After some walking down main street and passing a confectioner's and antique shop, we arrived at the Jameson Distillery Gates. The stone gate features an inscription "The Jameson Experience" which is how they have branded the tour of the facility. We bought our tickets and waited in the reception area. There is a chandelier crafted of empty Jameson bottles hanging from the rafters, casting brief green shadows on the wood floors. When the tour was about to start, our tour guide came up and opened large double doors to a theatre. The theatre was part of the old distillery and used to be the mill house before when the distillery first opened. We were then shown a very dramatic, but uninformative film about Jameson and Son. One interesting fact gleaned from the film was that the Jameson family had been influential in hunting and killing some pirates in their day. To reward their efforts, the family was given an emblem of a small schooner and the phrase "Sine Metu" which means "Without Fear". The Irish term for whisky is "uisce beatha", meaning "water of life". The tour brought us through the oldest part of the distillery. Irish whisky is crafted from three ingredients: barley, malt, and water. We learned that malt is nothing more than germinated barley seed, a process completed by submerging the barley in water for four days, then drying it thoroughly. The barley for use in Irish whisky is dried using smokeless anthracite, compared to barley for Scotch, which is dried using wood, giving it a distinct smokey flavour. The tour continues through parts of the old distillery, including the barley house and grain storage. The barley house has many windows as barley was known to spontaneously ignite in the hotter temperatures of the summer months. There are metal beams that jut out on either end of the five-storey building that add structural support to each floor, allowing it to hold tonnes of barley. The adjacent mill house is powered by a water wheel that makes use of Midleton's local river, the Owenacurra. The water wheel has barley engravings etched into the ornamental casing on the side of the flat, wooden panels. During the summer months, when the river was too low to power the wheel, a steam engine is used. The steam engine was built in Manchester, and shipped to Liverpool, where it made the sail to Cork, and was pulled by horse and buggy to Midleton. It cost an equivalent of €2 million. The buildings that are standing today were in constant use until 1975, when the New Midleton Distillery was opened, the buildings that stand in the distance as you go on the tour, where Jameson and other Irish Whiskys are produced today. In fact, all Jameson ever to be sold has originated from the Midleton Distillery. Jameson is triple distilled in copper pot stills, used because of the conductive capacities of copper as well as the lack of negative reactions with the alcohol. Once the wort mixture has been distilled three times, it becomes a spirit that contains 84% alchohol. It is later mixed with water to be 80 proof then aged in white oak casks. White oak casks are used because the tanin in the oak reacts with the whisky to give it the golden colour. Jameson uses previously used casks to impart additional flavour onto the whisky. Casks that held sherry are imported from Spain as well as casks that held port from Portugal, imparting notes of honey. Casks are used up to three times before being discarded. After a minimum of 4 years of aging, the casks are married, blending the sherry and port flavours into the final bottled product. There is a law in Ireland requiring whisky to be aged a minimum of three years before it can be officially sold as Irish whisky. Jameson sells a reserve that has aged for 12 years. By that time, about a third of the whisky in the cask has been lost, due to evaporation and absorption into the cask. The distillers call that missing portion the angels' share of the whisky. This is part of the reason that older whiskys are more expensive, as more and more product is lost. The tour ended with a complimentary tasting of Jameson, and Andrew and Melina got randomly selected to compare Irish Whisky with Scotch and with American Whisky (which is distilled only once, making for a much less smooth experience).
We wandered around Midleton for some time, stopping at a bookshop before catching the train back to Cork city.
Later that evening, we met up again to try the Franciscan Well, a pub on North Mall, just a few steps from my house. They feature a number of microbrews that are produced locally. I tried Rebel Red, an ale so named for the "Rebel" County of Munster (the south of Ireland) for which the flag colour is red. Meng found her new favorite beer in Friars Weisse. It has hints of banana. It is quite possible that this will become my pub.
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Go raibh maith agat.
(Irish, literal: A thousand thanks)
Thanks a million!