Reviving whiskey in the Liberties, as drink and tourist attraction 

Although Teeling’s distillery only opened in Newmarket in 2015, it is the oldest in Dublin. The Teeling name in Dublin whiskey goes back to 1782, when Walter Teeling had a small craft distillery on Marrowbone Lane.  

By the late 1800s there were over 37 different distilleries in Dublin, all of them in a south-city area called the Golden Triangle. In this time, 60% of the world’s supply of whiskey was made in Ireland, but by the mid-1900s it had dropped to only 1%. Scotland is now the number one seller.  

All the distilleries in Dublin closed in the 1900s, with the Powers Distillery being the last to do so in 1976. When Teeling reemerged in 2015, it was opened by descendents of Walter, Jack and Stephen Teeling. Teeling brought “a new chapter to life” hence why they have adopted the symbol of the phoenix. The symbol also alludes to the Great Dublin Whiskey Fire in 1875.

Laurence Malone had a warehouse near a coal factory, not far from where Teeling’s now stands, and this warehouse caught fire. The warehouse contained 5,000 hopheads of whiskey, that would have in total cost £54,000 (£6.58 million now). The cause of the fire is unknown, but the aftermath was ‘utter chaos’. The barrels of whiskey began to explode and sent rivers of burning liquor flooding the streets of the Liberties.

The fire caused destruction in the city and killed 13 people – not by burns or injury, but by alcohol poisoning, as people drank the liquor flowing through the streets.

While on a guided tour of the Teeling Disitllery, the tour guide Stephen told us that “for a whiskey to be considered vintage it has to be in a barrel for 10 years”, and vintage whiskey comes at a costly price. Teelings 30-year Single Malt is a whopping €925.  

Unlike the strict rules in most other countries, Irish law allows for experimentation with different wood types for barrels. There are no specific rules on what wood we must use to store the whiskey in. Although they are not able to store all their barrels in Dublin – the company has long had a distillery in Louth – there are four barrels kept within the distillery grounds – filled, we are told, on the days that Stephen Teeling’s daughters Zöe, Holly and Ferne were born, and they won’t be opened until each girl’s 21^st birthday.  

The fourth barrel kept with them is an important part of Dublin’s whiskey history. It was Batch One of the Teeling Single Pot Still. It was the first whiskey distilled in the new distillery, and it was the first Dublin whiskey distilled since 1976. This barrel was opened, and one bottle was capped and auctioned for €10,000.  

Part of the tour includes seeing where and how the whiskey is made. Whiskey is composed of three ingredients: water, yeast and grain. The first few steps of making whiskey are the same procedure as brewing beer, minus the hops.  

Speaking to tour-guide Stephen after the tour, he told us about the bar in the distillery. The bar is called the Bang Bang Bar, named after Thomas Dudley, the legendary Dublin figure nicknamed Bang Bang as he used to pretend to shoot people with his hands.