Most people think the Scottish invented whisky, but in this video I walk through why the first whisky was almost certainly made in Ireland—and how Irish whiskey went from global dominance to near-extinction, then back again. I start with the basics (grain, water, yeast, fermentation, distillation, and ageing), then head back to roughly 1000–1200 AD when Irish monks likely brought distillation knowledge home and produced “Aqua Vitae” (Uisce Beatha). We’ve even got the earliest written record of whisky anywhere: the Annals of Clonmacnoise in 1405, documenting a chieftain who drank so much Uisce Beatha he died—about 90 years before Scotland’s first written record. From there I cover how licensing, taxation, and crackdowns shaped the industry—creating the split between legal “Parliament whisky” and illicit poitín (the roots of “moonshine”). Then we hit the golden age: Dublin as the world centre of whisky production, the rise of big distilleries, and the shift toward single pot still style after the 1785 malt tax. I also unpack the Coffey still (invented by Irishman Aeneas Coffey), why the big Dublin houses rejected it, and how Scotland used it to scale blends. Finally, I lay out the perfect storm that sank Irish whiskey—WWI, independence, trade wars, US Prohibition, WWII—until only a couple of distilleries remained. And then the revival: Cooley breaking the monopoly in 1987, Pernod Ricard’s global push for Jameson, and the modern boom to 40+ distilleries. Sláinte.