it was not flavored. It may predate the English grain spirit, but if so, we have no documentation of that. In any case, it was drunk “by beer glassfuls,” as James Howell described Irish drinking habits in 1645, with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Its nickname, balcaan, or, roughly, “bust-head,” described its effect. Eventually, the two spirits began to merge: by the early eighteenth century, the bust-head got better and the usquebaugh lost the flavorings. Now, it was all “whisky,” as they began calling it in the 1730s.
At that point, there was little to differentiate Irish whisky from the whisky being made in Scotland. The two whiskies only really began to diverge at the end of the century, in the wake of a 1785 law favoring the use of large stills over (harder to regulate) small ones and a duty on malt imposed that same year. Many of the smaller Irish distillers couldn’t meet the resulting costs and either went out of business or went underground (poitín, or “little pot” was the new nickname attached to their spirit). Meanwhile, the larger distilleries, chiefly in Dublin but also in Cork in the south and Coleraine in the north, bought bigger and bigger stills and switched to making their wash from a portion of the expensive malt, essential to start fermentation, and a mix of raw barley, rye, and oats. All things being equal, raw grain makes for a much more pungent, oily spirit than malt does, and one that needs skillful management to yield a broadly palatable product.
The distillers who made a similar switch in Lowland Scotland at the time were therefore the first to invest in continuous distillation, making a highly rectified, very light whisky that was mostly redistilled into gin (in the Highlands, they mostly went off the grid). See still, continuous. In Ireland, however, they worked on making the best of the technology they had. The larger the still, the more the reflux, allowing some of the heavier components of the spirit to drop out. See reflux. The Irish therefore made their stills extremely large. The big Dublin firms also added a third distillation, as did some of the Lowland Scots. Rather than drying the malt they did use over peat, they used a smokeless hard coal, eliminating smoky, peaty flavors. At some point in the first part of the nineteenth century, Irish distillers took to running the vapor pipe coming off of a spirit still through a tank of cold water and running whatever condensed back into the still. They called this arrangement a “lie pipe” or “lyne arm.” (Later it was used occasionally in Scotland, where “lyne arm” survives as the term for a vapor pipe in general.)
As a result, when the Scottish distilling industry adapted to making pot still–continuous still blends, the Irish resisted, and successfully. In 1887, Alfred Barnard found twenty-eight distilleries operating in Ireland, many of them quite large. Of twenty-eight 28, only five had continuous Coffey stills, and four of the five were in the English-associating industrial north. In any case, the five were working for export: Coffey-still whisky was not sold in Ireland. See Barnard, Alfred.
Then came the twentieth century. Firstly, the First World War disrupted exports; then the Irish War of Independence severed all but the distilleries in Northern Ireland from the British Commonwealth and its markets; then the United States imposed Prohibition, shutting down that market (mostly, anyway). When that ended, the Great Depression began shortly afterwards, which was only ended by the Second World War, with its ferocious submarine warfare. By 1950, the industry was in real trouble. With a population of under three million people—less than half the population of New York City—Ireland had a domestic market far too small to support multiple large distilleries. Desperate cost cutting led to the introduction of continuous stills and blending in the 1950s, but even the bump in sales caused by the wild popularity of Irish Coffee couldn’t help much. See Irish Coffee. (Even in Northern Ireland, the two distilleries owned by Bushmills stood alone in the Commonwealth against the juggernaut that was the Scotch whisky industry; they did not fare particularly well.)
In 1966, faced with the loss of the entire industry, John Jameson & Son, John Power & Son, and Cork Distilleries Co, the three surviving distillers, joined forces as Irish Distillers Ltd., consolidating their distilleries in Cork. See Irish Distillers Ltd. In 1972, IDL bought Bushmills. There was then one distilling company in all of Ireland. In 1988, however, it was joined by a second when John Teeling (1946– ) opened the Cooley Distillery in a former government potato-spirit plant north of Dublin. Making double-distilled malt whisky in the Scottish style (including even a heavily peated expression, Connemara), Cooley helped to open the door for a new generation of Irish distilling. With an IDL-engineered, Jameson-led boom in export sales beginning in the early 2000s, Irish whisky found its momentum again. Today, there are at least twenty-five operating distilleries in Ireland, with more on the way. Pot-still whisky has enjoyed a remarkable resurgence, to the point that some distillers are even experimenting with restoring rye and oats to their mash bills, eliminated in the 1950s (at present, such a whisky cannot be identified as “pot still,” although that may change).
At present, there are seven styles of whisky made in Ireland:
single pot still, triple-distilled in one distillery in pot stills from a mixture of barley malt and unmalted barley
single malt, triple-distilled in one distillery in pot stills from barley malt
single malt, double-distilled in one distillery in pot stills from barley malt
grain whisky, distilled in continuous stills to high proof from a mix of grains
blended whisky: grain whisky blended with
(a) malt whisky
(b) pot-still whisky, or
(c) malt and pot-still whiskies
Irish whiskies are aged almost exclusively in used barrels, most of them American. The triple-distilled ones reach maturity in about five to seven years, the grain whiskies a bit sooner, and the double-distilled malts a bit later. Together, they constitute one of the fastest-growing categories of spirit in the world.
“Baron Finglas’ Breviate of Ireland.” In Hibernica, ed. Walter Harris, 1:100-101. Dublin: 1770.
Harper, William T. Origins and Rise of the British Distillery. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1999.
O’Connor, Fionnán. A Glass Apart. Mulgrave, Australia: Images, 2017.
The Statutes at Large Passed in the Parliaments Held in Ireland, vol. 1. Dublin: 1786.
Townsend, Brian. The Lost Distilleries of Ireland. Glasgow: Neil Wilson, 1997.
By: David Wondrich