From Barley to Blarney: A Whiskey Lover's Guide to Ireland. [Review]
From Barley to Blarney from the good folks at the Dead Rabbit in New York. What a great read!
Up front I loved it. It's really well written and has a wonderful light-hearted sense of humor that runs through it. It's beautifully illustrated and includes a geansai load of great photographs, maps, and illustrations and should be on the "must-read" list for any lover of Irish Whiskey who is looking to learn more about the renaissance that's happening right now. It's also a great travel guide for any of you looking to visit Ireland and visit any or many of the distilleries. The book is a snapshot of what was happening in 2017 which was when they did their "Whiskey Tour of Ireland" and at that time they visited 27 working distilleries
Written by Sean Muldoon, Jack McGarry, Tim Herlihy, and Conor Kelly with the majority of the photography by Elaine Hill. And I should mention "Poppy" the trustee VW Combi Van that took the intrepid crew the length and breadth of Ireland.
They break the island down into five geographical regions, Leinster & Dublin, Munster, Connacht, and Ulster. And in each of these regions, they give equal billing to large and small distilleries alike with each one getting four pages of detail including their history, plans for the future, as well as some numbers and whiskey styles and bottlings.
On this epic road-trip they stopped into somewhere in the region of 160 pubs, over 5 weeks, and by hook or by crook they managed to whittle these down to 50 that they've included in each of the regions with each of these pubs getting a two-page nod. The question here is when is the book with all of the 160-ish pubs going to be released?
It's great to see some places local to where the family home is located, with Johnnie Fox's Pub in Glencullen getting a shout-out in the Dublin Pubs section while Powerscourt Distillery in Enniskerry gets a shout-out in the Leinster Distilleries section. Oh, the memories!
10 pages of world-class Cocktail recipes are included at the back to whet your whistle even more and the book has a great Glossary, a distilled History of distillation, and a breakdown of Irish Whiskey styles and how it's made.
No surprise that it gets 5 emojis from me as it's such a great read and with bated breath I await the updated edition with revisits to the 27 already written about and visits to the nearly two dozen distilleries that have started since then.
160 pubs...5 weeks...Do the maths on that one!
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