I am driving. Not as I write this – I’m not quite at that level of proficiency just yet, where I can stare down at a glowing screen in my lap while careering across lanes at 105kph. In fact, I’m not even at the stage where I can confidently pick my nose when at traffic lights. I am still at the stage of the death grip on the wheel, hands locked at ten and two and nothing else will do, eyes peeled open to a degree that would make Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange wince a little. But yes, I am generally driving, and after two decades of only using public transport and the kindness of friends, family and my long suffering wife/chaffeur, I am now an independent road user.
Things have changed out there; the last time I drove it was in a Nissan Sunny, and it was so long ago that the salesman pointed out that it had ‘electric windows’ as though he was telling us it could fly. Fly, it could not. The car was a sluggish lump of ugly metal, and the few journeys I made in it felt like I was leading a platoon of Soviet tanks into the badlands of Afghanistan. Cars today are remarkable – even my sexless Fluence drives like a hovercar from 2525 in comparison to that so-called Sunny.
Using the bus is a distant, troubling memory. It seems like a long time since I had to join the human centipede that is public transport, surrounded by the sniffling masses, listening to the tinny din of those people who don’t know about headphones and instead choose to play their music on a phone’s miniscule speakers. A lifetime on the buses and trains taught me that hell isn’t other people – it’s being trapped with other people. I quite like the human race, even with their headcolds and lack of headphones, but I like them a lot more now that I am not trapped in a metal tube with them for an hour a day.
But one thing has jumped out at me from my few months on the road: Leaner and new drivers are not the menace I thought they were, but fully qualified men of a certain age, usually mine, are. When I see someone aggressively cutting across lanes in a tunnel, running a red light, or just being casually obnoxious, it is almost always a guy like me behind the wheel. Is life this short that we have to nuzzle up against the rear bumper of the person in front like an aroused canine, or just beep at everyone over everything? What is it with blokes in cars? In fact, what is it with blokes in general?
On Saturday I was in the game shop with my son. A man in his fifties came in to buy some games. The girl behind the counter told him that since he had spent more than seventy euro, he could have a free T-shirt. Any T-shirt, he asked? Any T-shirt, she said. Can I have that one? he asked, pointing at her T-shirt. She made some flippant comment to brush it off, he got his stuff and left. I felt a mix of emotions – pity for the man, who was so tone deaf that he didn’t realise that what he said wasn’t flirty, or funny, or anything other than unsettling; embarrassment for the staff member, even though she seemed wearily used to this sort of ‘top bants’; and a general sense of shame over being a bloke.
I tend to drop kick all these aspects of men into the same cauldron of oedipal horrors – the aggressive driving, the creepiness, the inability to read the room. How did we get here? We spent so long styling ourselves as some sort of apex predator that we sacrificed essential components of our own humanity. We have devalued ourselves in this process. Look at jobs where nurturing is required: What percentage of creches staff are male? If you advertised for an au pair and a man showed up, would you call the cops right away or wait until he was gone? We just can’t seem to free ourselves from this predatory status, even though we have devalued our role as carers. Look at the concept of the stay at home dad – why isn’t that more common (apart from the limits of the glass ceiling, which is really more like a Temple of Doom-style descending stone roof with spikes in it)?
The horror stories emerging about rich and powerful men and how they treated women have led me to conduct a rather grim internal audit of my relationships. Overall, it’s been pretty bleak. I can give you a few weak reasons for this – growing up in a viciously Catholic Ireland, or just the magic porridge pot of emotional problems that is being adopted, but while there are reasons, there are no excuses. I just treated people poorly, and especially women. I try to be a better person, but it’s hard to tell if I’m a decent human being or just better than I was. This change can’t happen fast enough: I worry about my sons and the sort of men they will become. I just don’t want them to have my problems, my hangups. They may have the advantage of growing up in a more enlightened time, but they also have a father who is trying hard to overcome a cultural hangover. Hopefully by the time they reach manhood, those self-driving cars we keep hearing about will offer them some moments of quiet contemplation on the commute home to think about how to improve their relationships with the opposite sex. Or they may just use the time to give their noses a really good pick.
