Region & History

On 20 December 1825, brothers James, Daniel and Jeremiah Murphy bought an old plot of land from the Lord of Midleton for £4,000. Two years earlier, a new tax law had suddenly made distilling in Ireland worthwhile. So the Murphys converted a disused woollen mill into a distillery. From this address in Midleton, just a few kilometres east of Cork, grew what is still Ireland's largest whiskey production today.

In 1867, five distilleries from the city of Cork merged to form the Cork Distilleries Company: Daly's, the Green, the North Mall and the Watercourse Distillery. A year later, James Murphy's operation in Midleton joined them. His enormous copper still held 140,000 litres and ran until the closure in 1975 – to this day the largest pot still ever built. Visit the old site in Midleton, and you'll still find yourself standing in front of it.

In 1966, the Cork Distilleries Company merged with John Power & Son and John Jameson & Son to form a new company: Irish Distillers. For the first time, Cork, Dublin and the Jameson name belonged to the same house. In 1975, the new company built a second, modern facility right next to the old distillery. The old site closed on the very same day. Today, a visitor centre leads guests past the silent stills of the past.

While Midleton grew, small-scale distilling all but vanished from Munster. It wasn't until 2003 that three friends from West Cork brought it back. John O'Connell and brothers Denis and Ger McCarthy started out distilling in a back room in Union Hall. They'd bought their two small stills from a Swiss schnapps distiller. In 2014, they moved to Skibbereen, and a new building followed in 2020. It made West Cork the largest Irish-owned distillery in the country.

Since then, the south has filled up with new distilleries. Waterford Distillery ran its first distillation in January 2016. Blackwater Distillery in Cappoquin has been distilling gin, poitín and whiskey on the river Blackwater since 2014. In Clonakilty, a distillery of its own has recently opened by the harbour. What began as a single address in Midleton has grown into an entire coastline.