Wise’s Irish Whiskey, Barry Crockett & Stephan D’Alton

This is a very well researched book documenting the family history of the Wise’s who built up the North Mall Distillery in Cork spanning a 200 year period.

In 1828 North Mall was the biggest producing distillery in Cork – even outperforming the big Dublin 4 of the Jamesons William & John, Roe & Powers. It was only outsold by Limerick giants Stein & Brown. Over 400,000 gallons of spirit was produced by Wise’s alone that year.

Given that none of these original distilleries now stand & only a few of the brand names survive in different forms – what changed?

The Coffey Still.

The new patent still allowed a much more productive & efficient method of distilling spirits & brought about the rise of blended whiskey.

There was great resistance from the established Irish distilleries to the Coffey Still – which benefited the Belfast distilleries who took up the opportunities created by the new technology.

By 1907 Coffey Stills in Ireland – mainly Belfast based – were out producing pot stills by almost 2 & a half times.

The Wise’s at North Mall failed to modernise which led to falling sales & eventually amalgamation with other Cork distilleries to survive. They continued to produce pot still whiskey which was becoming a more expensive premium style of whiskey proving harder to sell & lost market share to the more popular & affordable blended whiskey.

Meanwhile the Belfast distilleries were bought out by the big Scottish distillery giants & production moved to their homeland.

Pot still sales further declined & it wasn’t until the remaining Dublin & Cork distilleries combined to form the New Midleton Distillery in 1975 that Irish Whiskey eventually embraced the blend by fitting Coffey Stills in the modern facility. That move – as well as having an up to date marketing strategy to promote those new blended Irish Whiskey products – brought about the end of the decline & started the rebirth of Irish Whiskey around the world.

A lot of the background to the fall of Irish Whiskey is documented in this publication – even if it isn’t the main theme of the book.

It does however fascinate me that such a large & proud whiskey distilling empire could fall so far because of it’s failure to embrace new technology & methods.

There’s lessons still to be learnt from that.

Sláinte