The Angel's Share

A wine enthusiast goes to the land of clurichauns in Ireland for a lesson in Irish whiskey—its origins, distillation nuances, and nomenclature.

- Rathina Sankari

“GET ME TWO BOTTLES,” said my friend, when I told him I was set to travel to Ireland. He meant the world-famous Irish whiskey, of course. This drink from the Emerald Isle finds many aficionados across the globe. Mark Twain once famously said, “Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.” Twain’s Irish contemporary and Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw called the drink ‘liquid sunshine’.

For one, I prefer medium- or light-bodied wines with a fruity, sweet finish to any other drink. But I was eager to explore the history of the Irish whiskey, which is as complex as its country of origin. Called uisce beatha in the native Gaelic language, it translates to ‘water of life’. But how could whiskey be the water of life? What came first—the Irish Whiskey or the Scottish Whisky, both being Celtic? Why was

Irish whiskey distilled for three years and one day? What is the ‘angel’s share’? There were too many questions swimming in my head.

So I headed to the Irish Whiskey Museum (irishwhiskeymuseum.ie) in Dublin, bang opposite the renowned Trinity College. My guide Grace, with her Irish accent, told me that the earliest written records of the Scottish whisky (the Scots spell it without the ‘e’, but more on that later) go back to 1494, while that of Irish whiskey date to 1405 in the book Annals of Clonmacnoise, now found in the Trinity College. Later, when I searched the realm of the internet, I found that author Kate Hopkins in her book 99 Drams of Whiskey says there is no proof to determine the birth country of this tipple. Grace further went onto inform me that Irish whiskeys are traditionally triple-distilled, which gives them a smoother and lighter finish, while the Scottish version is double-distilled and some experience a burn while drinking them.