Being an atheist is a lonely old slog. Most people will cling to the belief that there is something out there watching over us, be it Jesus, Yaweh, Allah or whatever MechaGodzilla the Scientologists funnel their taxes towards. Few people will actually offer such a bleak world view as the true atheist – that there is nothing else out there, no higher power, and we are all alone. Of course, you don’t sell it to people in quite such a bleak way – you say that you believe people are innately good, that all religions were just an extension of that goodness, an extension that ultimately got corrupted by the power-hungry, in much the same way the leaking extension you got built during the Celtic Tiger got corrupted by lazy builders and pyrite.
Us devout atheists are few and far between, but what makes it even more isolating is the fact that we don’t have the structures of religion. There are no parish tea dances, no community hall bingo, no festive services. But in the broader sense I’ve wondered that the hell I’m going to do when I die. Being freed from the strictures of Catholic rites is great, but we still need some sort of ritual – I can’t just get stuffed into a recycling bin and turned into Soylent Green, or have my ashes chucked into a landfill. How will we say goodbye when we know there is no journey to the other side? Do we have a sacred decommissioning of our Facebook profile, a ritualised restoration of factory settings on our iPhone, or one final Instagram shot of our bespoke artisanal funeral buffet? Or just have Siri conduct a service, while Alexa paraphrases Mary Elizabeth Frye for the eulogy:
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I was cryogenically frozen, it wasn’t cheap,
So the money I owe you all I will have to keep.
The hardest part of being an atheist has been dealing with loss. The absence of an afterlife isn’t just hard to come to terms with for yourself, but for your loved ones. Since my father’s passing I have been crushed by grief, as I know that he is gone and I will never see him again. I’ve spent much of the last 12 months breaking down at inopportune moments – I meet people in work who knew him and they tell me how much they liked him, and I break down. I find an old letter from him to my mum written in the 1970s in which he promises not to drink and drive (apparently it was all the rage back then) and I break down. My son points to a photo of my father and asks me who he is, and I break down. It has been a year when I occasionally thought I was going to have some sort of breakdown, as I try to make sense of it all – this life, all our lives, and the fact that we all die. The dormant Catholic in me still sees November as the month to think on all these things, to remember all the souls no longer in existence, and the supreme importance of trying to follow the one commandment shared by all religions – try not to be a total jackass.
Speaking of remembrance and jackasses – it’s poppy season again in the UK, a time for flag-waving jingoism of the highest order, when the atrocities of war and sacrifice of the fallen is completely overshadowed by an orgy of imperialism. Where’s your poppy mate, don’t you honour our brave boys, spit on the flag is it mate, do you want to bring back Hitler, is that it? No more can UK TV presenters or sports stars quietly think about war and honour, they need to stick the biggest poppies they can find on their lapel or they are deemed to hate freedom.
I have a distant relative who fought in the First World War, Colonel Jim Fitzmaurice, and of his experience he wrote: “Dead German, British and French soldiers lay about in every conceivable position and condition—here and there a dead horse, a broken field gun. I had never seen a dead man before. I looked again at those dead soldiers — I looked at the poor dumb beasts — dead with their poor glassy eyes turned to the heavens. It was impossible to think. I decided that a very serious job had to be done, that I had better stop thinking and get along with my own particular portion of this big job — C’est la guerre.”
He was 17 when he fought in the Somme. I wonder what he would think of the obsessive poppy-watching in the UK, whereby every weatherman and celebrity chat show guest has to wear a big red poppy or be torn apart by the media; what would he say to the rising nationalism, of the UK’s plan to remove themselves from the European project? After the war Fitzmaurice made aviation history by making the first east to west Atlantic flight, which he managed with two Germans. Even though he fought in the Great War, he understood that divisions make us weaker. The poppy has become that most awful thing – a virtue signal, a way of telling people you care, whether you actually do or not. It’s like an analog hashtag, or the words of the gauche bore who feels the need to tell you about their many donations to charity. It seems a tragedy that there is a sense of relief when Armistice Day has passed, and we no longer have to endure shallow displays of remembrance.
