The 3 Most Unique Irish Whiskey Brands
John Kelly at the McConnell’s distillery
Like the history of Ireland itself, Irish whiskey history has both ancient and modern eras, with numerous points of intersection. On one hand, “the English word whiskey comes from uisce beatha, which is the Gaelic for ‘the water of life,’” says John Kelly, CEO of McConnell’s Irish Whisky. (As someone who has spent a year with Irish on Duolingo, you can take my word that the sound of “uisce” is entirely like “whiskey.”) On the other hand, American prohibition, along with the rise of the Coffey Still in Scotland all but decimated the Irish whiskey industry, and until relatively recently, only a small handful of Irish whiskey distilleries were in operation for 50+ years following Prohibition’s repeal.
Louise McGuane of JJ Corry
“But then we're so fortunate in this whiskey making country that we had that pause of production,” says Louise McGuane, founder of J.J. Corry Irish Whiskey, “and that a new kind of thinking has allowed a bit of a reset. We're not stuck in tradition, and we're not stuck in regulation,” she says. And indeed, Irish whiskey is experiencing a renaissance and resurgence in real time, with over 40 brands now in the game, each eager to put an original stamp on the category. Read The Great Irish Whiskey Resurgence and 13 Noteworthy Bottles.
While an argument can certainly be made for just about any Irish whiskey brand having a particular connection to Irish history, whether in its notable namesakes or repurposed buildings, here are three brands to know right now with incredibly unique ties to Ireland’s storied past.
McConnell’s Irish Whisky: Reclaiming a Notorious Prison
2nd Floor McConnell's distillery, the former Crumlin Road Gaol
To begin, note that the “e” that is typically used in the Irish whiskey to differentiate it from Scotch whisky, is conspicuously absent in McConnell’s Irish Whisky. As a distillery in Northern Ireland that was originally founded in 1776, the brand predates the practice of adding the “e.” Also of note, McConnell’s features the distinctive Harp of Erin in its branding, not to be confused with the Guinness harp, which McConnell’s logo also predates.
Despite being in a city that produced more whiskey than Dublin, Cork, or Middleton, Belfast-based McConnell’s went the way of many Irish distilleries during the latter half of the 1900s in its closure. Its revival is therefore embedded in Belfast pride, in a space that is nonetheless rooted in the city's complicated history. The current home of McConnell’s is the former Crumlin Road Gaol (jail,) a notorious space during The Troubles, and one that is especially significant to McConnell’s CEO, Kelly. Growing up in the 1980s and 90s “I went to school literally just over the prison wall around the Crumlin Road Jail,” he says. Transforming a prison into a distillery and visitor center was more than just a feat of engineering and architecture for a derelict, but historical space, it was also about reclaiming something dark and giving it a much brighter purpose.
“It would have been easy for us to build a distillery in a site in the countryside, but we chose not to do that,” says Kelly. “We wanted to do something special for the North Belfast community, and we wanted to regenerate that particular part of the city.”
The result of a massive architectural undertaking, involving lowering stills in through the roof in order to not to disturb the historically protected façade, “What we've been able to do is create something out of the ashes,” says Kelly. “The jail was a tough, dark, cold, angry, violent place that housed prisoners from both sides of the conflict. We haven't forgotten about that history and that legacy, but we've transformed the building, and we've now created something which acknowledges the past but is really something about the future,” he says, as both a place of significant employment for the area, and of welcome to visitors from Northern Ireland and around the world.
J.J. Corry Irish Whiskey: Resurrecting the Lost Art of Whiskey Bonding
JJ Corry Irish Whiskey
As a whiskey bonder — an important distinction from the role of whiskey distiller — Louise McGuane, founder of J.J.Corry Irish Whiskey, is tapping into numerous aspects of Irish whiskey history that are inextricable from Irish history itself.
“The route to market for the majority of Ireland’s distilleries in the 1700 and 1800s would have been a bit different from what we do today,” shares McGuane. “Distilleries weren't necessarily casking, maturing, blending, and bottling under their own names. They were just producing the distillate and then handing off all those other pieces of the job to bonders. Every town in Ireland had a whiskey bonder or three, depending on the size of the town,” she says, essentially publicans that bought and matured local distillates to sell onsite according to their own and their customers’ palates.
This practice nearly died out with the whole of the industry, and only the largest conglomerate whiskey brands survived to see the middle of the last century. Given McGuane’s optimistic take as above on the pause that occurred in Irish whiskey production, she is keenly suited to be the first to take on the role of Irish whiskey bonder again, especially given the creativity it engenders. “It’s a huge privilege,” she says. “There are very few people on the planet who get to be a part of the renaissance of a really historic industry.” McGuane now works with at least 14 of Ireland’s approximately 40 distilleries to collect liquid for bonding. “It's all about flavor seeking,” she says, utilizing a number of different cask finishes and blends for her bottlings, in order to amass a library of different Irish whiskey expressions. “I’m very fortunate that I got to redefine bonding for the modern age.”
J.J. Corry was the name of a bonder local to her hometown who McGuane chose to name the brand after, but in resurrecting the lost practice of whiskey bonding, she is also tapping into an even deeper aspect of Irish whiskey history. “A long time ago, whiskey making used to be women’s work,” she says. “It was a means of preserving any overstock of grain that you might have had one year, so it was the women who would distill that in whatever kind of rudimentary form it took.”
Slane Irish Whiskey: Reframing a Manor Estate
Slane Whiskeys at the Slane Castle
Having personally visited Slane Castle and the distillery now housed on its property, it’s a choose-your-own-adventure in terms of where to pick an entry point for storytelling purposes: its fame as an iconic concert venue since the early 1980s, having presented the likes of U2 and Oasis — as supporting acts; its historical notoriety as a location where King George IV rendezvoused with his mistress; or even the fact that as recently as the past five years, a fairy fort on the property needed to be moved for a renovation project, and so a consultant was utilized in order to negotiate with the fairies for use of the land. (The fairies kindly agreed to relocate. Such is the nature of business in Ireland, sometimes.)
Alex Conyngham
All this, and yet it’s the estate nature of the place that makes it such an interesting character in the Irish whiskey landscape. The Conyngham family has maintained the property since the 1700s, and while the legacy of the English colonization of Ireland is fraught — the Conyngham name is actually Scottish — the family’s current generation nonetheless felt a responsibility to do something with the property that allowed it to be of service to the community, especially as an employer. “It's about more than just us as a family, which is why I feel compelled to share the place,” says Alex Conyngham, who heads the Slane Irish Whiskey brand. He also recounted some advice from his father: “‘You'll never own this place Alex,’ he said, ‘you're just looking after it for the next lot,’” which informs the brand’s “leave a legacy, not a footprint” ethos.
It was Conyngham’s father who envisioned opening the property for concerts, and Alex himself who wanted to put both the land and buildings to work as a whiskey distillery, partnering with Brown-Forman to bring it to life. As an estate, it also includes sustainable farmland, making Slane one of few whiskey brands from any country that can claim estate-grown barley. “One of the reasons my dad and I started this was that we realized, ‘why are we growing barley for the cattle?’” he says. “It would be way more craic to do it for whiskey.”
Like McConnell’s, Conyngham chose to contend with existing structures on the property, rather than build a state-of-the-art distillery on the grounds from scratch. “Buildings need to have a purpose,” he says, and so stills were also installed through the roof of several carriage houses that now function as the distillery, visitors center and tasting room.