Scotland and Ireland , separated by less than fifty miles of sea, are surely the homes of whisky. Scotch whisky is what most people in the world mean when they say the word “whisky,” and there are places where a bottle of blended Scotch works as well as currency. Irish whisky was once a similarly globe-girdling colossus before falling on hard times in the twentieth century. It may have been down and out, indeed almost dead by the 1970s, but it has staged a stirring comeback with the help of the worldwide Irish pub phenomenon.
Whisky almost certainly originated here as well, most likely in Ireland as medieval monks applied the scientific knowledge they’d gleaned from the best libraries of Europe and beyond to everyday issues, like how to make the essences for which distilling was largely used. Someone had the bright idea of making an essence of beer, and the monks called it usquebaugh (also seen as uisce beatha), the Gaelic words for the “water of life,” or perhaps “lively water.” As more people made it and drank it, usquebaugh, pronounced (roughly) “ish-ka b’ah” was shortened to “ish-ka” and then twisted a bit to “whisky.”
Both regions have rich whisky folklore, often centered on clandestine distilling. In Scotland, making illicit whisky was a profitable if dangerous sideline for many farmers, immortalized in Edwin Landseer’s painting An Illicit Whisky Still in the Highlands. The unlicensed and untaxed whisky, called “peat-reek” for the redolent fumes from the peat burned to heat the hidden copper pot, the “sma’ still,” was either consumed nearby or smuggled to towns, often far south into England.
In Ireland the spirit is called poitín, a Gaelic diminutive that means, roughly, “dear little pot.” Poitín is still made today, and the lore is that you stole out at night to leave money in a well-known local crevice or hollow tree and returned a few days later to find a bottle of poitín, clear, unaged, and of authoritative strength, and you didn’t ask questions. See home distillation and moonshine.
Both regions also have thriving legal whisky industries that grew from Industrial Age beginnings. Distilling may have started as a cottage industry, but the Scots and Irish grew it to mighty proportions, helped along by the trading acumen and reach of the British Empire. What’s interesting is that in Scotland, it was largely the distillers out in the countryside, who did things the small and old-fashioned way, who succeeded in the long run; Glenlivet, for instance, is still tucked away in a green glen, reached only by a two-lane road. See Glenlivet. But in Ireland it was the big, urban distillers who did things on a relatively huge scale—big stills, big warehouses—that won out, at least before the crash of Irish whisky in the wake of American Prohibition and the post-independence trade war with the British Empire.
barley and grain. Both rely on blended whisky for the majority of their sales but make premium bottlings of more flavorful whiskies, and both have been experimenting with different wood for aging. See whisky, blended.While there has been a lot of consolidation in the industry in both regions, the most recent years have seen a small surge in new distilleries. It remains to be seen how these will affect the industries, but it shows that even the ancestral homes of whisky still have a lot of life.
The strong whisky cultures in both places have to some degree drawn attention from their traditions of mixing drinks, which are also strong, if somewhat narrowly focused. In both Scotland and Ireland, Whisky Punch was widely popular from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth, and in Ireland it still is, as the Hot Whisky. See Hot Whisky. Scotland soon learned to do without the citrus component in its punch, yielding toddy, the reigning mixed drink in the country until the late 1800s, when it was displaced by (blended) Whisky and Soda. See highball and toddy. The end of the nineteenth century saw American-style cocktail bars open in Dublin and Belfast and the major Scottish cities; their descendants include Belfast’s award-winning Merchant’s Hotel and Edinburgh’s Bramble. Ironically, the best-known mixed drink from either country was invented not at a smart hotel bar but by a hungover chef at a rural airport. See Irish Coffee.
See also whisky; whisky, Irish; whisky, pot still; and whisky, scotch.
Broom, Dave. The World Atlas of Whisky, 2nd ed. London: Mitchell Beazley, 2014
Bryson, Lew. Tasting Whiskey. North Adams, MA: Storey, 2014.
O’Connor, Fionnán. A Glass Apart: Irish Single Pot Still Whiskey. Mulgrave, Australia: Images, 2015
By: Lew Bryson