Day 2

Started the day with a nice breakfast at the hotel then met our driver Paddy. Owen was there ahead of everyone, a pattern of early rising he kept to throughout the trip. He will be ferrying us around western Ireland for the next 4 days. Our first stop was at St. Patrick’s cathedral; the seat of the Church of Ireland. The cathedral and grounds were very beautiful.

Next stop was the Guinness Brewery at St. James Gate and the Guinness Store. The self-guided tour was interesting. I found the portion of cooperage and coopers the most interesting. It was fascinating to see the level of expertise the master coopers had with just hand tools. The tour ended at the top of the building in the Gravity pub. Here we had our complimentary pint and enjoyed the views of Dublin from up high. Beer of the day was of course Guinness, but I was surprisingly impressed with their Hop House 13 Lager. Also very good.

After leaving Dublin Paddy organized a stop in Kilbeggan to visit the Killbeggan distillery. It is a small distillery that produces only two barrels a day. The production distillery is north of Dublin and produces several other brands including one of my favorites Tirconnell. The tour was split between the old distillery (now a museum) and the newer, currently operating, boutique distillery. The old distillery was powered by a water wheel which still works when the water is running high enough. Although no longer connected to all the equipment, it mainly provides atmosphere for the tours when running. There was also a back-up steam engine that was used when water power was unavailable. It too is still in operating condition and is started on

occasion by a historical steam engine group.

The newer, operating part of the distillery consists of essentially a brewery for producing wort and fermenting it into “wash” and a set of two pot stills for distilling the wash into whiskey. Their process consists of two distillations to achieve the desired proof. The clear whiskey is then transferred into bourbon barrels from the U.S. to be aged a minimum of 3 years. Most of the

barrels are then sent to Kilbeggan’s sister distillery Cooley north of Dublin to be further aged different casks and then bottled. Only a very few barrels are bottled on-site as cask strength distillers reserve.

The tour finished with a tasting of four of the whiskeys produced by Kilbeggan. We sampled the Kilbeggan Single Pot Still, Single Grain, Tyrconnel Port Aged, and the Connemara Peated Single Malt. All very good and distinctive.

Finally it was on to Galway to check into the Galway Bay Hotel, dinner at The Galleon restaurant, and drinks and music at O’Conner’s pub. All together a fantastic day.