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Strong
drink has a special place in Irish culture. St. Patrick
brought with him to Ireland his personal brewer, Mescan,
who kept him well supplied with beer. Medieval Irish monks
enjoyed an allowance of a gallon of beer per day. Legend
has it that farmers produced poitín (pronounced
put-CHEEN) from the time that the potato was first harvested
in Ireland. Introduced by Sir Walter Raleigh onto his
Myrtle Grove plantation in Cork in 1589, the potato quickly
became a staple in the Irish diet. It provided, as well,
the aquavitae for private consumption when neighbors
gathered for the craic, rousing song, and good
drink. The potato combined with malt yeast, barley, sugar,
and water yielded a fine baor (beer) when fermented
in a well-seasoned wooden barrel for three weeks. After
distillation, the drink produced was a clear alcoholic
liquor with a distinct aroma.
Around 1660, the English introduced a tax on distilled
spirits to fill a treasury depleted by Civil War and Cromwell's
wars with Holland and Spain. The Irish ignored the levy,
continuing to make their drink in home and village stills
throughout the country. The untaxed poitín became
known as moonshine. In 1760, the English passed a law
forbidding private, unlicensed production of distilled
liquor and began to enforce the tenpence per gallon tax
on poitín. The resulting fines caused great resentment
among the populace. Farmers used the money derived from
illegal sales of poitín to supplement their meager
incomes and help pay their rents. Neither landlords nor
tenants welcomed the revenue agents. Overnight, the Irish
became a nation of criminal distillers and smugglers gone
underground. The cottiers in Donegal, contemptuous of
the authorities enforcing the law, repulsed a force of
190 infantry and cavalry. County Mayo hid 200 distillers
openly working in well-protected stills to deliver the
mountain dew.
During the 1840's, poitín production declined in
Ireland due to the failure of the potato crop and the
decrease in population in areas of the south and west
where the potato was heavily cultivated. At the approach
of the second millennium, however, articles in Irish newspapers
indicate that poitín production is alive and well.
On March 13, 1997, the Irish Times reported that
United Distillers (Guinness) had introduced a legal version
of poitín. During Easter week 1999, the gardaí
(police) found £15,000 worth of the créatúr
in an illegal distillery outside Buncrana (Irish Post).
An arthritic pioneer, who had taken the pledge
to abstain from alcohol, was charged with bathing in the
illegal elixir (Irish Times, 7/7/97). And Hugh
Driver of Monaghan was cleared of charges after the judge
(God bless him!) accepted evidence that old Hugh's poitín
was for medicinal use.
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