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 […]
Tag: whisky
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. […]
Bad Timing
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?). […]
Flight of the Navigator
We all have a journey to whiskey, but for some, it is a more winding path that guides us here. For Daithí O’Connell, sailor, pilot, and founder of WD O’Connell independent bottlers, the journey was geographical as well as spiritual. The 40-year-old Carlow native started his career in hospitality aged just 15, working in a […]
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 […]
Dunville’s, distilleries, Speyside, patience
Indo col 54: St Malachy’s Church in Belfast is a survivor. Built in 1841 in what Sir John Betjeman once described as ‘a cheerful gothic’ style, it had its windows blown in by a German bomb during the Second World War, whilst also having the remaining windows sucked out when another bomb hit the nearby […]
Blogging – your pathway to success
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 […]
Great heights
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 […]
Goodbye, hello
“There are two kinds of Christmas people – those who like their Christmas lights to stay on solid and those who like them to blink. As a kid, I always had a thing for sitting in the dark and watching the lights blink on and off at random. In the end, what we have are […]
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 […]
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