I left London this morning and arrived in Dublin just before
11:00. Nate and I are staying at a nice
bed and breakfast near Gardner Street in the north part of the city. The first thing we saw was the Irish Writers
Museum, which is dedicated to Irish literature and the authors, poets, and
playwrights produced on the island. I
found the subject to be very interesting, learning about the lives and styles
of the likes of James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Patrick Kavanagh, Frank O’Connor,
George Bernard Shaw and Jonathon Swift.
After that, we got lunch and finished checking into our bed
and breakfast.
Setting off on foot, we found the Jameson Distillery. Founded in 1780 by John Jameson, the whiskey
distillery still operates on the same ground over two hundred years later. The tour of the facility went through the preserved
original factory, showing Jameson’s unique approach to brewing whiskey that
makes it unique from all others in the world.
The first main difference is that the barley is cooked using smokeless
flame, originally with special type of charcoal, nowadays with natural
gas. This is very different from scotch
whiskey, which is cooked with a fire fueled by peat sod, or turf, which produces
a smoke that heavily flavors the end product.
Another difference is the iconic Jameson triple-distillation method,
which is a method of extracting alcohol from water. One of the most influential factors on a
whiskey’s taste is the barrel that it is aged in. In Ireland, whiskey must sit in a barrel
undisturbed for at least three years in order to be called a whiskey. During the aging process, the whiskey takes
some flavor from the barrel. Jameson
uses three different types of barrel, all of them oak: used bourbon barrels
from Kentucky, used sherry barrels from Spain, and used port barrels from Portugal. After aging, these three varieties are “married”
back together to produce the finished product.
The difference in the type of barrel is one of the chief differences
between Irish and American whiskeys.
Jack Daniels, for instance, uses brand-new oak barrels, the taste of
which is evident in the American whiskey’s bite. Jameson’s base product is a three-year old whiskey;
their premier label is aged ten-years.
In the museum, they also showed barrels that had been aging for twenty
and thirty years. Typically, the longer a whiskey has been aged,
the better it is considered to be.
During the aging process, however, 10% of the product evaporates through
the barrel and into the air. This gives
the aging rooms a rather thick, sweet-smelling air. The Irish, poetic by nature, call this
evaporated whiskey the “angels’ share.”
Nate and I were lucky enough to be selected as one of eight
volunteers to be given a lesson on distinguishing whiskeys by taste-test. At the end of the tour, as everyone was given
a free sample of whiskey, the eight of us were placed at a table with three
shot glasses of three different whiskeys.
We were told to sample each and told the differences between them and it
demonstrated first-hand the differences in brewing technique. The three sampled were a Jack Daniels, a
ten-year old Jameson, and a twelve-year old Johnny Walker black label scotch
blend. Scottish “scotch” whiskeys are
most often “blends”, which means that they are composed of many separate
whiskeys that have come from many different distilleries. The Johnny Walker that we sampled, for
instance, was a blend from 40 different distilleries. I definitely was able to recognize the smoky
flavor that had been given to the scotch from the peat fire. One last interesting note, the word “whiskey”
itself comes from the Gaelic expression ishke
beatdhe, meaning “the water of life.”
After that we wandered around Dublin and saw Christ Church,
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Dublin Castle.
I am currently assembling our agenda for tomorrow, so stay tuned.
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