Donegal returns

‘Just watch your feet, it’s slippery,’ James Doherty calls over his shoulder. No kidding. I’m skittering across the rocks as he strides, surefooted towards the tide. He crouches, calls again. ‘There’s some down here!’ I slide and wobble my way to where he’s hunched, the Atlantic breaking over his feet. He’s clutching a tiny sprig of seaweed. ‘Try it.’ 

I bite. There’s an immediate hit of chorizo and truffle. ‘Pepper dulse,’ he explains. ‘We harvest it for the gin.’ Down here at the time of the full moon, scissors in hand, giving the rocks a haircut. It’s extreme, but I’ve known James for long enough now to realise that he’ll go the distance if he thinks something is worthwhile. 

We pick our way back up through layered strata of limestone and mudstone, wind and water-carved into fantastical shapes. The waves coil and break, forever working their way into the Donegal coast. Inhale. Salt spray and lung-freezing, head-clearing, air. He grins. Points out to sea. ‘This is my happy place.’

Born to Donegal parents in England, this is where he spent summers with family. It is where he has returned to, finding lost cousins, and sense of belonging and purpose. The Irish and the Scots have long been wanderers – extra vagans as the Latin has it, with their extravagant thinking. [thanks Kenneth White for that]. 

Doherty followed that pathway: tea planting in Zimbabwe and Malawi where he met his wife Moira, international sales at William Grant, stints in Australia, and Hong Kong. The stuff of many people’s dreams – all expense accounts and big corporate strategies. But he belongs here, on Ireland’s northwest fringe, a place of cliffs and bog, tight roads and the relentless sea. This is home. It is where his dreams could become a reality. 

What pulled him back was a whiskey, one which would speak of his roots, and also whiskey’s roots – or to be more specific, Donegal whiskey’s roots. Single malt, triple distilled and unashamedly peated. 

’Its better to live a dream and look back,’ he says. ‘Making a peated whiskey was practical, and logical. It created a space which we could attack.’ There’s one of the the befits of that corporate life – knowing how smaller brands need to be smart, to find the gaps, to avoid being just A.N.Other Irish whiskey – as well as understanding that all of that also takes time.

The peated side also made historical and emotional sense. There are strong parallels between Irish whiskey and Scotch in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Just as Scotland had its ‘smuggling era’, so Ireland saw a battle between the legal ‘Parliamentary’ pot still whiskey which was made in the big cities and main market towns, and the illicit single malt known as poitín – and predominantly the smoky style made in Donegal. If ‘Glenlivet’ became shorthand for smuggled Scotch, so ‘Inishowen’ became the signature for smoky poitín. It wasn’t just a spirit of resistance, but one of quality – there are records of Inishowen being exported to Scotland.

In both countries, moonshining was a way to keep small-scale farmers on the land. The success of Inishowen also allowed landowners to raise rents for otherwise poor quality land which could now support a quasi-industry. In time, farmers became distillers. There are even accounts of Donegal importing barley in order to operate its illicit stills, and Inishowen having 23 mills. 

The Excise clampdown was resisted. One inspector, a certain Aeneas Coffey (yes, that one) was attacked in Inishowen and left with a fractured skull and bayonet wounds for his troubles. The Parliamentary whiskeys won the day, and by the end of the 19th century poitín faded from sight, though you could find it if you knew who to ask. Both of James’ grandfathers were knowledgeable in the art.

We pause for lunch of oysters and crab toes (claws to most other folks, but Donegal does things differently) in Nancy’s in Ardara, close to the distillery. What started as a single room dispensing drinks has now spread, room by room, turning an old house into a rambling organic maze of spaces.

Alan McHugh is one of the ninth generation of the same family to run the place, returning to Ardara along with his siblings when their father was ill. All had left Ireland, and scattered throughout the world. Wanderers returning to the call of home. The idea of return runs strongly in this new Ireland: a re-engagement with place, culture, drink, music, literature, and language.

‘Though this was coming home for me,’ says James, ‘there is still a tension at work. I’ve never felt I had a fixed identity – Irish, but born in England, speaking with an English accent. I had more of an outsider’s view of the world. Maybe it’s a good thing. You can adopt the bits of this mixed identity which work best for you. Look at things from the outside.’ He may say that, but at heart he’s a Donegal man.

James and Moira’s original plan for Sliabh Liag Distillers was to build outside Carrick in a field with views out to sea. In 2016, the deal was done on the land, but the plans for planning were stymied by small, but obstructive, opposition. After four years of stasis they decided to look elsewhere and were welcomed into Ardara where, on the old show field on 21st Oct 2020, construction started. Spirit ran exactly a year later – the first legal whiskey made in Donegal since 1841. In 2025, Ardara single malt was launched.