In terms of overcoming divisions, you have to admire the gumption of the three Alliance TDs who are riding out to North Korea to try and find a resolution to the secret state’s nuclear Mexican stand-off with America. Of the three, Waterford TD John Halligan should be best placed to find some common ground with Kim Jong Un as they both have sentient hair, complete lack of belief in god, and experience dealing with difficult characters (Shane Ross and Trump, respectively). If nothing else, this could be the greatest episode of Hall’s Pictorial Weekly never made, and sher if it stops us all from dying in the Third World War, isn’t that much better than fixing the roads?
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 overlooks a distillery). For my family it was a lot to take – my kids were far from their friends, my wife was basically operating a shuttle back and forth from Midleton – sometimes up to 12 trips a day – and they all had to cope with a father lost in grief. But things got better – after avoiding it all my life, I started driving, which saved my wife at least two trips a day, and things have generally moved on and become less bleak since I posted this on January 1st of this year.
I still work in a hospital, something that I love. To simply be able to be kind to people in need is incredibly humbling – even basics like giving someone directions, or walking them to their destination (it is a massive hospital) is an important part of making that person’s experience in the hospital as pleasant and positive as possible. Clerical staff like me have our own minor roles to play in patient care, and it isn’t all about crossing Ts or dotting Is – sometimes it’s about chatting to a patient about the weather, or parking, or Brexit. To be able to say, don’t be scared, it’ll be fine, is a great thing. And everything is always fine, in the end.
When I worked in the media I became desensitized to the suffering of others. I sat at a desk and helped sell grief and horror. Obviously, not all journalism is about car-crash rubbernecking, but much of what we call news is unnecessary voyeurism. The coverage of the Hawe tragedy was one that had me asking what it’s all about – what greater truth was going to be uncovered in the details plastered across every page, what lessons for society? I’m not saying I was any different when I worked in papers – as a sub it was my job to make these stories as dramatic as possible using words and images, so I was just as much part of the grand harvester of sorrow as anyone. I can still remember the thrill of a tragedy happening on a slow news day, when you knew you had it for the front page before anyone else. In the end, newspapers are a commercial product – everyone has bills to pay, everyone has an owner, and everyone is selective about what they consider to be the truth. Clark Kent didn’t change a goddam thing in his day job.
One of the most curious parts of the period after my father’s death is just how creative it has been. A piece I wrote about caring for him and preparing to say goodbye ended up being the springboard to a strange sort of renaissance, and ultimately ended with me getting a weekly column in the Irish Independent, which I am contractually obliged to tell you sells 90,000 copies a day and is one of the biggest selling papers in the country. I try to explain it to my daughter as being like having a blog with 90,000 followers. She is duly unimpressed.
Apart from that, I have written more for the Irish Examiner, the Indo and even just this blog than I ever have, as I slowly worked my way through the grief. All this meant that even though I was working two jobs, both were very fulfilling – the hospital is rewarding in a very human way, while the writing has been both cathartic and, obviously enough, a boost to my own self esteem at a time when I suffering a sort of professional midlife crisis. I also like the extra money, as it allows me to buy a decent bottle now and again without feeling like I was stealing from my kids’ piggy banks.
This brings me, as almost everything does, to whiskey. Obviously, one post this year stands out – the publication of a long-overdue post on transparency in Irish whiskey. I have another long-form follow-up piece on that topic, so I won’t waste my breath on it here. Suffice to say, it was a conversation that needed to be had. I don’t really care how many brands there are, or where they come from – I care where they don’t come from, and I don’t want us all to look like fools.
Irish whiskey is booming – sales continue to rocket, distilleries are getting over the line with funding and planning, and – a sure sign that we are entering the golden age – Whiskey Live Dublin is going to be a two-day event next year. This year’s event was packed – more stalls, more punters, more fans, more nerds. We even have our own Irish whiskey glass, the Tuath, two magazines, growth in the Irish Whiskey Society (and an incredible year for the Cork Whiskey Society, who put on mind-blowing tastings with extinct drams), and more and more whiskey fans on Twitter, and presumably, that toilet of the soul, Facebook. Irish whiskey sales are even at the stage where multiples are starting to take note.
