What I love about Irish whiskey is that it is far more than the taste, the flavor, the bottle or the label. With many Irish whiskeys you are sipping the product of hundreds of years of history. Hundreds of years of stories. Stories of growth, stories of acquisition, of mergers, of big wins and even bigger losses, of characters unique to Ireland. Characters that have shaped not just their businesses but the industry and indeed Ireland itself.

One such man is forever immortalized on every bottle of whiskey that bears the word Tullamore. Many Americans I speak to about whiskey have assumed that the DEW in tullamore refers to the moisture found on the grass on the hills of Ireland as dawn breaks, but closer inspection of the bottle, reveals DEW to be an acronym, an acronym for the man that made Tullamore famous. His name was Daniel E Williams and he was one of the characters that changed the Irish whiskey industry forever.