Reviving Irish Whisk(e)y With McConnell's

Cocktails Distilled

Through the 18th and 19th Century Irish whiskey went from strength to strength, but at the beginning of the 20th century, legislation enacted across the sea in the United States practically brought the whiskey industry in Ireland to its knees.
The United States was the biggest international market for Irish whiskey, and that country's enactment of prohibition forced the steals to stop and the distilleries that housed them often to close their doors.
One such distillery was JJ McConnell's, a brand that was the darling of Belfast and had existed since 1776. In the decades that followed, the brand lived on only as a memory, a whiskey from another time. But luckily, the brand's story doesn't end there.
In 2020, the newest and yet one of the oldest names in Irish whiskey started to be seen again from across bars from Belfast to Boston.
To find out more, we talked to global brand ambassador, Sarah Kennedy, about legacy, rebirth, and what it takes to recreate a fabled brand.