In 1887, the British whisky writer Alfred Barnard set out to visit every whisky distillery in the British Isles and document what he found. His book, The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom, was part travelogue, part industrial survey — illustrated with engravings of each site he visited.
When Barnard arrived in Dublin, what he encountered was overwhelming. The George Roe distillery on Thomas Street was the single largest distillery in the entire British Isles. The Jameson distillery on Bow Street, the Powers distillery on John's Lane, and the Comber distillery in Northern Ireland — Dublin was the undisputed centre of the world whiskey industry.
Eighty years later, all of these distilleries had closed. Across the whole of Ireland, only two whiskey distilleries remained in operation.
What happened?
The Height of Dublin's Power
In the mid-nineteenth century, Irish whiskey was the premium spirit of the English-speaking world. In the gentlemen's clubs of London, the bars of New York, and the colonies of the Victorian British Empire, "whiskey" very often meant Irish.
The numbers support this. By the 1870s, Irish whiskey production exceeded twelve million gallons annually. Dublin's four great distilleries — Jameson, Powers, Roe, and John Jameson & Son — each employed thousands of workers and formed a central pillar of the capital's economy.
Irish whiskey's strength lay in the pot still method and the distinctive use of unmalted barley alongside malted barley. This combination produced a heavier, oilier texture and a complexity of flavour that many contemporary critics ranked above Scotch.
The First Crack — Rejecting the Coffey Still (1831)
The seeds of Irish whiskey's decline were planted by a machine invented by an Irishman.
Aeneas Coffey was a Dublin-born excise officer who spent years inspecting whiskey distilleries. In 1831 he patented the continuous still — now known as the Coffey still or column still. Its principle was efficiency: where the traditional pot still had to be stopped, emptied, and recharged between batches, the Coffey still ran continuously. It produced far more spirit from the same volume of raw material, at a fraction of the cost.
Coffey offered this invention to Irish distillers first. They refused.
Their reasoning was a matter of pride. The great Dublin distillers argued that spirit produced in a Coffey still was light and characterless — not whiskey at all. In 1879, the leading Dublin distilleries issued a joint statement declaring that continuous-still spirit could not legitimately be called whiskey.
They were right about the quality argument. But the market was moving in a different direction.
Scottish distillers adopted the Coffey still enthusiastically. By blending the cheap, light grain whisky produced in column stills with traditional malt whisky, they created blended Scotch — affordable, smooth, and easy to drink. The Victorian mass market chose it.
The very qualities the Irish distillers had condemned — lightness, accessibility — turned out to be exactly what made blended Scotch commercially dominant. Through the 1880s and 1890s, blended Scotch gained rapidly on Irish whiskey in the British market. While Jameson and Powers sold premium pot still whiskey at premium prices, blended Scotch captured the everyday drinker.
Three Disasters at Once
If the Coffey still rejection was a slow puncture, the early twentieth century delivered three blows simultaneously. Any one of them alone would have been serious. Together, they proved nearly fatal.
First Blow — Irish Independence and British Economic Retaliation (1919–1922)
The Irish War of Independence began in 1919. During the conflict, British trade restrictions made exporting to the British market effectively impossible. When the Irish Free State was established in 1922, independence solved the political problem but deepened the economic one. Irish whiskey, previously circulating freely within the British Empire as a domestic product, now faced tariffs as a foreign import.
The British Empire had been Irish whiskey's largest export market. Independence turned that market into contested territory.
Second Blow — American Prohibition (1920–1933)
In 1920 the United States enacted Prohibition. Irish whiskey's second major export market disappeared overnight.
The damage ran deeper than lost sales. During the thirteen years of Prohibition, the American black market for spirits was flooded with low-quality bootleg liquor labelled "Irish whiskey." With genuine Irish whiskey unavailable, American consumers who drank anything at all became accustomed to inferior imitations.
When Prohibition ended in 1933, American drinkers were reluctant to return to Irish whiskey for two reasons: thirteen years of absence had broken the habit, and the name "Irish whiskey" had been associated with poor-quality bootleg spirit.
Scotch fared differently. A well-organised smuggling network through Canada kept Scotch accessible to American consumers throughout Prohibition. When Repeal came, Scotch had maintained its American presence; Irish had not.
