Whisky Heritage Across Britain and Ireland

Whisky is one of the great cultural inheritances of the British Isles. Its origins are shared between Scotland and Ireland — indeed the two countries have argued for centuries over which can claim the earlier tradition — and its subsequent development across Britain, Ireland and the wider English-speaking world has been shaped by the movement of people, the movement of grain and the movement of empire.

In Scotland, whisky is inseparable from the identity of the Highlands. The image of the small still concealed in a Highland glen, the exciseman climbing a hillside in search of it, and the illicit spirit being carried down by pack-pony to the market town below is one of the founding stories of the modern Scotch industry. The Excise Act of 1823 brought that world to an end, but its memory persists in every distillery brochure and every glass raised in the Highlands today.

In Ireland, the tradition is older in written record. The monasteries of medieval Ireland practised distillation from at least the twelfth century, and the country's first legal distilling licence — granted to Old Bushmills in 1608 — is the oldest in the world. Irish whiskey developed its distinctive triple-distilled character in the great Dublin and Cork distilleries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even after the near-collapse of the industry in the twentieth century, that heritage has been preserved and, more recently, expanded upon.

Ireland holds the oldest licence. Scotland built the industry. The tradition belongs to both.

The Lowlands of Scotland produced the great blending dynasties of the nineteenth century. It was in Kilmarnock that John Walker set up shop; in Perth that John Dewar built his blending house; in Leith and Glasgow that a dozen other merchants assembled the whiskies that would carry Scotch to the world. These were, in origin, urban and commercial enterprises rather than rural or agricultural ones, and their contribution to the modern industry is fully as important as that of the Highland distilleries.

In England, whisky-making itself is a smaller tradition, though not an absent one. The English Whisky Company, established in Norfolk in 2006, was the first English malt distillery to operate in over a century, and it has been followed by others. There is now a small but growing English whisky industry.

Across the Irish Sea and the Atlantic, the Scots-Irish diaspora carried the craft of distilling to the American frontier, where it evolved into bourbon and rye. The link between the whiskies of Kentucky and Tennessee and the older traditions of Britain and Ireland is one of the deep connections of the English-speaking world.

To speak of whisky as a British and Irish cultural inheritance is not to reduce it. It is to recognise that a spirit made from grain, water and time has, over the course of nearly a millennium, become one of the enduring achievements of the islands that first learned to make it.