Ireland’s original Midleton distillery opened in a former woollen mill just outside Cork city in 1825. Midleton’s owners the Murphy brothers founded the Cork Distilleries Company (CDC) in 1867; a century later with market conditions in potentially terminal decline, CDC merged with Jameson and Powers to form Irish Distillers. Soon afterwards, both Dublin distilleries were closed and all whiskey production was switched to a large new distillery at Midleton, which opened in 1975.
Irish Distillers was bought by Pernod Ricard in 1988 and the new owners have invested hundreds of millions in Midleton in recent years. Today, Midleton distillery has a production capacity of over 70 million litres of pure alcohol per year, making both single pot still and grain whiskey for their Jameson, Midleton, Redbreast, Powers and Green Spot brands, as well as the legacy brand Paddy’s, which was sold to Sazerac in 2016. Further investment has been announced to make Midleton distillery carbon neutral by 2026.
Dublin’s Bow Street distillery was built in 1780 by the Steins, one of Scotland’s greatest distilling families. John Jameson was a Scottish lawyer whose wife Margaret Haig was part of the Haig-Stein whisky dynasty, and during the 1780s the Jameson family moved to Dublin to help manage the Stein’s Bow Street Distillery. The Jamesons bought the distillery from the Steins in 1805 and renamed the business John Jameson & Son in 1810.
John Jameson & Son was registered as a limited company around the turn of the 20th century, and joined with John Power & Sons and the Cork Distillery Company to form Irish Distillers Ltd in 1966. The Bow St distillery was closed in the 1970s and production of Jameson was moved to the new Midleton distillery in Cork. Irish Distillers was purchased in 1988 by Pernod Ricard, who concentrated their investment in Jameson and have overseen a dramatic upturn in the brand’s fortunes ever since.
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