There’s gold in them there stills – An Irishman’s Diary about the great whiskey revival

There seems to be a bit of a gold rush going on in Ireland of late. Not for the metal variety (although my native county is still bracing itself for the consequences if they ever extract those deposits from under Clontibret). No, the gold in this case is in liquid form, aka whiskey. After almost a century in retreat, the Irish distilling industry is undergoing a big revival. And although it seems a contradiction in terms, the latest green shoot was this week’s official opening of a museum – The Irish Whiskey Museum – in Dublin’s College Green.

Which, yes, hopes to entertain visitors with the history of the drink, much of it a tale of woe; but which, unlike most museums, will also host tastings of the various Irish products, now again multiplying. Rugby coach Joe Schmidt performed the honours at Thursday night’s ceremony. Perhaps more interestingly, however, the recurring figure in the videos around which the museum tour revolves was the actor Frank Kelly.

Kelly also does most of the drinking in the museum videos, although he somehow manages to look a lot healthier, and younger, than the Fr Jack character he played almost 20 years ago.

With cameo roles involving Queen Elizabeth I, among others, the whiskey story is told over three storeys of the architectural kind. And just as in the previous sentence, a silent “e” has a role in the plot.

It has become the norm that all Irish and most American whiskey now ends with a “key”, while Scotch, Japanese, and other varieties are spelt “ky”. Indeed, this is one of the few instances where discerning consumers will sometimes deliberately choose the product with an “e” additive in the ingredients, rather than the one without.

But as the line of vintage bottles rising and falling like a graph along the museum walls suggests, this is a modern and inconsistent affectation. Many of the old Irish labels have the e-less ending, not the supposedly definitive “key” (an interesting twist there, by the way, on another popular drinking term, the verb to be “locked”).

Proximity to Scotland may have been a factor. Belfast whisky was generally e-less. But the most plausible explanation I’ve seen for the modern Irish spelling suggests it was adopted by the Dublin distilleries of the late 19th century, to distinguish themselves not from their Scots rivals, but from the provincial Irish products also considered their inferior. Thus when the Scottish Distillers Company made a foray into Dublin in 1878, taking over the bankrupt Chapelizod Distillery (on which James Joyce’s father had lost his shirt), the prospectus for shareholders all but guaranteed a goldmine. Not only was the demand for Irish whiskey “practically unlimited”, it declared, but “the quality and reputation of Dublin whiskey is [...] equivalent to a premium of one shilling per gallon, or an additional 25 per cent over whiskey made in other parts of Ireland”.

Curiously the company went on to produce the e-less “Dublin Whisky”. And yet it seems to have thrived for 40 years, until closing in 1921.

Independence, ironically, was one of a series of setbacks, along with war, US prohibition, and bad decision-making, that over a few decades reduced Irish whiskey from world leader to also-ran, a status from which it is now re-emerging. Hence the museum’s bottle graph, falling steadily during the early 20th century, then bottoming out, and starting to rise again.

The display also features a few judicious quotations, including Samuel Johnson’s famous dictionary definition of “usquebaugh”, which digressed to say that the Irish version was generally considered superior to the Scotch. Quoted too is Raymond Chandler’s more inclusive view: “There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren’t as good as others.”

But a notable absentee is Mark Twain’s quasi-medical opinion on our national relationship with hard liquor: “Give an Irishman lager for a month, and he’s a dead man. An Irishman’s stomach is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him.”

Maybe, in the era of enjoying alcohol sensibly, that was a claim too far. It must have been biologically questionable even in Twain’s time. But as those ubiquitous Dublin pub posters remind us, Ireland has had a few well-known cases since (Kavanagh, O’Brien, Behan, etc) wherein whiskey caused severe corrosion.

This may or may not explain why, among the many new premium brands for sale in the museum shop, at €45 a bottle, is one called “Writer’s Tears”.

@FrankmcnallyIT