Designed by local architects, the plant ‘floats’ within a shed, the huge picture window in front of the stills also showing the complex of pipework that lies underneath – as well as the wee gin still where Moira makes An Dúlamán gin. ‘Nothing’s hidden’, it says.

The question then was what was this new peaty, single malt Donegal whiskey to be like? Linking it to the past was important so the decision was made to have it grain-in (not separating the wort from draff) ‘Why?’ says James. ‘Those illicit distillers didn’t filter their mash. By doing the same and distilling unfiltered we’d honour them. We also wondered if doing so would add flavour and carry more phenols through.’

It meant Forsyth’s designing a new system; a hammer mill to pulverise the grain, conversion tank rather than a mashtun and a complex system of valves, pumps, agitators, and pipework to stop the thick, sticky mass from clogging. 

The wash flows into one of the six (steel, temperature-controlled) fermenters.  An uptick in production had seen fruits in the new make fall slightly, alleviated by switching to the Japanese D53 yeast which gives mango and melon characters.

The offset neck on the wash still is another nod to Irish whiskey’s direct-fired past, when the mechanics for the rummager came through the centre of the still, rather than from the side, as in Scotland. The wash still gives low wines at 22%abv, which are redistilled in the intermediate still. Strong feints (above 25%abv, average strength 55%abv) go forward to the final distillation, while weak feints are recycled with the next lot of low wines. Spirit comes off at an average of 76%. 

New make is pumped to the filling store, where it sits in a wooden vat. This is never fully emptied, giving consistency between batches. Every drop of Ardara therefore will have a trace of the first distillate in it. It’s the final way of carrying the past with you. When I visited, the 10,000th cask was filled, no mean achievement in the current climate. 

The inaugural release (46%) mixes fruits, along with a chypre [oak moss] note, with smoked nut, and light cacao. The peat comes over as a mix of leather and woodsmoke, while the palate’s oiliness points to the grain-in decision. There’s enough fruited sweetness (pear especially) here to balance the malt and the smoke which steadily opens and fills out the back palate – think a pipe filled with rough shag being smoked beside a wood fire. Through this runs a green freshness.

It’s bold, without any of the raw, putty like character you can get with young peaty whiskies. The smoke is integrated, bedded in but there’s enough tension to show that this will be long-lived. Neither is there any of the heavy-handed application of oak which can bedevil younger whiskies by trying to fool you into thinking they are mature. Ardara is balanced but deliberately distillate-driven. There’s also a single pot still (made with malted and unmated barley and smoked oats) in cask, though with the Technical File] still not amended it remains ‘non-compliant’, which strikes me as very Donegal.

Ardara is a whiskey which asks what if Irish whiskey’s timeline had been different?If there hadn’t been a 140 year break, what would today’s Donegal whiskey be like? Quite likely this.

All of this challenges (again deliberately) the received wisdom of what ‘Irish whiskey’ is – specifically the notion that it is all ‘smooth’ – surely one of the worst words to use as a descriptor. ‘Smooth’ means safe and while it may have made a degree of sense when Jameson was launched as blend in the 1970s to compete with Scotch, the world has moved on. Not that a whole bunch of Irish producers have cottoned on. 

If Irish is to reassert itself, it has to have quality, but it also has to be different, diverse. It can be awkward, unorthodox, and challenging. It doesn’t have to fall into the trap of cliché where all of the edges of an Irish reality have been smoothed away.  

How can you make a whiskey here on the rocks of Donegal and not be distinctive, audacious even, in the current framework? If Ardara doesn’t appeal to everyone it has done its job – as long as there are sufficient people who get it.

The next day we stop in Kilcar to meet Tristan Donaghy who owns the hand weavers Studio Donegal . Among the clattering weird syncopation of 100-year-old frame looms, he talks of the current battle to reclaim Donegal tweed and to preserve this indigenous craft. ‘Donegal tweed’ has become a style which can be made anywhere. A campaign to have hand loom tweed granted an EU Protected Geographical Indication (making it the same as Harris Tweed) is underway. Reclaiming the past – the parallels with whiskey don’t need to be pointed out. 

Ardara has been selling itself as ‘The Islay of Ireland,’ but it isn’t and that’s the point. It is its own thing and an extension of west coast whisky/whiskey thinking which stretches from Lewis to Kerry. A wild Atlantic philosophy which you could fling even further north to Norway’s coastline. These whiskies on the fringes may sometimes share some stylistic similarities, but the strongest ties lie in the way in which the west acts on the psyche. The fractured, fragmented edge of the continent is where thinkers come, where possibilities open up. I think of James on the point, pointing out into the Atlantic. Feet in Donegal, looking outward.