I did not like La La Land when it came out. It felt like everyone else did, which in itself might have given me unrealistic expectations about how life-changing it might be. Perhaps my nonplussed reaction to it came from the fact that I don’t watch a huge amount of musicals (does anyone any more?). […]
Category: Not-Quite Whiskey Reviews
Reviews which aren’t.
The Bog Of Bones
Not far from my family plot in Midleton cemetery lie the graves of the Clonmult Martyrs. On February 20, 1921, 20 IRA volunteers were surrounded in a remote farmhouse by British forces. Some were killed in a gun battle, some died after – the Irish side say those who surrendered were summarily executed, the British […]
Full Metal Busker
It was a match made in heaven – a beautiful brand of Irish whiskey found a home in a beautiful distillery built by an Italian drinks giant. Then, last year, the short-lived romance between Walsh Whiskey and Royal Oak Distillery/Illva Saronno came undone. Walsh kept their beautiful brands, Illva kept the distillery. In retrospect, it […]
Tyroneasaurus Rex
Nigel John Dermot Neill was born in Omagh in Northern Ireland in 1947. His father, a New Zealander whose family originated in Belfast, was stationed there with the Royal Irish Fusiliers, but the family moved to New Zealand in 1954. There, the young boy opted to change his name, deciding that Nigel was a tad […]
The year of living dangerously
Whoever decided to launch one of the best-known luxury brands in the Irish whiskey category on budget day must have quite the sense of humour. We are still in the midst of a pandemic, the economy is in the process of being intubated by the State, and while this budget day may not have been […]
All that glitters
Do you remember Dingle Gold? It was a sourced blend, and it wasn’t very good, even by the humdrum standards of the most unchallenging blends. Of course, you wouldn’t expect too much given how it crashed into existence. The year was 2010 and the Porterhouse Group were going to be the only Irish firm at […]
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 […]
Arise
In the hills outside of Midleton lies the village of Clonmult. It is one of those blink-and-you-miss it places that is hard to find when you look for it, and passes by almost unnoticed when you drive through it. There isn’t a huge amount of things to see up there – the site of one […]
Only forward
In the autumn of 2012, a 92-year-old retired engineer named Bobby Hogg passed away, and with him went a little piece of Scottish culture. Hogg was the last native speaker of a Scots dialect spoken by the fisherfolk of the isolated Cromarty community, the only other native speaker having been his brother, Gordon, who had […]
Requiem For A Dream
Between 1924 and 1932, a series of studies were carried out in Hawthorne Works, a Western Electric factory outside Chicago. The aim was to test if workers were more productive in brighter or dimmer lighting. Over the course of the study, a pattern emerged. When the lights were raised, the workers were more productive than […]
The Moebius
Shift work is inhuman. There is something utterly unnatural about being awake all night. There are some who thrive on shift work, but they are a minority – most of us do it for the money, or because it suits our homelife, but very few do it because they like it. I only did nine […]
Bowing out
I loved Dublin. It’s the city of my birth, where my wife and I fell in love, and where we became parents. I spent four great years there from 1999-2003 and it broke my heart to leave. But I had to face the fact that I am a culchie. Like the salmon swimming back upstream […]
The end of the beginning
It’s hard to say if 2017 was what you would call a great year. It was certainly one of changes – we settled into our new home (my old home) and learned to adapt to terrible broadband (PS4 games take a week to download), rubbish windows (we all wear parkas indoors) and beautiful scenery (it […]
Any port in a storm
Hueston Station rn, no trains just overpriced scones and disappointment pic.twitter.com/KYJes7iEjl — Bill Linnane (@Bill_Linnane) October 16, 2017 We got to Heuston Station as the last train pulled out. It was only going as far as Portlaoise, so even if we had made it, we would still have had quite a walk back to Cork. […]
Burning in water, drowning in flame
I almost drowned when I was eight. It was at Inchydoney beach, near where my dad is from; I was in the water, close to the shore. I took a step back and fell into a channel and disappeared under the water. I can still remember it – the blue haze of the water down […]