Midleton

Yesterday I went with a few of my housemates to the Old Midleton Distillery, which is now owned by Jameson and is the distillery where over half of all Irish whiskey is produced. The old distillery itself was bought by Jameson in the 1960s and had previously produced its own whiskey since the mid-1800s. Midleton is a small town located about a half hour east of Cork City on the Owenacurra River. We went there by bus and it was actually rather remarkable to see how much of the one main street in town was shut down because it was Sunday.

The tour of the Distillery itself was pretty awesome. We were led on a tour of the grounds and buildings where they at one time produced very large amounts of whiskey, although now all the production occurs at a modern distillery pretty much next door. The old distillery is in fairly good shape for its age, however, and going through the grounds and learning about the distillation process was especially fascinating for me as a chemist. For most of the tour whenever the guide mentioned distillation or their big condenser I was constantly reminded of work and the ochem lab I took for all of last year.

In any case, the tour took us around the grounds for about an hour and enlightened us to the basic principles of distilling whiskey in addition to the differences between Irish, Scottish, and American whiskeys. Generally, the differences lie in number of distillations, the way the barley is heated and dried, and the type of barrels in which the whiskey is aged. Irish whiskey is distilled three times, and the first of the stills (distillation vats) is (or was, it was not too clear) the largest still in the world.


After the tour they had a whiskey tasting where they had us compare small samples of American, Scottish, and Irish whiskeys, and seeing/tasting the differences between them was actually quite intriguing after having been walked through the process of making them and having the differing points of their production described.

Completely unrelated random fact: According to Wikipedia, Cork Harbor is the second biggest natural harbor in the world (behind Sydney, Australia).