It was Whiskey Nut who noticed it first – Aldi were going to be selling a 26 year old single malt for under fifty euro. It had to be an error, I thought – this was presumably a Bushmills, of the same age as some of the (presumably) Bushmills that Teeling sell for hundreds of euro. How could it be this cheap? I had to find out. So on the day of the special buys, I was in Aldi Wilton at 10.25am practically frothing at the mouth. There was no sign of it. Could it have sold out, I wondered? No, it had never arrived, a staff member informed me. I left….only to return at 4pm. Still no sign. Over the following week I visited four Aldi branches a total of seven times. I could see on Twitter that others up the country were getting them – ‘that’s more of it’ I thought to myself. ‘The metropolitan elite being catered for’ I realised. ‘The pricks’ I mused.
Of course, it was not that Aldi hates Cork people (everyone else does, presumably out of jealousy or possibly because of the accent), but a logistics SNAFU at their Mitchelstown hub. I know this as the good people of Ballyhoura Mushrooms told me, proving what I knew back in the Nineties – that mushrooms bring enlightenment. Eventually, Cork stores got the whiskey, and I selfishly bought five. One was a gift for my goddaughter, another for a friend, one was sold to a fellow whiskey fan from Dublin (I flipped it for fifty euro, clearing a cool profit of one cent), and the other two are there on a shelf, staring at me, judging me for my greed. They are my tell-tale heart. Of course the saddest part of the whole escapade was my son being dragged from Aldi store to Aldi store to beat the customer quotas, leading him to call me an Aldiholic, which is both impressive and more than a little depressing.
There was one rare whiskey that I didn’t have to work quite so hard to obtain. Two weeks ago I came home to find a package on the front door. A gift from my neighbours, the good people at Irish Distillers. I’m not sure what I did to deserve such a generous gift; or what I might have to do. Part of me is now concerned that one day a message will come from IDL that they want me to go back in time and kill Aeneas Coffey, or egg Andre Levy’s house. Frankly, I’d do both for free.
I’ve got a few bottles of MVR over the years, most of which I have regifted. It is just too expensive for my tastes. I don’t have much disposable income and there is something obscene about spending that much on a bottle of booze. My cut off for whiskey is about 120, max; I recently picked up a 21-year-old Ardmore for 90, but that was too good a bargain to pass up.
But, despite the price, MVR sells like hot cakes. Part of that is the vintage aspect – it is used as a marker for weddings, births, business deals, promotions, graduations; it is a stamp in time. When the bottle relaunched earlier this year I pointed out that, while I didn’t like saying anything was ‘just a blend’, MVR was that – a blend. But while it is a blend, it is also a product of its time. When first released in 1984, it was genuinely rare as it included spirit from the old Midleton distillery. Obviously those days are long gone, unless there is one of those cask circle offerings that date back to old Midleton. Matt Healy has an excellent post on the history of MVR – it’s well worth a read, not least because of the comments section, where people queue up to ask Matt how much their various vintages are worth. It’s a testament to what a nice guy Matt is that he doesn’t do what I would have done and told them all to JFGI (Just Fucking Google It).
Part of the reason MVR was the world’s first premium blend was one of necessity – Midleton don’t officially make malt (they do now in the micro-distillery), so a world-class single malt was not something they could bring to the table. They had aged pot still whiskey stocks – but back then, who knew what that was? How would you sell that as a premium drink, when category awareness outside of whiskey geeks was basically nil? So they brought out a premium blend, and it has gone on to become one of the best known whiskeys from Midleton, outside of the triumvirate of Paddy/Powers/Jameson.
MVR 2017 comes in two versions – the oldschool edition for collectors who want to continue the line, and the new, disruptive remodel that I got. It comes in a beautiful wooden box, all copper seams and tasteful design, and looks well worth the pricetag.
