Top 5 Irish Whiskey Myths
By Richard Thomas
Irish whiskey remains a boom sector. Sales continue to grow, and new expressions come out and new distilleries open regularly. If anything, its momentum is accelerating.
Yet despite the surging popularity, half-truths and falsehoods about Irish whiskey abound. Setting the record straight means puncturing the five biggest myths about Irish whiskey.
1. Irish whiskey comes in two forms, Catholic and Protestant. The root of this myth lies in the fact that Bushmills is located in the predominately Protestant and still British Northern Ireland. Hence, Bushmills is Protestant whiskey, which means by contrast Jameson, down in Cork County, must be Catholic.
Of course, this myth ignores that those two were the sole Irish distilleries for less than two decades (Cooley opened in 1987), whereas Irish whiskey dates back centuries, or that John Jameson himself was a Scotsman and probably a Protestant, or that the current Master Distiller at Bushmills, Colum Egan, is a Catholic. It also ignores the brisk trade in stock between the major distilleries, so Bushmills often uses a little Jameson whiskey and visa versa. Finally, it overlooks who actually drinks what, because plenty of Protestants love Jamesons, and numerous Catholics drink Bushmills.
(Credit: Richard Thomas)
2. Irish whiskey is beer and a shot whiskey. This idea surely comes from how most Americans become introduced to Irish whiskey in the first place, namely as college students drinking a cheap longneck beer with a shot of Jameson. Yet excellent sipping whiskeys like Redbreast and Connemara have been around for a long time, as have premium expressions in the Jameson and Bushmills line. Nowadays we can add the revival of Irish single grain whiskey and poitin (basically moonshine) to the mix.
3. All Irish whiskey is triple distilled. Triple distillation is the signature element of the Irish style, but it’s no more true that all Irish whiskey is triple distilled than it is that no Irish whiskey is peated. Many Irish whiskeys, and Irish single malts in particular, are double distilled.
(Credit: Irish Distillers)
4. Irish whiskey was always spelled with the “e.” Like whiskey in America now, the Irish once spelled the word both with and without the “e.” Take the example of the old bottle of Paddy. The shift to the standardized spelling with the “e” came when a very large chunk of the Irish whiskey trade was consolidated into Irish Distillers and housed under one roof at New Midleton in the 1970s. That settled the spelling issue right up to the present day, but there is no reason why one of the new Irish distilling companies couldn’t go back to dropping the “e” in the same way that George Dickel and Maker’s Mark dropped it in the U.S.
5. All independent Irish whiskey comes from the Cooley Distillery. This wasn’t true even before Beam Global bought Cooley, home of Connemara and Tyrconnel, and started winding down its many sourcing contracts. Knappogue Castle, for example, was sourced through Bushmills. Just as the big two, Jameson’s Midleton and Bushmills, traded stock with each other, they also sold stock to independent parties.
I didn’t know the Irish used “whisky.” I assumed the reason the Americans spelled it with the “e” is because they got it from the Irish, and that was how the Irish did it. Live and learn!
One comment on the Catholic-Protestant debate. While I realize that the religious origin of Irish whiskey is not strictly binary, there was a time when customer or bar/establishment preference was.
As a recent grad working in Boston in 1976 I was delighted to find a great “Irish” bar on the Commons, The Bull and Finch (much later to become the iconic Cheers bar). When I entered and asked for a Bushmills I was tersely rejected with the barman saying they didn’t serve that “sh*t here” the reason being it was from a Protestant district.
Bobby Sands was still alive but The Troubles was full blown at age 7. It was certainly on people’s minds and predicated people’s preferences.
I wandered into the Plough and Stars in Cambridge during a snowstorm in the mid 70s and asked the bartender for a shot of Johnny Walker. “We don’t serve no Scotch in this bar”, said the long haired bartender with an affected brogue. I noticed they had a full selection of Scotch in the early 90s.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. I know people who are Irish and recently moved to the US. We were talking about whiskey and I mentioned that I like Bushmills. They went ballistic and said they would never drink that Protestant garbage. They distinctly talked about which whiskeys were Catholic and which were Protestant…
As usual, hate-filled ideas come from and carry ignorance.
There is an episode of the Wire where McNulty, a Jameson drinker, is offered Bushmills. He says “that’s Protestant whiskey.”
@ Rusty – Good story — would have been great if your next query was something along the lines of “Well, I suppose Suntory is out of the question then, is it?”