Jameson Bow Street 18 Years

Known for paying his employees above the average working wage at the time, John Jameson always looked at new ways of investing in his workers’ welfare. He began constructing a series of homes near the Distillery in the late 19th century, which were rented for a nominal sum to employees. They were state of the art compared to the usual dilapidated tenements found in Dublin at the time, and any family lucky enough to get one would have experienced a life-changing upgrade in living standards. One such family was the D’Arcys, who lived at No. 18 Bow Street and spent three generations working in the Malt House in Bow Street.

Having millions of gallons of whiskey in and around the distillery was risky, but the Jamesons always took the wellbeing of their staff very seriously. In the days before a municipal fire service, John Jameson had an inhouse firefighting team comprised of trained employees that would have been prepared for the worst. In the early days, a wooden drum on wheels with hoses attached was all they had to battle any blazed that broke out. Later, patented fire extinguishers were strategically placed throughout the maturation sites, but the fire fighting unit still remained in place until the closure of Bow Street in the 1970s.

Although there are only a handful of Coopers still left in Ireland today, this slowly dying trade was once a mainstay in the whiskey industry. The Cooperage, where all the barrels and casks used in the maturation process were examined, checked and repaired, wasn’t an easy career to break into. All the Coopers working at Bow Street would have undergone a rigorous apprenticeship before being proclaimed a Cooper. For 7 years, they would be bound to their Master, obeying him in all things and even promising not to gamble, fornicate or conduct matrimony. Although being a Cooper was a very respectable trade at the time, skills weren’t the only things passed down. Every new family member who joined his father in the Cooperage would also inherit whatever nickname he had been given. Once everyone knew whose son you were on your first day, that was it - your new nickname stuck.

Maturation on site began in a modest way in the early days, before developing significantly after 1825 when a change in legislation meant Distillers no longer had to pay duty on spirit as soon as it came off the still. Warehousing in Bow Street expanded dramatically by the 1880s, with 16 warehouses storing an average of 25,000 casks annually on site. Maturation continued in Bow Street until the 1970s, when production wound down and eventually transferred to Midleton in 1975, where our whiskey making philosophy lives on.