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Out of stockFerns Co Wexford. 30cm x 26cm Bishop's Water Distillery was an Irish whiskey distillery which operated in Wexford, Ireland between 1827 and 1914. The distillery was named for a stream which ran along the back of the distillery, the Bishop's Water, said to possess "various occult properties derived from the blessings of the sainted Bishop of Ferns". Constructed at a cost of £30,000, the distillery was reported to be “reckoned the most perfect and complete of the kind in Ireland”. In 1833, just a few years after it opened, the distillery recorded an output of about 200,000 gallons per annum .However, output had fallen to just 110,000 gallons per annum in 1886, when the distillery was visited by Alfred Barnard, as recorded in his seminal 1887 publication "The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom". This was amongst the lowest output of any distillery operating in Ireland at the time, and far below the potential output of 250,000 gallons per annum reported when the distillery was offered for sale as a going concern in 1909.The distillery's whiskey, Barnard noted, was highly appreciated locally, and in the British cities where it was exported. In the early 20th century, with the Irish whiskey industry in decline, Bishop's Water distillery, like the majority of distilleries in Ireland at the time, suffered serious financial difficulties, and entered bankruptcy. Following its closure, the distillery was initially converted into an iron works (Pierce Ironworks). However, much of the site was later demolished, and little evidence of the distillery still remains. Some mementos can still be found in locals pubs, while a stone archway known to have been extant in 1903 and now bearing the inscription "Casa Rio", possibly in reference to the location of a Pierce ironworks office in Buenos Aires, marks the entrance to the site where the distillery once stood, on Distillery Road.
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23cm x 28cm Drimoleague Co Cork Patrick J. O’Flaherty, better known as Paddy, sold what became his namesake whiskey in pubs across Ireland for an incredible four decades, spanning the turn of the 20th century. Magnetic, outgoing and generous, Paddy bought rounds and made friends everywhere he went, always making sure everyone had a great time. Kind and wise, with a good natured, rapier wit, Paddy was always welcomed and was by all accounts universally beloved. After 40 years of service, the whiskey he sold took on his name. Traversing the beautiful southern tip of Ireland from East to West and back for 40 years on foot, with horse and buggy or by train, Paddy was always on the move. From coast to coast, he was the life of the party—one filled with music, laughter, good times and great whiskey. Paddy’s good humour and revelry proved a winning combination, and before long, the brand name was forgotten. Everyone simply ordered more Paddy whiskey. Word got around, and not just in Ireland. Today, from continent to continent, the tradition Paddy started is alive and well.
NEARLY A QUARTER-MILLENNIUM OF ENDURING QUALITY
Paddy Irish Whiskey traces its roots all the way back to 1779, but it started simple, and the recipe remained consistent. As its popularity grew across Ireland, Paddy eventually made it overseas. A century later, it won first-prize medals in Philadelphia (1876), Sydney (1879) and Cork (1883), along with a gold medal at the World’s Fair in Paris (1878). By 1930, Paddy could be found in cosmopolitan cities like Milan, Shanghai and Bangkok, and in 80+ countries worldwide.
ADDY IRISH WHISKEY
Light, well-balanced and pure.
An approachable Irish whiskey comprised of a triple-distilled blend of grain, malt and pot-still, Paddy is mild and yet crisp, with a hint of honey. Paddy is the perfect session spirit for gathering ‘round for good times with friends. Triple-distilled from the finest barley and water from County Cork’s Irish countryside, Paddy matures for years in three types of oaken casks, acquiring its distinctively rich and golden color in dark, aromatic warehouses before being bottled and shipped directly from Ireland.Theres a reason Paddy has been triple distilled the same way in County Cork Ireland for nearly a quarter-millennium. Some good things don’t come to an end.
