The Lost Distilleries of Ireland

Brian Townsend

• Publisher: Neil Wilson Publishing
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781906000097
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Scotch may be the most popular whisky in the world today, but over a century ago, it was Irish whiskey which was most commonly drunk throughout the world. At the time of writing only three producing units exist at Midleton, Co Cork; Bushmills, Co Antrim and Cooley at Dundalk, Co Louth. In this book, Brian Townsend has meticulously researched the lost distilleries of Ireland and details what happened to them. In part I, he relates the origins of distilling in Ireland (an Arabic hand-down to Irish monks); the links with Scotland; the wild years when illicit distilling was rampant and shebeens proliferated as corruption increased; the coming of legitimacy and temperance; the development of the Coffey still (which ultimately helped to sink the industry); the golden years; and, prohibition in the USA and the emergence of the Free State in 1922. In part II, each distillery is listed and accompanied with archive photos and etchings. The list will include: Bow Street, John's Lane, Thomas Street, Marrowbone Lane, Jones Road and Phoenix Park (all Dublin); Monasterevan, Co Kildare; Tullamore, Brusna and Birr (all Co Offaly); Nun's Island, Galway; Limerick, Co Limerick; North Mall, Cork; Midleton, Glen and Bandon (all Co Cork); Bishop's Water, Wexford; Dundalk, Co Louth; Royal Irish, Avoniel and Irish, Belfast; Upper and Lower, Comber, Co Down; and, Coleraine and Limavady, Co Londonderry and Abbey Street and Waterside, Londonderry. Black and white contemporary and archive photographs accompany the text.

PART ONE

IRELAND’S EMERGING SPIRIT

Ireland has always been a land of paradox that defies easy definition or description. It is the most westerly nation in Europe, yet it has been described as Western Europe’s most oriental country. For most of the Middle Ages, much of Ireland was an isolated haven of culture and learning when the rest of Europe huddled under a dark mantle of barbarism. It is a land that was all too often at loggerheads with its more powerful island neighbour and a country that more than any other has had to export its most talented children. Lastly, it is a country of contrast but one which has never abandoned its deeply Celtic roots.

Just why Ireland of all places should be the birthplace of whiskey distilling is one of the enigmas of history. There are a dozen and more explanations, all perfectly reasonable and plausible, but none of which appear conclusive.

For instance, it is widely recorded that Irish monks travelled in the early centuries AD to Italy and other Mediterranean lands. It is probable that from the seventh century onwards they learned the rudiments of distilling, first thought to have been developed by Arab alchemists to isolate essences and perfumes and the technique was then brought to Europe via Moorish Spain.

One may assume that around the same time other travelling Irishmen were shown how to make beer. It is known that the ancient Egyptians had found that certain grains, particularly barley, produced a chemical or enzyme during germination that turned starch into sugar; also, that it produced enough enzyme to trigger the same starch-to-sugar process in unmalted barley and other cereals under the right conditions; and that yeast used to leaven bread would, if added to the sweet barley gruel at the right temperature, change the sweet liquor to a fierytasting spirit that induced great joy and euphoria in those who drank it.

One can speculate on the Irish motives to seek, produce and later isolate that spirit. For instance one can reason that the Irish, who lived amid great poverty in a land of near-unrelenting rain, needed something in addition to faith to keep out the cold and the wet; or that there was — and still is — something in their psychological make-up that predisposed them to distil; or that their fierce independence and creativity of mind demanded something that would stoke the brain’s creative furnaces on long bleak winter nights; or, more prosaically, that would provide an inner warmth against the raw Atlantic gales and rain which pervaded their smoke-filled turf houses.

Other explanations are flatly commercial. Once people developed a taste for this spirit and were prepared to pay for it despite their poverty, men mashed, fermented and distilled the stuff in order to make money. After all, it offered a far better return on their grain than what they received from their landlords or superiors, or from merchants and millers. Inevitably, their labours in turn attracted the eagle eye of the Crown and its treasury.

Taxes on spirits were duly introduced under King Charles II and in due course a body of tax-gatherers, the excisemen or gaugers, was created to enforce the collection. However, such taxes and duties aroused a determination among Irishmen to distil their own spirit (or poteen as it was, and still is, known) beyond the excisemen’s reach — a fact that played a central role in a centuries-long conflict between Ireland and London.

All these factors contributed to making Ireland the crucible of whiskey distillation and ensuring it thrived in the teeth of controls or outright suppression by the authorities. But does this fully answer the question as to why whiskey distilling began in Ireland?

One possible answer lies in Ireland’s sea-girt isolation, in its cool, damp climate and relative poverty. For centuries before and after the arrival of Christianity, people in Ireland knew about wine and other potent drinks found in sunnier climes of Europe and of the euphoria they induced. Despite its remoteness, it seems that wine did reach Ireland in considerable quantities.

There was clearly no prospect whatsoever of growing vines in Ireland, so a substitute had to be created from a readily available raw material. Grain, particularly barley (or bere, in its ancient form), was the most suitable substitute. As to how the many stages of steeping, germinating, drying, milling, mashing, fermenting and distilling were learned, developed and perfected we can only speculate. At any rate, we can fall back on the old adage that, then as now, necessity was the mother of invention. However, by the 19th century whiskey distilling in Ireland had become a well-recorded and fully documented industry.

