I'm a Whiskey Expert. Here's How I Drank My Way Across Dublin in One Day
There are plenty of cities around the world that require a car to get around. But Dublin, Ireland, is certainly not one of them. It’s proudly and unequivocally a walker’s city. Its charming metropolitan streets are lined with striking architecture, including homes with brightly painted Georgian doors. Legend has it the colors help people too bleary-eyed to read numbers, find their way home after a night out at the pubs.
Despite being the birthplace to literary giants James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and Jonathan Swift, according to local lore citizens could not at first agree on how to spell the city’s name. However, where there are writers, there are editors and eventually they struck red lines through Duiblinn, Dubh Linn, then Dyflin, and finally settled on Dublin.
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After squaring the name, the literary crew turned to writing tales of a whiskey town growing through turbulent times and revolutionary struggle. After all, whiskey has been a staple of the city, since the first legal distillery, the Marrowbone Lane Distillery, opened around 1752. Ultimately, there was a golden triangle of distilling – the ghosts of whiskey past, present and future.
Recently, I had one day in Dublin and it soon became my mission to explore the many ways that whiskey is part of the city’s culture. I was in the country to visit a relatively new craft distillery, Glendalough, which is about 90 minutes south of Dublin in picturesque County Wicklow. The brand’s head distiller, Ciaran “Rowdy” Rooney, respects the category’s traditions while introducing new and overlooked flavor profiles through non-traditional barrel aging. After some strategic planning with Rooney, it was time for me to wake up early and get moving.
8:45 AM My first first stop of the day was at Butlers Chocolate Café, which serves Dublin’s morning lifeblood: coffee and chocolate. Here you can enjoy a dram for breakfast in the form of chocolate truffles that include 4.8% Irish whiskey.
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9:30 AM After being caffeinated and satiated, I headed to famed tobacconist Peterson of Dublin, which dates back to 1865. Word on the street was that I could get some of its tinned pipe tobacco infused with Irish whiskey. Sadly, the rumors were not true. Strict tobacco rules mean this blend is only available for sale outside of Ireland. If you want to burn whiskey, this isn’t the country for it.
9:36 AM Determined the morning wasn’t going to go up in smoke, my next stop was the food hall at Fallon & Byrne on Exchequer Street, which stocks sea salt infused with Irish whiskey and Irish organic salmon cold-smoked over oak with honey, fennel, and Irish whiskey. It was well worth the trip. After procuring both the salt and salmon, they accompanied me to the nearby Sheridan’s Cheesemongers.
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A word of caution: Don’t ask Sheridan’s for whiskey-flavored cheese, since they don’t carry it. Instead ask them to suggest Irish cheese pairings for Irish whiskey. Given that I had just tasted the Glendalough Double Barrel Whiskey and based on my description of its flavor profile, they recommended Mount Leinster raw-milk cheddar, which, like the whiskey, is sweet and fruity and develops nutty overtones with age. The cheddar’s subtle citrus notes accented the whiskey’s own delicate citrus tones. The store’s milder Coolea Extra Mature cow’s milk cheese underlined the whiskey’s creaminess and hints of caramel sweetness. Wicklow Blue, a blue Brie-style cheese, matched Glendalough’s texture perfectly while its sharpness matched Double Barrel’s approaching late-palate spice flares.
Related: We Tasted Hundreds of Whiskeys. Redbreast 18-Year-Old Is the Best Irish Whiskey of the Year
10:38 AMThe Celtic Whiskey Shop & Wines on The Green was just two minutes away. Dublin’s retail hub for whiskey enthusiasts offers a comprehensive selection of Irish whiskeys, including expressions from Bushmills, Midleton, Jameson, Teeling and Redbreast. There are also distillery exclusives and collectible bottles. If you’re looking for a specific Irish whiskey, it’s here. The selection is so big that I feared it was testing the floor’s weight limit.
11:33 AM There is no shortage of pubs in Dublin – about 750 of them – each with an authentic personality. To visit them all in a single day, you would need to hit one up every 2 minutes. The problem? Alcohol can only be sold on licensed premises starting at 10:30 AM on weekdays, so given that it’s Thursday, I’m already 63 minutes behind.
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The authentic Victorian pub, The Swan, is located on the corner of York and Aungier Streets. It reminds us that historically Irish pubs were a social, family-owned institution passed down from one generation to the next. Here, third-generation publican Ronan Lynch treats the establishment as a living space and customers as guests.
The Swan is all original, complete with stained-glass windows, mahogany trim and the original tiled floors whose design naturally features a mosaic swan right in front of the door. The establishment is called the Swan because, back in the day, when most people couldn’t read or write, pubs were recognized by their symbol.
Irish whiskey lines the backbar and are framed by original housings once used for whiskey barrels, so that bartenders could pull directly from the cask. This system was in place until the 1950s, when Ronan’s father, Rugby Hall of Famer Sean Lynch, cleaned and labelled Powers Whiskey bottles before filling them from these casks.
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12:45 PM A short walk from The Swan, is the Long Hall, which is recognizable by its iconic red-and-white striped awning above the entrance. The pub, which opened in the 1860s, was last refurbished in 1881, when the owners installed behind the bar a lavish Frengley Brothers clock called “Old Regulator.” Mismatched chandeliers dot the red tin roof, as if they were plucked from Victorian estate sales, cast a warm glow on a backbar of Irish whiskey.
2:01 PM There was still plenty of light outside and my odyssey was long from over. Heading up the inclined cobblestone streets of Temple Bar, my first stop was the Palace Bar, which stocks more than 100 Irish whiskeys. I followed that with a quick detour that brought me to Bowes, which opened in 1880 and currently stocks 225 whiskeys behind the bar.
3:00 PM Then it was time to head to Mulligan’s on Poolbeg Street, which is one of Dublin’s oldest pubs and has been legal since 1782. Writer James Joyce frequented it and even featured the establishment in his short story “Counterparts.” Later John F. Kennedy and Judy Garland had drinks there in the 1950s.
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4:00 PM Back in Temple Bar, I stopped by the Whiskey Reserve, which boasts a staggering 2,000 whiskeys, including a single-cask Glendalough aged in Madeira casks with a finish that lasts long after you cross the Grattan Bridge to get to Dublin’s award-winning Bar 1661.
5:14 PM Bar 1661 is named for the year the British Crown banned the distilling of poitín,. The liquor became a symbol of Irish defiance as production shifted underground. Bar 1661 evokes this history, remaining staunchly Irish and fiercely independent, while elevating Irish cocktail culture with poitín.
Its delicious Belfast Coffee refines traditional Irish coffee with cold brew, cream, poitín, and demerara sugar. It’s intensely creamy, with gentle coffee lemon notes and caramelized sugar — decadent yet balanced. With the caffeine providing a second wind and the arrival of some friends, drinking at Bar 1661’s until last call became inevitable.
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After circling back to other bars and late spots with Rowdy, it was time to find my hotel and hope the front door was brightly painted or identified by a tile mosaic of a bed. Or was that a swan?
source https://www.mensjournal.com/drink/one-day-whiskey-tour-of-dublin
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