Nose Malty, fresh, woody. Hints of spice, honey, vanilla. Taste Light and crisp. Hints of nuts, malt, charred wood. Finish A gently fading sweetness. A lingering of mild, woody malt. -
Framed John Jameson Retro Advert 28cm x 24cm John Jameson was originally a lawyer from Alloa in Scotland before he founded his eponymous distillery in Dublin in 1780.Prevoius to this he had made the wise move of marrying Margaret Haig (1753–1815) in 1768,one of the simple reasons being Margaret was the eldest daughter of John Haig, the famous whisky distiller in Scotland. John and Margaret had eight sons and eight daughters, a family of 16 children. Portraits of the couple by Sir Henry Raeburn are on display in the National Gallery of Ireland. John Jameson joined the Convivial Lodge No. 202, of the Dublin Freemasons on the 24th June 1774 and in 1780, Irish whiskey distillation began at Bow Street. In 1805, he was joined by his son John Jameson II who took over the family business that year and for the next 41 years, John Jameson II built up the business before handing over to his son John Jameson the 3rd in 1851. In 1901, the Company was formally incorporated as John Jameson and Son Ltd. Four of John Jameson’s sons followed his footsteps in distilling in Ireland, John Jameson II (1773 – 1851) at Bow Street, William and James Jameson at Marrowbone Lane in Dublin (where they partnered their Stein relations, calling their business Jameson and Stein, before settling on William Jameson & Co.). The fourth of Jameson's sons, Andrew, who had a small distillery at Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, was the grandfather of Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of wireless telegraphy. Marconi’s mother was Annie Jameson, Andrew’s daughter. John Jameson’s eldest son, Robert took over his father’s legal business in Alloa. The Jamesons became the most important distilling family in Ireland, despite rivalry between the Bow Street and Marrowbone Lane distilleries. By the turn of the 19th century, it was the second largest producer in Ireland and one of the largest in the world, producing 1,000,000 gallons annually. Dublin at the time was the centre of world whiskey production. It was the second most popular spirit in the world after rum and internationally Jameson had by 1805 become the world's number one whiskey. Today, Jameson is the world's third largest single-distillery whiskey. Historical events, for a time, set the company back. The temperance movement in Ireland had an enormous impact domestically but the two key events that affected Jameson were the Irish War of Independence and subsequent trade war with the British which denied Jameson the export markets of the Commonwealth, and shortly thereafter, the introduction of prohibition in the United States. While Scottish brands could easily slip across the Canada–US border, Jameson was excluded from its biggest market for many years. The introduction of column stills by the Scottish blenders in the mid-19th-century enabled increased production that the Irish, still making labour-intensive single pot still whiskey, could not compete with. There was a legal enquiry somewhere in 1908 to deal with the trade definition of whiskey. The Scottish producers won within some jurisdictions, and blends became recognised in the law of that jurisdiction as whiskey. The Irish in general, and Jameson in particular, continued with the traditional pot still production process for many years.In 1966 John Jameson merged with Cork Distillers and John Powers to form the Irish Distillers Group. In 1976, the Dublin whiskey distilleries of Jameson in Bow Street and in John's Lane were closed following the opening of a New Midleton Distillery by Irish Distillers outside Cork. The Midleton Distillery now produces much of the Irish whiskey sold in Ireland under the Jameson, Midleton, Powers, Redbreast, Spot and Paddy labels. The new facility adjoins the Old Midleton Distillery, the original home of the Paddy label, which is now home to the Jameson Experience Visitor Centre and the Irish Whiskey Academy. The Jameson brand was acquired by the French drinks conglomerate Pernod Ricard in 1988, when it bought Irish Distillers. The old Jameson Distillery in Bow Street near Smithfield in Dublin now serves as a museum which offers tours and tastings. The distillery, which is historical in nature and no longer produces whiskey on site, went through a $12.6 million renovation that was concluded in March 2016, and is now a focal part of Ireland's strategy to raise the number of whiskey tourists, which stood at 600,000 in 2017.Bow Street also now has a fully functioning Maturation Warehouse within its walls since the 2016 renovation. It is here that Jameson 18 Bow Street is finished before being bottled at Cask Strength. In 2008, The Local, an Irish pub in Minneapolis, sold 671 cases of Jameson (22 bottles a day),making it the largest server of Jameson's in the world – a title it maintained for four consecutive years.
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Really cool Guinness advert from the 1993 Cork Jazz Festival mounted and framed.70cm x 60cm
Origins : CorkCork Jazz Festival Genre Jazz Dates Late October Location(s) Cork, Ireland Years active 1978-present (42 years) Website GuinnessJazzFestival.com -
20cm x 15cmThomas Power & Co of Dungarvan was established in 1880,a date which appeared on their promotional literature.
As spirit merchants Power’s of Dungarvan had access to the freshest fortified wine casks, and in this letter we can see a distillery requesting access to that stock. The records of Thomas Power & Company are far from complete, but as you can see below even in the late 50’s Power’s were importing hogsheads full of wine from Portugal.
As well as importing barrels of wine and fortified wines, Power’s clearly had a need for the finest empty port pipes from Sandeman.
Power’s bottled a lot of Guinness, and until the mid-1950’s the stout traveled to Dungarvan in wooden barrels.