Pouring it, I am hit by how thick it is, and how guilty I feel about drinking something that costs this much. On the nose lots of cloves and cinnamon, hot cedar – and less oomph than I expected. I feel like the weight just isn’t there – but this is once again with the obviously prejudiced mindset of someone who uses phrases like ‘just a blend’. There is also that soft sweetness of Haribo strawberries, but sadly none of the toffee/caramel notes that get my sweet tooth jonesing. On the palate – before any real flavour there is that incredible smoothness. This is that smooth Irish they talk about – velvet, creamy texture, possibly aided by a disappointingly low ABV of 40%. Honestly, everything should just be 45% upward. I don’t care if it makes the drink less like the soft kiss of moonlight and more like Pompeii is happening in the middle of your face, I love that holy fuck effect you get from strong whiskey. It’s the pupil-dilating suckerpunch I crave, it makes you sit up and take note of what’s happening.
With the MVR, that smooth, oily glide makes way to reveal a little caramel, biscuity notes, a little plum, but then I get that from almost every whiskey. Very light hints of vanilla, but really more of that freshness from the nose. It’s surprisingly light and eerily drinkable. I poured a single dram for tasting and was onto a generous second in no time; this isn’t science, guys, no need for laboratory conditions.
The finish here is deceptive – you think it’s all over, but there it is, reverberating away in the background for some time. Again, this is just so smooth, it is remarkable. While I would favour a Redbreast 21 (or possibly even the CS version of the 12) over this as a personal choice, this has a luxuriant grace that is hard to find fault with.
MVR calls itself the pinnacle of Irish whiskey – back in ‘84, that may well have been the case. The entire category was struggling to survive. But this is 2017, and the pinnacle, we now realise, is yet to be achieved. MVR has been overtaken by the Dair Ghaelachs and, if I’m totally honest, the Connemara 22 year old, which is a beauty, or any number of other great Irish whiskeys. But MVR has what other brands aspire to – an aura that has permeated the consciousness of the average consumer. It is the ideal gift for a collector or for anyone as a special gift to mark a special year.
As for the premium blend as a concept – I honestly don’t think we can unseat the Scots without a single malt that will reshape how whisky drinkers see Irish whiskey. A world-class, world-beating single malt – and we are more than capable of this. For a small nation, we excel at adapting (a skill learned through centuries of brutal oppression). Look at our attitude to rugby – the garrison sport, the one the outsiders play. Ten years ago we took on our old foes England at their own game in Croke Park. Mountain-made-flesh John Hayes cried during the national anthem. We crushed them 43-13, and suddenly rugby is an Irish sport.
It’s all very well to say single pot still whiskey is the greatest drink on God’s green earth, but not many outside of Ireland understand it. It’s like hurling – we know its bullet-time mayhem makes it one of the most skillful games in the world, but to outsiders it is – as described in Blitz – a cross between hockey and murder. Single pot still whiskey is amazing, but to grab the attention of the world we could really do with a jaw-dropping single malt – much the same was Japan suddenly became the one to watch thanks to Yamazaki. It’s an oversimplification, but the point is that we can be the best again. It’s not about sales, but respect.
So that was 2017 for MVR, Irish whiskey in general, and my family and I. Some good moments, some bad, but overall a positive year, one for regrowth and resurgence. My hopes for 2018 are the same as last year – that multinationals stop playing pass the parcel with Bushmills and actually invest some time, money and vision into what should be our Macallan/Glenlivet/insert global scotch brand here. That place has the stocks, the brand, the staff – it has everything. So why is it so hard to let it shine? Red Bush, are you fucking kidding me? The name alone makes me want to pour it down a drain. With looming Brexit, confusion over what sort of border we are going to have, and a lurch to the right over on the mainland, it’s time to embrace Bushmills as the prodigal child of Irish whiskey that it is. This isn’t some nationalist rant – NI is a phantom limb, and we need to let it go – but I am saddened by how one of the great distilleries of this island has been allowed to languish. I know I’ve said this several times before, but I’ve spoken to a few people who worked there in both marketing and production, and they said the same – no owner has loved that distillery like they should have. That isn’t right.
