I am posting this press release because A) I want to seem like I have a clue about yeast and B) I would like to get on the free beer gravy train. Don’t you dare judge me. O’Hara’s Brewery has collaborated with Tullamore D.E.W. to brew the limited edition ‘Irish Wit’. The beer is a take on the classic […]
Recent Posts
Arrivederci, Royal Oak
Bernard Walsh always strikes me as a hail-fellow-well-met-kind-of-chap. He has built an incredible brand in Walsh Whiskey, and then went on to build an incredible distillery in Royal Oak in Carlow. This makes this news all the sadder, as watching any relationship fail – be it personal or professional or both – is never easy. […]
Key whiskey trends for 2019 or possibly never
It’s that time of year when we look at trends for 2019. Actually, that time of year was about two months ago, in a different year, but I was busy then, so it has taken until now to get this done. Predicting drinks trends is a risky business – do you play it safe by […]
The Confluence
For more than two thousand years, Guangzhou has been a meeting place – of land and sea, trade and culture, old and new. Separated by mountainous topography from the rest of China, it evolved into a modern, liberal city with its own distinct cuisine and way of life. As the terminus of both the Pearl […]
A toast to 2018
It was another boom year for Irish whiskey – Blackwater and Powerscourt both came to life, Nephin are gearing up to build, and Bono and Paddy McKillen bought into a proposed distillery for Monasterevin. It is an exciting time, and a sure sign that Irish whiskey was accelerating was the appearance of our first celebrity […]
Death and empire
I hadn’t been in Powerscourt House & Gardens since I was a child. My memories of it are vague – rolling down the grassy hills with my sister, getting lost in the Japanese gardens, and being scared by the statues of gods and monsters. Walking through the house and back out onto that incredible garden, […]
Some pics I took at a Cork Whiskey Society tasting this time last year. If you’re looking for a festive gift for someone, membership of the CWS is great value – thanks to the hard work of their committee, you get to taste unicorn whiskeys on a monthly basis. Join here.
Start to Finnish
A curious thing about the passage of time is how it is slower in our minds than it is in reality. Looking forward to anything feels like forever, while looking back it all seems like yesterday. In 2014 I was stumbling into an obsession with whiskey when I came across an Irish name in a […]
The Accidental Careerist
I was in a taxi on my way to the TV3 studios. It was 5am on a cold November morning in 2014, and I was about to appear on the channel’s breakfast TV show, Ireland AM. The driver and I were laughing about the fact that I was about to go on live television to […]
The Science Of Faith
“Nobody knows anything about us,” John O’Connell says of West Cork Distillers, the firm he co-founded and has poured 17 years of his life into. It seems incongruous – at a time when Irish whiskey is booming, one of the most grassroots, ground-up operations in the country is also one of its least well-known. This […]