Third Blow — The Anglo-Irish Trade War (1932–1938)
In 1932, Éamon de Valera became Taoiseach of Ireland and stopped payment of the land annuities owed to Britain under an earlier treaty. Britain responded immediately with a 20% tariff on Irish goods. Ireland retaliated with tariffs on British goods. The Economic War lasted six years.
For Irish whiskey, this was a closing of the last remaining door. The British market had already been lost in practical terms; the Economic War formalised its closure. And in British Empire markets — India, Australia, Canada — Irish whiskey now competed under severe price disadvantage against Scotch.
The Collapse in Numbers
The cumulative effect of these three blows can be tracked precisely.
| Year | Irish Distilleries | Context |
|---|---|---|
| 1887 | ~30 | Barnard's survey, peak era |
| 1900 | ~28 | Late peak |
| 1920 | ~20 | Independence war effects beginning |
| 1930 | ~10 | Prohibition and trade war damage |
| 1950 | 6 | Post-war, additional WWII damage |
| 1966 | 3 companies | Before IDL merger |
| 1972 | 2 | Midleton and Bushmills only |
World War II added another wound. Ireland remained neutral, but grain rationing was imposed, and the volume of barley available for whiskey production collapsed. For an industry that depends on building up aged stocks, even a temporary production halt creates a decade-long supply problem.
George Roe's Thomas Street distillery — once the largest in the British Isles — closed in 1923. John Jameson & Son ceased trading in the 1920s. Powers declined year by year.
IDL — Merging to Survive
In 1966, the last three surviving companies — John Jameson & Son, John Power & Son, and the Cork Distilleries Company — merged to form Irish Distillers Limited (IDL).
This was not a strategic merger. It was consolidation under duress. None of the three companies was viable independently. IDL decided to concentrate all production at a single new facility: the Midleton distillery in County Cork. The Bow Street distillery in Dublin and the John's Lane distillery of Powers ceased operations by the late 1970s.
By the early 1970s, Ireland had two whiskey distilleries. Two. An industry with centuries of history had been compressed to a single pair of operating plants.
Why Scotch Survived
Scotland faced the same headwinds — Prohibition disrupted its American trade, wars rationed its grain supplies. Yet the Scottish industry emerged damaged but intact. The differences were structural.
Market diversification. Scotch had built a presence across continental Europe beyond the British Empire. Irish whiskey was heavily concentrated on Britain and America — and lost both.
The column still. Blended Scotch's low price point helped it hold consumers through economic depression. Irish whiskey's premium pricing left it exposed when consumers had less to spend.
Political status. Scotland remained part of Britain. Scotch moved freely within the British Empire with no tariff disadvantage. Irish independence removed this structural advantage.
Prohibition-era continuity. The Canadian smuggling route kept Scotch's American market relationship alive through Prohibition. Irish whiskey had no equivalent lifeline.
Renaissance
In 1988, Pernod Ricard acquired IDL. This proved to be the turning point for Jameson's revival. Pernod Ricard invested heavily in positioning Jameson as a global brand, focusing on its approachability as a strength rather than apologising for it.
Growth was slow through the 1990s. The breakthrough came in the early 2000s. Irish whiskey's smooth, accessible character aligned well with the cocktail culture revival sweeping the United States, and Jameson found a new generation of drinkers.
The numbers are dramatic. In 2000, Jameson sold approximately 500,000 cases annually. By 2020, that figure had exceeded eight million cases.
New distilleries followed. Teeling (opened in Dublin in 2015 — the first new Dublin distillery in 125 years), Dingle, Waterford, Walsh Whiskey, and dozens of others. By the 2020s, Ireland had more than forty operating distilleries — approaching the level of the late nineteenth century.
What History Leaves Behind
Irish whiskey's decline was not simple failure. The rejection of the Coffey still was a principled stand, and the principle was not wrong. Traditional Irish pot still whiskey was and is a more complex, labour-intensive spirit than blended Scotch.
But markets follow accessibility more readily than they follow principle. The political circumstances of independence, the external shock of Prohibition, the misfortune of the Economic War — these compounded in a way no industry could have prepared for.
The current renaissance is built on awareness of this history. The new Irish distilleries are restoring traditional pot still methods while also experimenting with styles that the nineteenth-century Dublin giants never imagined. To rebuild something once lost is to understand it more completely than those who built it the first time.
The Jameson distillery building on Bow Street in Dublin is a museum now. Whiskey was made there until 1987. Standing inside, it is hard to believe it was ever anything else.
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