Gather round lads and lassies.
Let us tell you a story about monks who drank perfume, outlaws who flipped a king,
a killer inventor, and the letter E.
This is the tumultuous tale and a brief history of Irish whiskey.
You probably heard the word whiskey comes from the Gaelic word uisce beatha,
which means water of life.
You'd think it was the Scots who started this beautiful madness,
but it was actually the Irish.
Irish whiskey was mentioned almost a century before the Scottish one,
namely in 1405 when a clan leader in Ireland died because he took a surfeit
of aqua vitae on Christmas.
May he rest in peace.
But Irish uisce had been around for centuries at that point.
It's actually one of the earliest distilled drinks in Europe,
one of the OGs of booze, if you will.
See, in the 12th century, Irish monks learned how
to distill perfumes.
And when one of them got drunk on Chanel Number One, they realized
fun was to be had.
Now anything can be booze if you're crazy enough, but the Irish decided to tweak
the process and the recipe and came up with a potable spirit.
One downside though, their insides no longer smelled
like a rose garden.
By the 16th century, Ireland was swimming in whiskey.
So the king wanted a cut and introduced licenses.
The first Irishman to get the license to kill, pardon, to distill,
was Sir Thomas Phillips, the landowner in the town of Bushmills in 1608.
After him, a number of lucky lads got licensed, while others
ignored the mobster king.
Legally, there were two sorts of whiskey, the Parliament whiskey, the legal one,
and poitin, the not-so-legal one.
Fun fact, poitin means small pot in Gaelic, as the outlaws used
small pots to make whiskey.
In the 18th century, demand for whiskey skyrocketed.
Whiskey makers naturally started diluting their stuff to earn an extra buck,
so new laws were introduced saying, "Thou shalt not cut your booze."
Hardcore government control followed and as a result many distilleries were closed.
While there were 1,228 distilleries in Ireland in 1779, only 32 remained by 1821.
To reverse the effect, reforms and lower taxes were introduced
and soon the whiskey economy exploded.
Everyone in the British Empire drank it, and Dublin became
the Silicon Valley of whiskey.
Ten million gallons was the yearly tally by 1823.
Even the Scots were impressed, but at the same time wanted to get
in the game, which became possible after one killer invention,
the famous Coffey still.
In 1832, Irish inventor, Aeneas Coffey, came up with a column still that
enabled continuous, faster, and more efficient production of whiskey.
It was what Henry Ford's assembly line was to cars or what drinking hats
are to, well, drinking.
The Irish however resisted the novelty, scoffing at its product, grain whiskey.
Yet the Scots embraced the still wholeheartedly
and started producing with it.
Since it was cheaper, it soon took a huge chunk
of the market share from the Irish.
Here is when the difference in spelling came.
The big distillers of Ireland decided a distinction should be made between their
pure Irish whiskey and the disruptive Scottish product.
Until then, everyone called the amber spirit "whisky," but to set them apart
the Irish added the E.
In addition to the rising popularity of scotch, the Irish War of Independence
and Civil War broke out.
Plus, America decided prohibition was a good idea.
Whiskey consumption and production plummeted.
So the global behemoth had to advocate, giving its mantel to scotch,
which is arguably still the king.
But this story isn't one with a sad ending.
In the late 1980s, the spirit of Ireland rose once again.
Existing distilleries amped up their production, closed ones opened up again,
and new whiskey makers popped up.
It was the best of times, it was the worst
of times, for Irish whiskey.
But today, we have Jameson, Tullamore, Redbreast, Bushmills, and numerous others,
and it's only getting better.
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