Irish distillation is documented earlier than Scottish distillation. The Annals of Clonmacnoise record a death in 1405 attributed to a surfeit of aqua vitae, and the Red Book of Ossory contains distillation instructions from the fourteenth century. As in Scotland, the practice was introduced through the monastic network and initially framed as medicinal.
The first known licence to distil was granted to Sir Thomas Phillips at Bushmills in County Antrim in 1608, a document frequently cited as the earliest of its kind. Licensing did not immediately produce an industry, but it establishes the formal beginning of the regulatory record in Ireland.
The Effect of Taxation
In 1785 the British administration introduced a tax on malted barley. Irish distillers responded by including a proportion of unmalted barley in the mash, a fiscal adaptation that produced the Single Pot Still category. What began as a means of reducing a tax liability became the defining production style of the country.
A tax on malt produced a category of whiskey that no other country makes.
Triple distillation in large copper pot stills also became standard Irish practice during the eighteenth century. The Dublin distilleries of the nineteenth century operated stills of considerable capacity, and their scale was documented by Alfred Barnard during his 1885 survey.
Victorian Dominance
By the middle of the nineteenth century Irish whiskey was the most widely traded whiskey in the world. Dublin and Cork distilleries supplied the British Empire and the United States, and the merchant-bonder system, in which wine and spirits merchants matured and bottled whiskey purchased in cask, supported a dense commercial network in both cities.
The Dublin distillers declined to adopt Coffey's column still, arguing in published correspondence that the product it made was not whiskey. Scottish grain distillers adopted it readily, and the blending houses that followed built the export volumes that Irish producers subsequently lost.
Collapse
Three events compressed the industry within thirty years. The Irish War of Independence and subsequent trade dispute with Britain closed Commonwealth markets. United States Prohibition, in force from 1920 to 1933, removed the largest export destination. The Second World War then restricted grain supply and export shipping.
By the 1960s the number of operating distilleries in Ireland had fallen to a handful. In 1966 the surviving southern producers merged as Irish Distillers, and in 1975 production was consolidated at a new facility at Midleton in County Cork. For much of the following two decades, the island supported only two working distilleries.
Documented Revival
The revival of Single Pot Still whiskey in 1991 preserved a production tradition that had come close to disappearing entirely.
Cooley Distillery opened in 1987, the first independent Irish distillery in a century. The reintroduction of Redbreast in 1991 restored the Single Pot Still category to regular production. Since 2010 the number of licensed distilleries on the island has increased substantially, and the Irish Whiskey Association's technical file, registered under European geographical indication rules in 2014, provides the category with a written legal definition for the first time.