Buns2025: Day 12 – Dublin & Cork, mostly Cork
Soundtrack: “Irish Rover”, The Pogues
Miraculously awoke with functioning hearing.
Dublin’s public transport includes buses and trams (there might be suburban trains too but as I’m not needing to go to far haven’t looked into these). It also has two major train stations for Irish Rail services to other towns and cities, if you want to head south it’s Heuston, north is Connolly. Both stations are named after folks who fought in the 1916 uprising, where while the Irish lost, the UK leaders were basically assholes and their heavy handed response improved support for the independence movement.
Today I’m heading south, so Heuston it is. It’s a pretty station, not huge, but it has room for a few shops and a piano. I don’t know why there is a piano, but there it was, seemingly available for the public to play. At least it’s not bagpipes. I grabbed a takeaway tea and breakfast bun while I waited. The breakfast bun filling was three small sausages and a little tomato chutney, nothing gourmet but sustenance on the run. The bun itself was fine, a standard Irish bap (not to be confused with a Scottish bap, here the baps aren’t covered in flour, and the texture is a little firmer, there’s possibly also an egg wash as they are slightly shiny.
While Heuston is a fairly small station, my train ended up being on the farthest platform, and as I was in car A, I was right at the front. The train was pretty standard, and I settled in with my tea and blogged for most of the journey. Every so often there’s be a voiceover for the next station, in both Irish and English, that finished with “thank you for travelling with Irish Rail”. To my ignorant ear, Irish Rail in Irish (Iarnrod Eireann) sounded like “here and there”. Yeah, I might not be allowed back into Ireland.
Changed trains at Mallow, and there was no waiting for the connection so I can’t really say much about the place: the train station has functioning steps and bridges over the rails is about it really. Come to Mallow: we have steps.
Irish countryside is generally green, picturesque, and, well, green. There are occasional towns, churches with spires, buildings that aren’t green, but the rest is pretty green, at least in November. There were cows and sheep in fields, occasionally horses, wandering over the green hills and countryside.
Cork is the Republic of Ireland’s second largest city. I took a wander through the main city area, which is mostly closed off to cars. A good thing too, because Cork traffic, even on a Sunday, is pretty lousy. Lots of merge points, sudden narrow single lanes, one-way streets, weird barriers. I found a little shop that specialised in buns, so figured I needed to give them a try. On most days, they have all manner of sweet buns, but not today, though they had cinnamon buns so I grabbed one and, feeling brave, a coffee. The cinnamon bun was slightly warmed, very tasty, not the sort that has pesky fruit, just a scroll of cinnamon goodness and lots of icing.
For lunch I figured I needed some solid sustenance, so found a pub that was open and serving. It was time for the the traditional Irish dish of bacon, cabbage, and mashed potato, served with a herb bechamel sauce. The bacon, it turns out, isn’t simple rashers or pieces, rather three wonderful thick slabs of cured pork mounted atop a mound of mash. There was also plenty of cabbage, and it was tasty too, not the bitter boiled death variety. Stomach suitably filled, it was off to Midleton.
Midleton is about 20km west of Cork, and while I could have done things involving trains to get there, went with a rideshare. Was looking a bit grim for a little while, thanks to the chaos that is Cork Sunday traffic (surely all these crazy drivers should be in church or something right?), but once the driver cleared the city centre it was a fairly easy drive.
Midleton Distillery turns 200 this year. I first encountered their whisky around 2014 through accidentally ordering a slightly expensive dram at a hotel. It was a delicious dram, and I’ve been a fan ever since. So today I’ve signed up for one of their behind the scenes tours to check out how they do their thing.
Irish whiskey has a bunch of rules, as does Scottish whisky, and while there’s similarity, there’s also differences. Irish whiskey also has a somewhat different history, so while Scottish distilleries have built their individual identities, in the 1970s the three main Irish whiskey producers got together and formed a co-operative that has lead more to the establishing of brands not dependent on the actual distillery: Jameson, Redbreast, Yellow/Red/Green/Blue Spot, Midleton, Powers, Method and Madness, are all distilled at the Midleton distillery: their method of distillation, aging, and blending composition varies.