Aside from that hopeless hope, I’d love to see more Irish whiskey bloggers in 2018. I don’t fit that bill, as virtually everything I write is about really only about myself, with whiskey having a sort of walk-on part in my existential crises, so it would be great to see more blogs like Liquid Irish, still one of the best food and drink blogs in Ireland. More voices, more diversity, more people with the knowledge of whiskey to celebrate and, more importantly, defend the category from itself.
Here’s to better days, better drams and those unscaled peaks.
A few years back, I was talking to a distiller about gin when Peter Mulryan came up in conversation. I asked what he thought of Mulryan’s approach to gin making – his wild experiments. The distiller admitted he admired Mulryan, but simply said ‘he’s gone too far’. It reminded me of Eddie Jessup, the scientist in Ken Russell’s Altered States – a voyager who had pushed the limits of what man should know. When I told Mulryan this recently, he laughed. Perhaps he was tickled by the irony of it – after all, we were at the launch of his latest madcap experiment, a gin distilled from Barry’s Tea. While it isn’t the first Irish gin to be infused with tea – contrary to popular opinion, Patrick Rigney’s Drumshanbo Gundpowder Gin is not made with gunpowder, but rather with gunpowder tea – it was Mulryan’s variation that caught the public eye. Mother’s ruin and mammy’s best friend, united as one. Mulryan had achieved the singularity. But it wasn’t an easy road.
Back in 2014 he had a revelation. In a short space of time leading up to this moment, his son got sick, he turned fifty and his father passed away. He realised life is short, too short to waste time doing anything other than what you love. So he took a leave of absence from his job with RTE, the Irish state broadcaster, and decided to become a distiller. He knew plenty about whiskey – he is the author of five books on the subject, along with the host of Midleton’s pot still promos. Along for the ride were three others, who all worked in the media with Mulryan. But there is a quantum leap from writing and talking about whiskey to actually making it, and the devils that plagued his earliest experiments were not technical, but bureaucratic.
He got a unit in an industrial estate in Cappoquin, west Waterford, and set to work. From the outset there were problems – he brought in wash to distill poitin with, and Revenue stopped him. So he sold his second still and opted to focus on gin. But necessity is the mother of invention. He opted to push the boundaries of the category – after all, there are dozens if not hundreds of gins on the market here, thanks to the boom in distilling. Blackwater Distillery, as his firm is known, created a gin casked in juniper barrels, a strawberry gin, a hedgerow gin, a classic London dry gin, a navy-strength strawberry gin, and the most challenging of all, the Barry’s Tea gin. What made it challenging, according to Mulryan, was not a technical distilling detail, but just getting the Barry’s Tea company to come on board with his crazy idea. It took two years. As he points out, they are a private, family-owned business that is also a household name – they have a lot to lose, so thankfully they gained quite a bit, with the gin winning rave reviews and selling out in record time.
Mulryan also took part in the AIB Start-Up Academy, where the bank helped entrepreneurs with some of the nuts and bolts of keeping your business on the road. Obviously, he learned a lot, as Blackwater Distillery has made inroads into one of the biggest supermarket chains in Ireland. Their Boyle’s gin – in original and damson – along with Dolmen poitín and Woulfe’s vodka are on every Aldi shelf in Ireland, while they also manage to make vodka so good they can sell it to the Finns, as they won a contract to sell their product to Altia, Finland’s state-led drinks organisation.
The hard knocks of the first three years seem to be turning a corner, as Mulryan is now moving on to the second act. To mark work starting on their new distillery, they are releasing a sourced whisky. That isn’t a typo – Mulryan was of the new breed of distillers here to drop the E (Mark Reynier was the second), pointing out that it is more historically accurate. The Technical File which oversees the whiskey category allows it – so it was only a matter of time before someone did it. As he pointed out on the Blackwater Distillery blog: “For the past forty years it is true to say that Irish whiskey has been spelt without and ‘e’. But that spelling a legacy of monopoly, so as Ireland’s first whisky micro-distillery it seemed only right to mark ourselves apart from the multinationals, to look to tradition and along with dropping the ‘bs’ to drop the ‘e’.”