We know that distilling was an art long practised in continental monasteries — many spirits and liqueurs such as Benedictine and Grande Chartreuse trace their origins to monastic orders. One can surmise that Irish monks on pilgrimage spent time in such monasteries, absorbed the rudiments of how to ferment and distil and took the knowledge back with them to Ireland. Some would also have learned brewing on their travels and taken these skills back with them. Is it any wonder that Ireland is the birthplace of Guinness, the greatest and most universally successful porter?

It is wholly logical that someone, possibly a monk, drew the parallel that if people on the continent could distil brandy from wine, then something similar could be distilled from beer. That may have been accomplished around 1000 and folklore has it that among early drinkers of the resulting spirit were English soldiers sent by Henry II to Ireland to assist Dermot McMurrogh, King of Leinster, in his conflict with Roderic O’Connor, the High-King. Henry’s men soon appreciated the potent effects of this primitive spirit, rough and raw as it doubtless was, and they are supposed to have taken samples back to England.

The spirit was called uisce beatha, (in Gaelic, the ‘water of life’) — an enduring concept found in many societies: namely, a potion that would give people long life and good health. Interestingly, the expression ‘water of life’ may have arisen from the early name for brandy — aqua de vite, or ‘water of the vine’. As most knowledge in those days was written down in Latin and spelling was notably erratic, it is possible that a scribe copying the words aqua vite wrote them down as aqua vitae, or ‘water of life’. The crucial leap from distilled spirit to water of life may have been little more than a slip of the quill…

A phonetic rather than written chain links uisce beatha with whiskey. On the one hand it is said that, unable to pronounce the Gaelic uisce beatha, the English soldiers who first sampled it anglicized the word as ‘oo-iska’ or ‘isky’ and finally ‘whiskey’. However, the redoubtable Alfred Barnard claims the expression ‘whiskey’ only became part of common parlance as late as the early 19th century.

Nowadays, the Scots call their spirit ‘whisky’, while the Irish and Americans say ‘whiskey’. As this book is about Ireland and Irish distilleries, it shall be spelled ‘whiskey’ unless we are referring to the product of Scotland or those few Irish whiskey brands that regarded themselves as ‘whisky’.

There is no proof that the term uisce beatha was in common parlance at Henry II’s court. There are no historical references to it, though that is not entirely surprising because scribes and chroniclers were always selective in their recorded portrayals of what went on around them. A remarkable example of this from more recent times can be found in the archives of the great Victorian-era photographer, George Washington Wilson. This Aberdonian took thousands of brilliantly composed glass plate negatives of the contemporary Victorian scene — docks, railway stations, town halls, parks and ornate bandstands and many other landmarks of his time. Yet when I delved at length among his banks of negatives, I could not find a single shot of a distillery. To many of his era, they were places of shame unfit to be recorded for posterity.

In the same way, few Victorian historians deigned to describe the urban squalor and poverty that huddled in the shadow of that era’s great bridges, railway lines and other engineering achievements. That was left to the likes of Charles Dickens — and there were few of his ilk on hand in Ireland when uisce beatha first trickled out of the end spout of a hand-beaten cooling worm. However, uisce beatha certainly did reach the English court at the end of the 16th century when an Irish bishop sent a cask to Queen Elizabeth I as a gift. It is said the spirit kittled the royal palate mightily and the monarch apparently sought more.

The secrets of making uisce beatha were to cross the North Channel to Scotland, probably during the 15th century, possibly earlier. Scotch whisky distilling can date itself from 1494, when a famous bill for eight bolls of malt to make aqua vitae was made out to Friar John Cor — the first written proof of whisky being made in Scotland. Ironically, the first written evidence of whiskey distilling in Ireland dates from around 1600 — though few would dispute that distilling started in Ireland far earlier than in Scotland.

That only highlights the difficulty historians have when trying to confirm events and developments in long-past centuries. We take it for granted today that every event of note is recorded on paper — or increasingly on film, or electronically. But in the Middle Ages, few people could write and most transactions and agreements were conducted and concluded verbally. Only monarchs and monasteries had scribes who were capable of writing things down on parchment. Although literacy became more widespread throughout Europe in the wake of the invention of the printing press, as a mass phenomenon it really only came of age as a by-product of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.

One must therefore conclude that it is certain, if impossible to prove, that whiskey distilling in Ireland was thriving long before Columbus landed in the New World in 1493. On the basis that all good ideas travel — especially so to lands and areas of similar culture, language and disposition — the secrets of distilling would inevitably have found their way to Scotland from Ireland. The Scots, in so many ways similar in outlook, philosophy and temperament to their Irish brethren, and who shared similar hardships and the same raw climate, learned quickly and well.

