I often wonder why James Doherty did it. Why he decided to leave a good career in an international drinks giant to build a distillery in a remote part of Ireland. Sure, Irish whiskey was booming, but there were easier ways to make a buck off it – start a brand, flip it to a […]
Category: Not-Quite Whiskey Reviews
Reviews which aren’t.
Bird On A Wire
I got the Irish whiskey industry to get pot still going, because that was dead. It’s the old campaigning journalist in me – if you believe in something, you go out and fight your campaign. On September 20, 2020, the drinks writer Becky Paskin started a lengthy thread drawing attention to some of the language […]
Homecoming
The Irish have a long history of emigration. It pre-dates the Famine years of the 1840s, but that confluence of a failure of the potato – the staple crop for much of the impoverished population – and the subsequent failure of the ruling British government to properly react to the crisis pushed millions into flight. […]
The Long Way
Jennifer Nickerson wanted to be a vet. The Aberdeenshire native was studying in Edinburgh when she came to the conclusion that she didn’t particularly want to spend the rest of her working life outside in the wet and cold, so she switched to accountancy – a drier career, in every sense. While she was in […]
For The Ages
Few aspects of the whiskey industry make our eyes roll like marketing. A side effect of being exposed to far too many breathless press releases filled with bunkum, it has come to be seen as part of the whiskey business rather than whisky industry; it’s about hustle, not grind – sales, not substance. Among the […]
Resurrection Man
In Cork Airport’s duty free there is a large screen showing adverts for Midleton distillery’s single pot still collection. The smooth-talking gent hosting the videos lavishes the Cork whiskeys with praise, and assures us that Midleton’s single pot still collection is the ultimate expression of the art. In the decade since those videos were created, […]
Lights, Camera, Macallan
I like a The. Many of my blog posts are given titles with a ‘the’ randomly thrown in at the start, because I think it adds gravitas. In reality it makes everything I write sound like pompous waffle; The Glorious Now, The Pathfinder, The Slow Cut, The Quiet Corner. Scroll through this blog and you […]
The Quiet Corner
Just outside the small Scottish village of Pencaitland, nestled in a pleasant green valley, lies Glenkinchie Distillery. It’s not an especially well known distillery, nor does it have much in terms of underground cred; I’ve never heard anyone speak in hushed tones about any bottlings, indie or otherwise, from there. It seems odd that for […]
To Those Who Wait
The dancefloor of Auntie Annie’s indie club in Belfast seems like an unlikely setting for the start of a Northern Irish distilling success story, but it was there in 2006 where David Armstrong and Fiona Boyd first locked eyes. David, an aerospace engineer, and Fiona, a property surveyor, connected immediately over their shared love for […]
Prologues and epilogues
“We have always been storytellers” – Kevin Keenan, Glendalough Distillery co-founder. Glendalough Distillery is one of the success stories of the Irish whiskey resurgence. Founded in 2011 by a group of friends, their prominence in the media came from a combination of being early adopters of an exciting new trend and some high profile investors. […]
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