As for their new whisky, The Retronaut, it is the first of a series of curated releases while they get their distillery up and running, get stocks laid down and get a product to market in five to ten years time. It’s a 17 year old single malt, unpeated and matured 100% in bourbon wood – no caramel, no chill-filtering – with only 1160 bottles at 46%. The next iteration is due in spring next year. In the meantime, Mulryan is as busy as ever.
The development of his new distillery in Ballyduff is going to devour a million euro (breakdown of the funding here), but that will take it from being a pretty slice of 1950’s Americana (with asbestos roof) to state of the art three-still distillery and whiskey school (without asbestos roof). The reason it is a slice of Americana is that it was built in the 1950s by a returning emigrant, keen to start a hardware empire in west Waterford. When Mulryan bought the place, it was like a DIY Marie Celeste, an apothecary of obsolete engineering. It had to be gutted, but even then there wasn’t enough space, so they also bought another two lots – an open space alongside and a old convenience store beyond that, the last shop to close in Ballyduff, a village too sleepy to even keep a Spar going.
But with Mulryan’s business will come the visitors – the whiskey nerds, the tour buses, and the participants in his whiskey and gin schools. With the mass tourism power of Midleton just 50 minutes away to the west and the uber-nerd appeal of Reynier’s Waterford Distillery to the west, Mulryan’s mix of quaint charm, great backstory and zany ideas could make it a real draw over the next decade.
Before the big move from an ugly industrial unit to a beautiful restoration work, there has been one final boundary-pushing experiment – single batch whisky. Writing on his blog in June, Mulryan explained: “Each 50 litre cask of new make spirit starts life as approx. 500 litre batch of wort. Do the maths: one batch + two distillations = one cask. Now as each 50 litre cask takes the guts of a week to make, this isn’t a very economical way of making whisky. But on the up side as each batch is one of a kind, it means each mash bill can also be unique. So this is an experiment in taste and tradition.”
And where, you might ask, is the mashbill going to come from? “We will make the first 50 casks of single batch whisky ordered. Already 4 have gone; one to a Michelin Starred Chef, one to a banker, one to the company directors, and one to a rather stellar American pop type person. So only 46 left and when they’re gone, well you know the drill. As for the juice itself? We’re offering Single Malt, Pot Still Irish and some historic casualties. You know, mash bills that were in their day pot still whiskies, but now (thanks to the scandalous Irish pot still whisky GI) can no longer be called pot still (though they can still be Irish whisky).”
Like Eddie Jessup, Mulryan is a man not just in search of his true self, but also building a physiological pathway to our earlier consciousnesses using flavour and spirit. The countdown to the third act has begun.
The resurgence of Irish whiskey was hard fought. It’s easy to forget just how close we came to losing the entire category back in the 1960s. There are a few people who deserve thanks – the coopers, the operators, the staff who lost their jobs or worked a two-day week to keep the industry alive, and also the people who had to make the tough choices to cut Irish whiskey production back to the bone. Frank O’Reilly is one such person. He oversaw the merger that created IDL – effectively the gatekeepers for Irish whiskey. To mark Mr O’Reilly’s contribution to the history of Irish whiskey (as a member of the Powers family, he was one of the last descendant of the great whiskey dynasties to hold office in IDL), IDL archivist Carol Quinn welcomed members of the O’Reilly family to Midleton to see what their ancestor had helped create. You can read Carol’s blog post on it here, but my lame contribution to this is different. Back in the 1980s, a journalist named Ivor Kenny wrote a series of books on business leaders in Ireland. They are fantastic – he spoke to Richard Burrows, Frank O’Reilly and John Teeling, and captured a moment in history for Irish whiskey. Here is a series of rather poor photographs of the interview with Frank O’Reilly, which although physically hard to read, is well worth a read for anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of how a small few people created a vehicle to keep Irish whiskey alive.