Now as then, it’s cheaper to buy new make, but that puts a drain on cash flow, so as you can see from this letter, Power’s were probably bulking out their own mature stock with whiskey bought in for blending purposes. The original Velvet Cap, in common with the vast majority of Irish whiskies in the first half of the 20th century was probably a pot still (made with around 15% oat and 5% rye). But this is not made clear on any invoice I have seen, where purchased stock is simply referred to as ‘whiskey’. In the end though whether Velvet Cap works or not largely comes down to repeat business and that is mostly about taste. We like the direction in which this Irish whiskey is going, but let us know what you think. Batch One is now on sale here or there for the first 150 purchasers, it can be got with a signed copy of my book The Whiskeys of Ireland and a tour of Blackwater Distillery here. #DrinkResponsibly
Declan GillReplyForward -
Lovely collectors item here in the form of a resin Guinness Hapless Zookeeper as featured in many of John Gilroys adverts. 40cm x 20cm x 10cm Arthur Guinness started brewing ales in 1759 at the St James Gate Brewery,Dublin.On 31st December 1759 he signed a 9,000 year lease at £45 per annum for the unused brewery.Ten years later, on 19 May 1769, Guinness first exported his ale: he shipped six-and-a-half barrels to Great Britain before he started selling the dark beer porter in 1778. The first Guinness beers to use the term were Single Stout and Double Stout in the 1840s.Throughout the bulk of its history, Guinness produced only three variations of a single beer type: porter or single stout, double or extra and foreign stout for export. “Stout” originally referred to a beer’s strength, but eventually shifted meaning toward body and colour.Porter was also referred to as “plain”, as mentioned in the famous refrain of Flann O’Brien‘s poem “The Workman’s Friend”: “A pint of plain is your only man.” Already one of the top-three British and Irish brewers, Guinness’s sales soared from 350,000 barrels in 1868 to 779,000 barrels in 1876.In October 1886 Guinness became a public company, and was averaging sales of 1,138,000 barrels a year. This was despite the brewery’s refusal to either advertise or offer its beer at a discount. Even though Guinness owned no public houses, the company was valued at £6 million and shares were twenty times oversubscribed, with share prices rising to a 60 per cent premium on the first day of trading. The breweries pioneered several quality control efforts. The brewery hired the statistician William Sealy Gosset in 1899, who achieved lasting fame under the pseudonym “Student” for techniques developed for Guinness, particularly Student’s t-distribution and the even more commonly known Student’s t-test. By 1900 the brewery was operating unparalleled welfare schemes for its 5,000 employees. By 1907 the welfare schemes were costing the brewery £40,000 a year, which was one-fifth of the total wages bill. The improvements were suggested and supervised by Sir John Lumsden. By 1914, Guinness was producing 2,652,000 barrels of beer a year, which was more than double that of its nearest competitor Bass, and was supplying more than 10 per cent of the total UK beer market. In the 1930s, Guinness became the seventh largest company in the world. Before 1939, if a Guinness brewer wished to marry a Catholic, his resignation was requested. According to Thomas Molloy, writing in the Irish Independent, “It had no qualms about selling drink to Catholics but it did everything it could to avoid employing them until the 1960s.” Guinness thought they brewed their last porter in 1973. In the 1970s, following declining sales, the decision was taken to make Guinness Extra Stout more “drinkable”. The gravity was subsequently reduced, and the brand was relaunched in 1981. Pale malt was used for the first time, and isomerized hop extract began to be used. In 2014, two new porters were introduced: West Indies Porter and Dublin Porter. Guinness acquired the Distillers Company in 1986.This led to a scandal and criminal trialconcerning the artificial inflation of the Guinness share price during the takeover bid engineered by the chairman, Ernest Saunders. A subsequent £5.2 million success fee paid to an American lawyer and Guinness director, Tom Ward, was the subject of the case Guinness plc v Saunders, in which the House of Lords declared that the payment had been invalid. In the 1980s, as the IRA’s bombing campaign spread to London and the rest of Britain, Guinness considered scrapping the Harp as its logo. The company merged with Grand Metropolitan in 1997 to form Diageo. Due to controversy over the merger, the company was maintained as a separate entity within Diageo and has retained the rights to the product and all associated trademarks of Guinness.
