Region & History

Irish whiskey has centuries of history behind it, but Irish gin is a young chapter by comparison. It really only begins after 2014, when the island counted just four working distilleries. Most of these were set up for whiskey. What followed was one of the fastest waves of new openings in the European spirits scene. Gin was almost always the starting point, since it needs no years of cask ageing.

In Drumshanbo, a small town in County Leitrim, PJ Rigney opened The Shed Distillery with his wife Denise in 2014. It was the first distillery in the area in over a hundred years. Rigney had spent decades travelling beforehand, including along old tea and spice routes in Asia. His Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish Gin combines Chinese gunpowder green tea with meadowsweet from the fields around Drumshanbo.

A little earlier, in 2012, Oliver Hughes, Liam LaHart and Peter Mosley founded Dingle Distillery. The three were experienced Dublin brewers. Their distillery sits in a former sawmill near Milltown, close to Dingle in County Kerry. Their Dingle Gin became the flagship of a peninsula that hardly anyone had previously associated with spirits.

In the Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin, Glendalough Distillery was founded in 2011. The distillery says it employs Ireland's only full-time wild botanical forager, Geraldine Kavanagh. She roams the mountains daily, bringing back botanicals for the gin. Further west, off the coast of Mayo, lies Achill Island, Ireland's largest island. Its bogs and cliffs show just how closely landscape and flavour are linked here.

The numbers reflect the pace of change. From four distilleries in 2014, the country grew to around fifty Irish gin brands across 32 counties by 2019. Irish gin sales grew by roughly 184 percent between 2014 and 2020. Its share of the spirits market rose from around 5 to 13 percent. England's Gin Craze of the 18th century sprang from cheap juniper spirit and misery. Ireland's boom, by contrast, was a craft project of small teams from the very start.

Whiskey remains the backbone of most of these houses. It often lies ageing for years while the gin already brings in revenue. That's precisely the Irish peculiarity. Gin is the workshop where young distilleries show what they can do, long before the first whiskey is even ready.