While I could go on and on about the various types of spirit production involved in making whisky, and all the steps etc, my lazy fingers aren’t really as enthusiastic so what follows will be as simple and short as my brain will allow. It all starts with sugar + yeast = alcohol (and carbon dioxide, but we can ignore that bit). Any grain (barley, corn, wheat, rice, etc) that contains some sugar, can be ground, added to water, add some yeast, and then we get grain alcohol. At some point folks worked out that if first we take the barley, make it moist and comfortable, it will start to germinate and at this point will contain even more sugar. Then we need to apply lots of heat to stop the grain fully germinating as that would consume all the extra sugar; the whole process is called malting. More sugar means less grain is needed to make more alcohol. While yeast will produce a suitable amount of sugar during fermentation, this approx 10-12% abv liquid is then distilled, which is basically heating until the alcohol evaporates, leaving the rest behind. The alcohol is then cooled back into liquid. Irish whiskey often, but not always, goes through the distillation three times to produce the final spirit, which can be 80-90% alcohol, this is then diluted down to somewhere in the 60-70% range, poured into barrels, and eventually put in bottles.
A lot of Irish whisky is a blend of malt and grain spirits. This started due to a 19th century UK tax on spirits produced from malted grain, so to lower the tax bill, they started adding straight grain alcohol. While the tax was repealed eventually, by then they’d just got used to making whiskey that way, so now a blended Irish whiskey must contain at least 30% malt and 30% grain spirit. Midleton produces both types of spirit (in Scotland very few distilleries produce both, most produce malt and then blends use grain whisky produced by one of the handful of grain distilleries). Midleton produces a lot of spirit, approx 55 million litres of alcohol per year. That’s a lot of hangovers.
This spirit then gets put into barrels, predominantly sherry and bourbon. The barrels both work as storage, as well as the wood itself imparts flavours into the spirit. Thanks to the US coopers’ union, bourbon must be made in new barrels, so Scottish and Irish distilleries buy the used barrels. The filled barrels used to be stored lying on their sides, as that was the easiest way to arrange with manual handling. Now we have forklifts and things, barrels get stored standing up. Scottish whisky is required to be stored in oak barrels, for the Irish, the barrels just have to be wooden. In Ireland, no tree is safe from being turned into a barrel. Generally whiskey barrels get used up to three times, after which they don’t really bring much to the contents.
Our tour guide M went through all the above and much more. He took us through the old distillery, where much was done by hand (though they did get a shiny expensive steam engine early on which helped). We sampled one of the distillery’s whiskies, blended from spirit stored in a number of different woods. This was quite delicious, definitely led by the sherry but with added complexity from the other barrels. Then we got to nose some of the new make spirit, both malt and grain (I’ve tasted new make spirit in Scotland, but from a distillery that only double distils meaning the abv was around 70%, while at Midleton they triple distil so we’re talking 80%+ for the malt, and 95% for the grain, so definitely not recommended for tasting). The grain spirit, unsurprisingly, had all the aromas of hand sanitiser. A nice, neutral hand sanitiser, but still hand sanitiser. The malt had more depth, some spice, some apple and pear notes, though still battling the cold my nasal perception was rather compromised.
Then we took a wander through the new distillery, where it was nice and warm thanks to the distillation in progress. The 6 pot stills at Midleton are all quite large. (There are two types of stills: pot stills are like big tagines with a pipe out the top, while column stills are, well, column shaped. Pot stills work on batches, add the low alcohol liquid, turn on the heat, when no more alcohol in the pot empty and repeat. Column stills work continuously, and to be honest even after seeing the diagrams I’m not 100% clear exactly how, so I suspect there’s magic in there somewhere.)
M took us to another warehouse, where he had a barrel ready to tap. Some of the spirit in the barrel was distilled in the 1980s, and had been in bourbon and port and sherry barrels, while it was later topped up with spirit distilled in the last 20 years that also did time in bourbon and sherry barrels. I should really have asked why they did so much shuffling of spirit, but I suspect that part of it is that as barrel contents evaporate a little each year (2-3%), in order to get barrel turnover they sometimes combine barrels when they get low enough. Suffice to say it tasted absolutely amazing, bug sherry notes of raisins and dried fruits, a little chocolate, a very dry lingering finish, and if you wanted to own a barrel like that you’re looking at about 1 million euro.
We finished the tour with a dram of the 21 year old Redbreast, also heavily sherried but a touch sweeter than the cask we tried. Lots of wonderful dried fruits and chocolate, and a bottle would only set me back somewhere mid-three figures (spoiler alert, I didn’t buy one). Was a great tour, I got to ask lots of nerdy questions about fermentation, and grain, yeast, and other distilling things.
Got a ride-share back to Cork, then a nice train ride to Dublin. Couldn’t get another sausage bun at the Cork station because their warmer was turned off, but did get some nice music from whoever was playing the piano. Come to Ireland, our train stations have pianos.
Tomorrow is a train to Belfast for a couple of days in Northern Ireland. Titanic stuff, and I get to tick having been to all 4 countries of the UK.
