“I want to be the man who brought poitín out from under the bar,” says Dave Mulligan. He’s referring not to the illegal moonshine of old but to the real thing.
Poitín was never about potatoes, according to Mulligan, who has named his Dublin bar 1661, after the year the spirit was banned in Ireland. It was around for centuries before the spud appeared on our shores, he says.
Poitín is simply a white whiskey that hasn't been aged in wooden casks. It was traditionally made from barley, either malted or unmalted; it was also around for hundreds of years before whiskey appeared. Like Irish whiskey, it has Geographical Indication status, meaning that spirit marked as Irish poitín, or Irish poteen, must meet a series of specifications.
A bartender all his life, Mulligan has been interested in poitín since 2011, when he moved to London and set up an Irish-focused bar called Shebeen. “I started looking at the history and realised that this is our real national spirit and nobody was doing anything with it. The problem is too much history: it is the grandfather of all whiskey, with hundreds of years of history.”
Bar 1661, just off the Capel Street end of Parnell Street, in Dublin 7, offers cocktails made from any of the 24 poitíns in stock; you can also book in for a tutored tasting. Mulligan also makes his own brand, Bán Poitín, in partnership with the Echlinville Distillery, in Co Down.
Bar 1661’s house cocktail is the Belfast coffee, a very cold Irish coffee made with poitín. It outsells all its other cocktails, and is now being served in bars in London and the United States. Mulligan hopes it will become the signature Irish poitín cocktail.
