Eric Ryan: Cork's Whiskey Walker & Talker

This week I caught up with Eric Ryan - a man with a remarkable
range of experience, knowledge and historical interest in whiskey
and especially whiskey from Cork in the south of Ireland, where
we’re both from.


Eric is a founding member of the Cork Whiskey Society, founder
and host of the Cork Whiskey Walk, which I was lucky enough to
join Eric for last year, and he applies his brewing and
distilling knowledge working at the Midleton Distillery.


While the county of Cork may be most well known in the whiskey
world as the home of the Midleton distillery which produces
Jameson and Redbreast and Powers and myriad other spirits, there
are hundreds of years of ups and downs, fortunes made and
fortunes lost, amalgamations and consolidations that have led us
to the present whiskey landscape in Ireland and Cork has been
right at the centre of it for more than 400 years.


This history of Cork and the history of Cork whiskey are one and
the same and they make for fascinating stories.


Eric and I could have chatted for days such are the number of
stories he has and the number of rabbit holes we could have gone
down, but we managed to keep the conversation to a reasonable
time.