The Uisce Beatha
The old joke says God invented whiskey to keep the Irish from ruling the world. Maybe. But in the Ireland I know, whiskey is not some nightly national performance staged behind a rainy pub window.
It is more often a quick short at the edge of things: a birth, a wedding, a wake, a bad tooth, a bad day. A little fire in the glass when words are either too much or not nearly enough.
Uisce
Uisce is Irish for water, pronounced roughly “ishka”. Add the beatha, (bah-ha) the Irish word for life, and you get the old phrase behind whiskey: the water of life. You can hear the word changing shape as it crosses mouths and centuries, from uisce to whiskey, from language to a printed label.
Most people are not pouring it every night, despite what the postcards and tourist shows may suggest. But many households keep a bottle somewhere close, because life has a way of arriving without an appointment.
Someone gets sick. Someone has a baby. Someone dies. Someone needs steadying. The bottle comes out, not as indulgence exactly, but as ritual, remedy, support.
So what does the average Irish household have on hand? Many would have the ol’ green bottle of Jameson. Jameson is what most people think of as Irish whiskey-it’s the Heinz ketchup of whiskeys. It is a reliable, reasonably priced tipple.
Distilled in Cork, it is the standard against which others are measured. It is sweetish, oaty, and mellow as far as whiskey goes.
Brew Your Own Whiskey
Ireland’s relationship with small brewing has been different than what happened in the US and other countries. Where the rest of the world had this huge artisanal bathtub beer business, it never took off in Ireland. That seemed strange. Beer is something that the Irish drink plenty of. And why not have some variety?
Well I found out. The big breweries in Ireland like Guinness, squash all the small breweries by lowering their prices to keep those small breweries from having a tap or shelf space in pubs and shops. They have been able to maintain their monopoly.
Moonshine
Whiskey is different to beer though. If the whiskey companies wanted to play that same game with the old illegal stuff, they found the ground less cooperative. The Irish moonshiner, or maker of poitín, had brand loyalty before anyone in marketing learned to say “brand loyalty.”
In some places, it runs through families and farms as an unofficial inheritance. Any self-respecting farmer might still know where to lay hands on a bottle of mountain hooch if the need arose.
And why would the need arise? Ask around and you will hear the old explanations: a dose for an animal, a shock to bring a sheep back from the edge, a taste of the old way, a clean burn, a reminder that not everything worth having comes with a barcode.
Micil
A perfect example of old into new is Micil. Eleven years ago, I was a “mature” Gaeltacht student, which is a polite way of saying I had voluntarily returned to the classroom long after I should have known better. It was, unexpectedly, a gift. For a short stretch of time, I was a kid again, released from every adult obligation except studying, listening, speaking, and trying not to embarrass myself too badly.
I had a great roommate, a fabulous teacher, and one of those accidental dips into a deeper Ireland that tourists rarely find. That teacher was Padraic O’Griallais, and through him came Micil: not just a drink, but a family story, a language story, and his stubborn little dream carried forward from the old illicit moonshine world into the present.
Salthill Giant
When Padraic confessed that he was quitting teaching to distill poitín, I have to admit that I was worried about him. He had one of those moonshine legacy recipes and a stubborn dream. The poitín is for a select market for sure.
Happily, Padraic and the Micil brand have expanded. My favorite is their gin. They make several different cask whiskeys, with different flavor notes and ages. They also have a cream liqueur like Bailey’s that is sooo much better. The plan was to move the distillery from Salthill and go out into Connemara, but I think it’s better that they stayed close to Galway proper.
Micil has gotten its fair share of publicity. Padraic and Micil were featured on Gordon Ramsey’s syndicated regional cooking show. He told me that Gordon has a lot of charisma and was wonderful to work with, despite the crusty image.
Gordon charmed everyone by making time to go the family house and meet Padraic’s mother. Then came an appearance on Eugene Levy’s Apple TV travel show.
That was a different story, all business. Micil also has product placement on the Irish language soap opera Ros na Rún too.
Final Frontier
Whiskey tasting has become a pinky-finger lifted kind of thing. People, ok men, spend a lot of money to try all kinds of exotic little angel shares of fancy “aged for centuries, rolled on the Titanic, flavored by rainforest orchids”- whiskey. I didn’t understand how anyone could walk out of these events, but apparently you only get tiny sips spread out over hours.
Great, hours and hours, even less appealing. All that said, this is a great market to get into because of the interest and tricky because of present trade tariffs.
We happened into the distillery at Christmas, and I got to see Padraic again. It was wonderful to see how well things were going. Micil is a Galway staple.
Of course this isn’t the product of luck. He is as single-minded and hard-working as they come. It is certainly the water of life for him.
What about the rest of us? Water of life? Maybe a lubricant of life … But, when a group show up on your doorstep with a bottle in hand, some life event has surely occurred.
Beer just doesn’t have the cache. Beer doesn’t celebrate sufficiently nor does it ease the passage.
It doesn’t have the strength. It isn’t strong enough to shock life into the wounded or ease mortal pain. So water of life? Yeah maybe…
Videos:
Micil Irish Whiskey Micil tour- YouTube
