August 31 Two (Very Different) Tours (Day 339)
- This morning Robert embarked on a tour of iconic sites in London.
Robert passed through this gate at Buckingham Palace…
…and got a picture of a member of the Queens Guard in the huge bear skin hat!
He continued on to see Big Ben in the Elizabeth Tower…
…and across the square, Westminster Hall with Victoria Tower.
In between is the Palace of Westminster where the British Houses of Parliament are found.
Along the Thames River Robert saw the “London Eye” Ferris wheel, “Europe’s tallest cantilevered observation wheel”!
Meanwhile, in Dublin…
We embarked on an afternoon Personal Whiskey Tour to celebrate Tommy’s 70th birthday!!! Tommy was truly surprised when introduced to our tour guide.
Our first stop was those shiny pot stills along the road we walked past last evening!
These are the remnants of the last Irish Whiskey Distillery, Powers, operating in Dublin until 1975. Now part of the campus of the National College of Art and Design, they were restored by Powers Distillery recently. In the early 1800’s Irish whiskey dominated the global spirits market, with about 90% of the market. Three main factors led to the century long decline of Irish whiskey. The first was the invention of the column still which allowed continuous distilling, rather than the pot stills that created whiskey in small batches. The second factor was the potato blight of 1845-49 that brought about the Irish Potato Famine which led to the repeal of the Corn Laws that had restricted the import of cheaper foreign grains like corn from the US. Distilling cheaper corn in column stills to create a neutral spirit that could be blended with other whiskeys was adopted by Scotland while Irish distillers refused to ‘adulterate’ their pure pot still whiskeys. The third factor was the Irish War of Independence, the subsequent civil war and trade war with Britain which cut off exports of Irish whiskey to the largest market of England and all Commonwealth nations. The final blow was the adoption, from 1920 to 1933, of Prohibition in the US, the second largest market for Irish whiskey. By the 1930’s Irish whiskey’s share was about 2% of the global market!
Our tour guide then took us to the first distillery of the tour, Teeling Whiskey Distillery, the first new distillery opened in Dublin in 125 years! Opened in 2015 it has an interesting connection to Oregon! The Master Distiller, Alex Chasko, hails from Portland, Oregon! Also, Oregon pine is used to make the wooden fermenters (huge barrels) where the malted grain is mixed with water and fermented with a mix of yeasts creating the high proof ‘beer’ that is then distilled.
The pot stills.
The most important part of the tour! The tasting!
Our next stop was around the corner, The Dublin Liberties Distillery, opened in 2019, one of the newest distillers in what was known as the Golden Triangle of whiskey distillers in 1800’s Dublin.
Our distillery tour guide introduced us to the neighborhood, the Liberties, known as the working class ‘hell’ outside of Dublin proper and free of it’s rules and laws.
Among the mills, fermenters and pot stills is this small brass and glass box with tubes connecting to the stills.
Every distillery had this contraption near the stills. We learned that it is a ‘spirit safe’, used to decant small amounts of the neutral alcohol to test for ABV percents. “The introduction of the safe dates back to 1823 when duty laws were brought in to enforce taxation on distilleries. For this reason spirit safes feature a large elaborate padlock which casts back to a time when only an exciseman, who enforced tax collection, could unlock the safe. The spirit safe stills plays an important role in modern whiskey making.” The ‘revenuers’ have to take their cut, otherwise it’s moonshine or ‘poteen’ (pronounced poo-cheen in Irish)!
Again, the most important part of the tour!
The third and last distillery of our tour was the Pearse Lyons Distillery, started by Mr. Pearse Lyons, born in Dublin but moved to the US where he started the Alltech company, an animal nutrition and spirits company based in Lexington, Kentucky. Experts “in yeast fermentation, solid state fermentation and the science of nutrigenomics, Alltech is a leading producer and processor of yeast additives, organic trace minerals, feed ingredients, premix and feed.” He and his wife bought a derelict 18th century church in the Liberties neighborhood of Dublin and spent 4 years restoring and remodeling it into a distinctive distillery!
The stone spire which had been struck by lightning was replaced with a steel and glass spire dubbed the Liberties Lantern!
The church is reflected in the modern glass main distillery building, alongside the cemetery.
The small cemetery adjacent to the church holds several of Mr. Pearse’s distant relatives. Amazingly there are over 10,000 people buried in the tiny cemetery, they were laid to rest stacked on top of each other over the centuries!
Entering the church you see the melding of the two religions of Ireland! The pot stills replace the alter in this church!
The stained glass windows tell the story of distilling whiskey and honor the craft of coopering (barrel making) that Mr. Pearse’s ancestors honed.
Available here are the whiskeys distilled right here, as well as the beer and bourbon made in the Lexington Brewing and Distilling Co. of Kentucky, also started by Mr. Pearse Lyons in 2008!
We had a wonderful and informative afternoon and soon headed out for dinner and to look for pubs featuring Irish traditional music, which we dubbed ‘Diddly-dee’ music, to round out the evening!