Since before the time of St Columba, seafarers had plied the 17-mile-wide North Channel between the Antrim coast, the Hebridean island of Islay and southern Argyll. As the centuries passed and trade increased, seaboard townships and ports were established in the most convenient locations along the respective coasts. One amongst these was the port of Dalruadhain or Dalaruan, later called Campbeltown, in Kintyre. It is significant that both Islay and Campbeltown became early centres of Scotch malt whisky production, with Campbeltown boasting more than 20 distilleries before 1900. Campbeltown also shares with Ireland the experience of a great decline: today there are but two distilleries left in the burgh and both have experienced long periods of enforced closure.

Ireland therefore was the cradle of whiskey distilling in Europe and her sons took their whiskey-making skills to wherever they emigrated — England, Scotland, the United States, Canada, the Antipodes. In the annals of whiskey lore, the Irish were undoubtedly the masters and the Scots the apprentices. But ultimately this is a story where the apprentices learned all too well, and as the 19th century progressed, they grasped what the winds of providence brought them and became the masters. In so doing the Scots helped consign the industry in Ireland to a mere semblance of its former self, while ‘Scotch’ went on to conquer the global marketplace. Just after the turn of the century, the Scots playwright J M Barrie set down in What Every Woman Knows that ‘there are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make’. This line might have aptly described the way in which the likes of his contemporaries James Buchanan, Tommy Dewar and Peter Mackie were helping to make Scotch what it is today.

Ironically, the key to the success of Scotch was invented by an Irishman. The patent still, created around 1830 by Aeneas Coffey, the French-born, Dublin-bred former Inspector General of British Excise in Ireland, was the most significant development in the history of distilling since the industrialization of the craft. He was to be a prophet without honour in his native land — and his patent still was spurned by the Irish distillers who were set in their ways. This was to prove their undoing as Coffey turned to the Scots to take up his invention. However, that turn of events was many centuries down the road from the Middle Ages — a long, fascinating road which we will travel in the ensuing chapters.

In a nutshell, and with the benefit of hindsight, one can say the Irish were the originators of the whiskey world. The Scots — harnessing their legendary sense of thrift and efficiency — found a way to make a palatable whiskey more cheaply and eventually elbowed the Irish whiskey distillers out of most of their markets. However, in the final years of the 20th century, Irish distilling has absorbed many lessons from the Scotch industry and is finally making headway after decades of decline.

That could just mean that one day some of the lost distilleries in this book may be reinstated and brought back to life again. If that ever happens, I for one will be the first to celebrate.

THE ROAD TO RUIN

Gaugers And Poteen

Alcohol — it comes from the Arabic word al-kuhl, meaning powdered antimony — bears the burden of being one of the greatest blessings and utter banes known to humankind. It has become the world’s most universal social drug and is one of the most widely manufactured and distributed goods on the face of the planet. Indeed in many countries it is administered as a product classed under food and agriculture. It is the great lubricant of human cogwheels, the yardstick of hospitality across much of the world and the instant giver of joy at the end of a hard day’s toil, be it at the tractor wheel or computer terminal.

Equally, alcohol taken to excess has destroyed more lives than one can count; the curse that has ended a million careers and sent further millions of people into the gutter. Yet alcohol is so valuable a compound as drug, nutrient, solvent, fuel and chemical raw material that life without it is unthinkable. In one respect I suspect its greatest hour has yet to come. With hydrocarbon fuel deposits shrinking yearly, many scientists believe alcohol made using bio-engineered enzymes from waste biomass such as wood shavings or straw, has a bright future as a vehicle propellant.

For many countries, alcohol production has long been a valuable industry, employer and source of export earnings. Put bluntly, alcohol is here to stay and, without its euphoria-creating touch, much of human existence would be dull and dismal indeed. Perhaps that is the key to the Celtic predisposition to distil. No one enjoys a good laugh, crack and a bit of song as much as the Irish. So once they brewed a liquor that would magically enhance the enjoyment of all three, it would be every man’s duty to try and make the stuff. To be sure, it also made money — but that was never the main motivation behind the early Irish drive to distil.

It is a sad fact of life that some neighbours do not get on together. Differences of philosophy and temperament, outlook and behaviour, which could be tolerated at a distance, are exacerbated by proximity. It is one of the abiding tragedies of history that the English and the Irish, though they have so much in common, have all too much that divides them. It is almost as if spiteful Fate had ordered that their respective national traits and characters bring out the worst in each other.

Since the days of Henry II (who reigned from 1154 to 1189, and annexed Ireland in 1171), and particularly since the reign of Henry VIII (1509–47), English monarchs and governments have sought to bring everyone on the scattered British Isles under the authority of a central government and crown. Equally, Ireland has resolutely sought to retain, then regain, its independence. In the process, great injustices were done, great suffering inflicted and many institutions and industries damaged. Irish distilling was one such industry.

Taxation on alcohol in the British Isles dates back to the Restoration monarchy of Charles II (1660–85) and was first levied on Christmas Day, 1661 at a rate of four pence (less than 2p) per gallon of spirit, later specified as ‘proof spirit’. (Unless stated otherwise, all output figures quoted in this book are given in proof — 57 per cent alcohol — gallons.) Initially it applied only to English distillers or importers of brandy or rum. However, it was soon after applied to Ireland and in 1708, after the 1707 Ac...