Irish whiskey

A Nip Against the Cold An Irishman pouring whiskey 1869. Part of Erskine Nicol Irish collection, painting of Irish life. Irish whiskey was one of the earliest distilled drinks in Europe, arising around the 12th century. It is believed that Irish monks brought the technique of distilling perfumes back to Ireland from their travels to southern Europe around 1,000 AD. The Irish then modified this technique to obtain a drinkable spirit. However, it is known that by 1556 whiskey was widespread, as an act passed by the Parliament of Ireland (3 & 4 Phil. & Mar. c. 7 (I)) declared whiskey to be "a drink nothing profitable to be drunken daily and used, is now universally throughout this realm made". This act also made it technically illegal for anyone other than "the peers, gentlemen and freemen of larger towns" to distil spirits without a licence from the Lord Deputy. Start of licensed distillation In 1608, King James I granted a licence to Sir Thomas Phillips, a landowner in County Antrim. Today Kilbeggan Distillery in Kilbeggan, County Westmeath, lays claim to the title of oldest distillery in Ireland, as the first distillery in Kilbeggan was established in 1757 (although not continuously operating since e.g., the Kilbeggan Distillery was entirely shut down around 1917 and again between 1954 and 2007 and was "in rubble" and "totally derelict" by 1983). Despite this the licence was continuously paid and whiskey is currently distilled in Kilbeggan using the original 1757 licence. Kilbeggan also has what is believed to be the oldest operational copper pot still in the world, first used in 2007 after being "last used in the 19th century". However it is through the earlier 1608 licence that the Old Bushmills Distillery lays claim to being the oldest surviving grant of licence to distil in the world. However, the current Bushmills distillery and company was not registered to trade until 1784 and despite the promotion of the Phillips licence as its claimed founding date, the Bushmills distillery does not clearly descend from any distillery operated by Phillips through ownership or location. In 1661, the Crown introduced a tax on whiskey production in Britain and Ireland. Growth in the latter is very much visible in the share of Irish duties paid on legal spirits in the late 1700s. In 1770, whiskey only accounted for 25% of the total duty on spirits received by the exchequer, while duty on imported rum accounted for 51%, with the remainder divided equally between brandy and gin. By 1790, however, whiskey's share accounted for 66%. Due to the stringency of this act, which made assumptions about output (for instance, a 500-gallon pot still was assumed to produce 33,075 gallons a month) and the minimum numbers of days which a still was in operation per annum (112), while Aeneas Coffey (an excise officer at the time, and later inventor of the Coffey still) estimated that there were over 800 illicit stills in operation in Inishowen, County Donegal alone. Reform and expansion , built in 1825, hosts a mammoth 31,618 gallon Pot still, so big that the still room needed to be built around it. Although no longer in use, it remains in place inside the old distillery building. Domestic demand was reduced somewhat in the mid-1800s, due to the Temperance movement of the 1830s, and the Great Famine of the 1840s (during which a million Irish died and a million Irish emigrated). Between 1823 and 1900, however, whiskey output in Ireland still increased fourfold, At their peak, the distilleries in Dublin would grow to become the largest in the world, with a combined output of almost 10 million gallons per annum, the largest of which, Roe's Thomas Street Distillery, had an output exceeding 2 million gallons per annum. In fact, even by the late 1880s, only two of Ireland's then 28 existing distilleries were producing single malt whiskey, the rest steadfast in their devotion to "pure pot still". In 1904, almost seventy years after the Coffey still had been patented, the Senior Manager of Ireland's largest rural distillery, Allman's of Bandon, placed an outright ban on the introduction of Coffey stills at his distillery, in the face of opposition from a director. In 1909, the royal commission settled the argument, declaring that whiskey could refer to the output of either Coffey or pot stills. whereas Coffey stills are permissible in the production of armagnac. An industry in decline In addition to the introduction of blended whiskeys and the Irish distillers' failure to account for its appeal to changing tastes, there were a number of additional issues which placed further pressure on the Irish distillers: the Irish War of Independence, the subsequent civil war, and trade war with Britain (which cut off whiskey exports to Britain and all Commonwealth countries, then Irish whiskey's biggest market); prohibition in the United States (1920–1933), which severely curtailed exports to Irish whiskey's second-biggest market (Irish whiskey had accounted for more than 60% of whiskey sales in the US in the 1800s); widespread counterfeiting of Irish whiskeys in America and Britain; protectionist policies introduced by the Irish Free State government, which significantly capped whiskey exports in the hope of taxing domestic consumption; and finally, over-expansion and mismanagement at several Irish distilleries. Together, these factors greatly hampered exports and forced many distilleries into economic difficulties and out of business, and by the early 20th century Scotland had surpassed Ireland to become the world's largest whiskey producer. When British historian Alfred Barnard published his account of the distilleries of Britain and Ireland in 1887, there were 28 distilleries in operation in Ireland. By the 1960s, there were only a handful of these remaining in operation, and in 1966 three of these (John Jameson, Powers, and Cork Distilleries Company) chose to amalgamate their operations under the name of Irish Distillers and to close their existing facilities and concentrate their operations in a new purpose-built facility to be constructed beside the Old Midleton Distillery in County Cork. In 1972, these were joined by the only other remaining Irish operation, Bushmills, so that by the mid-1970s there were only two whiskey distilleries in operation in Ireland, the New Midleton Distillery and the Old Bushmills Distillery, both owned by Irish Distillers, and with only one of these having operated during Irish whiskey's golden years. Production reached a nadir at about 400,000–500,000 cases per annum during the consolidation period, down from a peak of 12 million cases around 1900. In addition, it is estimated that the industry provides support to a further 4,200 jobs across agriculture and other sectors of the economy. In 2021, annual sales were 14 million cases (168&million bottles), and in 2022, there were 42 distilleries on the island. == Process ==