Ireland -- Whiskey's Political Line Is Wobbly, These Days

Whiskey toasts and whiskey songs, whiskey poems and whiskey jokes. The "water of life" flows freely throughout Ireland, a uniting river of fiery spirit reaching from the northernmost beaches of the Antrim Coast to the far south of Bantry Bay.

But there was a time not too long ago in Ireland when what you drank Saturday night depended on where you prayed Sunday morning.

Jameson whiskey was the choice of Catholics, distilled and bottled in the far south near Cobh, the once-great seaport where generations of Catholic Irish fled the potato famine for the new world.

If you were a Protestant, your drink was Bushmills, made in the town of the same name in Northern Ireland, the part of the island that stayed with the United Kingdom after the partition of 1921.

Today, those divisions are as blurred as the vision of someone who's had a wee too many drams of the golden elixir.

Both Bushmills and Jameson are owned by the conglomerate Irish Distillers. Which in turn is owned by Pernod Ricard. So, technically, all Irish whiskeys are owned by the French.

They may be units of the same company, but old ways die hard in the Irish whiskey business.

My recent visit to the famed distilleries found more than a smidgeon of competition between the two. And the religious divisions, while officially gone, live on.

The Jameson distillery today looks like a huge hydroelectric plant, all steel walls and smokestacks. But next door is the Irish Whiskey Heritage Center, the old whiskey works that literally smells of history. It's no longer a working distillery, but a museum to the great Irish drink.

Tours lead past ancient copper kettles where the whiskey was distilled. In Ireland, whiskey is distilled three times, and nothing is added in the process except air. In comparison, Scottish whisky, or Scotch, is distilled twice, and peat smoke is added during the mashing and fermentation.

In those pre-politically correct days, everyone drank on the job. The workers were given a portion a day. Whiskey that somehow came out stronger than 100 proof couldn't be sold to the public, so the workers would take the extra-strong stuff home. The excise agents would sip away in their tiny tax-recording office off the main storage area.

Even heaven got involved - some of the whiskey would evaporate into the air during the distillation process, which the workers called "the angel's share."

While there is no open discrimination anymore, the reality of religious segregation means that the Jameson distillery's employees are mostly Catholics. Employees are drawn from the surrounding towns, which are overwhelmingly Catholic in the far south of Ireland.

Bushmills is a similar story - with a different majority. The distillery is on the Antrim Coast in the far north of Northern Ireland.

"To be honest, we draw our work force from the surrounding community and it is a very Protestant area," said John Beaton, a Bushmills tour guide.

Bushmills claims to be the world's oldest distillery, dating to 1608. But that's just a technicality.

"We've been making whiskey here since the 1100s," Beaton said. "They just got the license in 1608. So, we've been at it for nearly 900 years. We think we're pretty good at it. No, we know we're good at it."

Working distillery

During a half-hour tour, visitors hear the clang, clang, clang of hammers against metal and the rattling of bottles coming down an assembly line. Cases are stacked high in a warehouse. On a cold spring morning, the room feels like summer in the Caribbean - hot and humid.

"This is a working distillery - The aroma you smell is whiskey making," Beaton said. "The very `water of life' itself."

Beaton can't help taking a subtle dig at the Jameson factory down south.

"Our water comes over basalt - theirs over limestone down in Cork," he said. "It's a slight variation, but we think it's important.

"Besides, we're not just some museum," he says. "That's why the mashing unit is closed today. We're using some caustic soda for cleaning, and we don't want to splash it on you good people."

The gigantic stills use 8.5 tons of mash and 9,000 tons of water each to create whiskey.

"When we're done, we sell the leftover mash to the farmers," Beaton said. "In Ireland, we don't have mad cows. We have happy cows."

The distillery has well over a million gallons of whiskey on the site on any given day. Much of the whiskey is stored in American oak barrels from the Blue Grass Cooperage in Kentucky.

"The same cooperage used by Jack Daniel's," Beaton says. The more expensive Black Bush is put into Portuguese sherry barrels.

Law requires that Irish whiskey be stored for three years before it is sold. To mark the millennium, Bushmills is selling $7,000 kegs of whiskey with buyers' names burned into them. The kegs will be shipped out around the world just before the New Year's celebrations.

If they can't wait that long, visitors on the tour can enjoy a dram in the tasting room, where there's an old advertisement showing a man by a fireplace getting "the Bushmills glow." On that cold spring day, I opted for a hot toddy - a warming mix of whiskey and lemon.

Politics

Politics can still wreak havoc in the whiskey trade. A top Bushmills distributor last year sponsored the local football team of the Gaelic Athletic Association.

The amateur association has its headquarters in Dublin, and as part of its bylaws, bars security forces and soldiers in Northern Ireland from playing on its affiliated teams.

The sponsorship riled many in the pro-British north. The mayor of nearby North Down announced that she had barred Bushmills whiskey in her official parlor.

Beaton insists that such problems are a rarity and that any political divisions end at the factory gate.

"We have fair employment here - there's no discrimination," he said. "All that stuff about Catholic whiskey and Protestant whiskey went away a long time ago."

Union Jack flags wave from stores and posts, and the curbstones are painted red, white and blue - the colors of the British flag.

Back in the United States, I informed friends of the new realities of the whiskey trade. One Catholic friend, a longtime Jameson drinker, admitted that he really preferred Black Bush but had felt guilty about it all these years.

The word hasn't filtered down everywhere. Last fall, I visited the Mad Hatter's bar on Geary Street in San Francisco. The bartender came by.

"An Anchor Steam beer and a shot of Irish whiskey," I ordered.

"The whiskey - Protestant or Catholic?" he asked.

------------------------------- IF YOU GO

Finding your way there

The Jameson Heritage Centre, Distillery Road, Midleton, Republic of Ireland. Open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily March through November. Admission: 3.50 Irish punts (about $6). Local telephone: 021-613-594.

Old Bushmills Distillery, Main Street, Bushmills, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. Hours vary by season, but generally 9 a.m to 3:30 p.m Monday through Thursday. Admission is 2.50 British pounds (about $4). Local telephone: 012657-31521.

Irish Whiskey Corner, Bow Street, Dublin. Tours highlighting history of Irish whiskey. Open daily May-October. Monday through Friday, November-April. Call for tour times. Local telephone: 01-872-5566.