Triple Distilled Communications
A blog about whiskey and other matters of interest
Author: Bill Linnane
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Indo col 46: There is a road in my home town of Midleton that floods at the slightest opportunity. Running alongside the town estuary, all it takes for the Bailick Road to disappear under water is a moderately high tide and a few hours of rain. There were attempts over the years to alleviate the…
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Indo col 45 The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham was a man of vision. In the late 1700s, his ideas were seen as completely radical, as he opposed slavery, called for the separation of Church and state, advocated for women’s rights, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, legalisation of divorce, animal rights, and the abolition of the death…
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Indo col 44: In May 1846, a wagon train of pioneers set out for from Missouri for California, looking for a new life and the dream of fulfilling their manifest destiny. The group, led by George Donner and Armagh man James F Reed, became trapped by snow high in a pass known as Hastings Cutoff…
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Indo col 43: Isaac Asimov loved the future. As a professor of biochemistry and prolific science fiction writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books, along with a vast archive of correspondence. He is considered, along with Robert A Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke, one of the greatest names in sci-fi. Asimov’s embrace of…
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Hate to break it to you @Bill_Linnane but doing your half of the housework and caring for your own kids ain't romance! 💔 pic.twitter.com/Wj0xmY4F6N — Leslie Ann Horgan (@LeslieAnnHorgan) February 14, 2018 Indo col week 42, a Valentine’s special which has somehow made me History’s Greatest Monster. I am not especially romantic. My wife would…
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Wee 41 of the column and this time I get political, with terrible results. As a portmanteau, Brexit works quite well. It rolls of the tongue, and its similarity to the word breakfast gave great material to headline writers: Full English Brexit, Brexit buffet, bed and Brexit – all potentially great headlines. Granted, none of…
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Loving whiskey can be a bit lonely. It’s a bit like trainspotting – both involve a love of history and engineering, lots of note taking and bringing a camera everywhere. Granted, whiskey is a lot more fun, as you get to do all those things whilst half cut, but you get the idea – it…
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In the original ending of The Emperor’s New Clothes, there was no child. Hans Christian Andersen had written the story as an adaptation of an earlier folk tale, where devious tailors play on the insecurities of a vain emperor, telling him that they have made him an outfit that is visible only to those of…
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Not far from where I live is a little village named Ardmore. Just over the county line (and the River Blackwater), it is a pretty little spot, once dependant on fishing but now surviving well on reeling in the tourists instead. It’s home to the Cliff House Hotel, which has one of the better whiskey…
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Agmondesham Cuffe was quite the operator. As detailed in Turtle Bunbury’s excellent work on the Irish aristocracy, Cuffe knew which way the wind blew. Cuffe disliked the policies of James II, who had plans to make Ireland a Catholic stronghold, as per the plans of the Catholic Earl of Tyrconnell, who wanted to strip the…