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Framed 1964 Listowel Races Advert 28cm x 23cm Ballylongford Co Kerry The great John B Keane once said: "The Listowel Races is a state of mind." Anyone who has attended the festival will know this statement to be an undeniable truth. Because for one divine week in September, a spotlight from the gods shines on Listowel. It is a shimmering star, guiding people from all over the country for a week of devilment and roguery - a place where hatred dissolves and inhibitions release. And for as long as I can remember, I too have been steered by that very light. For a time, I thought I could never love a man the way I loved the Listowel Races. Unlike romantic relationships, I knew where I stood in the affair. There were no miscommunications or missteps. I asked for the thrill, the passion and the romance, and all the races asked of me was the entrance fee. Even as a child, I worshipped it. From the moment the festival lights were hung above Church Street, I knew magic was in the air. Any pocket money I had was spent at the Birds Amusements in the mart yard and any tears I had shed, as my mother told me, came when it was time to go home. As I grew older, I discovered another type of magic on the racecourse or 'the island' as it's otherwise known. It is a paradise on the River Feale filled with old friends, new acquaintances and disgruntled punters. Expats return from far-flung countries and wish for the week to never end, wanting one last race, drink or dance because one September evening spent on the island equals a lifetime of memories. This year will mark the 162nd anniversary of the meeting. The first took place in October 1858 and, since then, has moved from a two-day race meeting to a seven-day spectacle filled with music and wren boys. Also known as the Harvest Festival, the meeting traditionally marked the end of the harvest, and farmers came to relax and enjoy the fruits of their labour. While this remains true, Listowel now attracts a variety of attendees from across the country and beyond. The people don't just come for racing anymore. They come for the atmosphere, the people, and the promise of the time of your life. Festivals like Galway and Punchestown may have the hype, but Listowel has the mightiest heart. In 162 years, the island and its high jinks have survived war and politics, but it won't escape the ravages of 2020. Covid-19 restrictions mean the Listowel Races will take place behind closed doors for the first time. Under protocol from the HRI and the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board, race meetings are closed to the public. Much-needed boost For Listowel, the impact will be huge. The town is small, with a population of 4,800 people. In 2018, attendance at the festival hit 90,000 for the week.
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Classic Guinness Tango time Advert. 25cm x 34cm Arthur Guinness started brewing ales in 1759 at the St James Gate Brewery,Dublin.On 31st December 1759 he signed a 9,000 year lease at £45 per annum for the unused brewery.Ten years later, on 19 May 1769, Guinness first exported his ale: he shipped six-and-a-half barrels to Great Britain before he started selling the dark beer porter in 1778. The first Guinness beers to use the term were Single Stout and Double Stout in the 1840s.Throughout the bulk of its history, Guinness produced only three variations of a single beer type: porter or single stout, double or extra and foreign stout for export. “Stout” originally referred to a beer’s strength, but eventually shifted meaning toward body and colour.Porter was also referred to as “plain”, as mentioned in the famous refrain of Flann O’Brien‘s poem “The Workman’s Friend”: “A pint of plain is your only man.” Already one of the top-three British and Irish brewers, Guinness’s sales soared from 350,000 barrels in 1868 to 779,000 barrels in 1876.In October 1886 Guinness became a public company, and was averaging sales of 1,138,000 barrels a year. This was despite the brewery’s refusal to either advertise or offer its beer at a discount. Even though Guinness owned no public houses, the company was valued at £6 million and shares were twenty times oversubscribed, with share prices rising to a 60 per cent premium on the first day of trading. The breweries pioneered several quality control efforts. The brewery hired the statistician William Sealy Gosset in 1899, who achieved lasting fame under the pseudonym “Student” for techniques developed for Guinness, particularly Student’s t-distribution and the even more commonly known Student’s t-test. By 1900 the brewery was operating unparalleled welfare schemes for its 5,000 employees. By 1907 the welfare schemes were costing the brewery £40,000 a year, which was one-fifth of the total wages bill. The improvements were suggested and supervised by Sir John Lumsden. By 1914, Guinness was producing 2,652,000 barrels of beer a year, which was more than double that of its nearest competitor Bass, and was supplying more than 10 per cent of the total UK beer market. In the 1930s, Guinness became the seventh largest company in the world. Before 1939, if a Guinness brewer wished to marry a Catholic, his resignation was requested. According to Thomas Molloy, writing in the Irish Independent, “It had no qualms about selling drink to Catholics but it did everything it could to avoid employing them until the 1960s.” Guinness thought they brewed their last porter in 1973. In the 1970s, following declining sales, the decision was taken to make Guinness Extra Stout more “drinkable”. The gravity was subsequently reduced, and the brand was relaunched in 1981. Pale malt was used for the first time, and isomerized hop extract began to be used. In 2014, two new porters were introduced: West Indies Porter and Dublin Porter. Guinness acquired the Distillers Company in 1986.This led to a scandal and criminal trialconcerning the artificial inflation of the Guinness share price during the takeover bid engineered by the chairman, Ernest Saunders. A subsequent £5.2 million success fee paid to an American lawyer and Guinness director, Tom Ward, was the subject of the case Guinness plc v Saunders, in which the House of Lords declared that the payment had been invalid. In the 1980s, as the IRA’s bombing campaign spread to London and the rest of Britain, Guinness considered scrapping the Harp as its logo. The company merged with Grand Metropolitan in 1997 to form Diageo. Due to controversy over the merger, the company was maintained as a separate entity within Diageo and has retained the rights to the product and all associated trademarks of Guinness.