Our Story

Our story started over 1000 years ago… when the Moors shared their distilling knowledge with the Irish monasteries around the 12th century. The Gaels were taught these skills and started to make Irish whiskey.

First mentioned in Irish literature in 1405 it was so popular, the Irish named this spirit, Uisce beatha, meaning "the water of life".

By the 15h century, Ireland was full of expert distillers and by the late 18th century, it was the most popular spirit in the world.

For many reasons, exports dwindled till finally in the early 70's, just one distillery, Irish distillers, was left holding the torch, lighting the path for others to follow. Then came 2009, When the customs and excise laws around alcohol were relaxed.

That sparked an idea 💡.... let's do our part to revive a spirit so intertwined with this islands history and use it as a reason to travel the world, to meet Gaels and their friends.

We started off teaching ourselves to distil in the garage! We finally became good at it winning multiple awards for our gin (2nd best in Ireland, damn those Kerry men 😀 !).... then we started to lay down new make whiskey until our first bottles were ready this year. This is how An Gael Irish Whiskey was born.

We are so looking forward to building our purpose built, brand new distillery in the beautiful Sperrin mountains, so we can experiment further and produce wonderful malts and blends for your enjoyment (intermixed with our amazing 3D stories about Ireland that you can view using our AR App).

All we can say is that with such history behind us, modern day Irish Whiskey is becoming one of the most sought after and exciting dinks categories in global spirits.

Irish Whiskey is really starting to produce a diverse range of styles. In the next couple of years, we will see a category that will take us to some very interesting places indeed.