dublin day 8 - booze, booze and more booze...

july 22, 2007

i woke up this morning to a beautiful irish breakfast that luise prepared for jake and i. in hindsight, it was the perfect start to an alcohol-filled day. denis landed a little after 10am this morning and he and i planned to meet at the guinness brewery for the tour. on my way to the brewery, the weather turned sour--the perfect day to sit in a brewery (or two) and have a pint while the rain poured down. so that's what we did.

the brewery tour was interesting, the brewery itself was a little bit disneyland, but the bar at the top of the tower, gravity bar, was really cool. that's where denis and i had our complimentary guinnesses after the tour. it's the big hang out spot so it was pretty full even on such a crappy day. and even though it was raining, you still had a beautiful 360 degree view of dublin from the bar.

after the guinness brewery, denis and i headed to the jameson distillery for another tour. before the tour started, we sat at the bar in the lobby of the distillery and chatted up the australian bartender. overhearing our chat, our tour guide, xander, wandered over and began chatting with us. after some persuasion from denis and a little information drop that i was partially dutch, since xander was dutch, i somehow ended up in the driver's seat for a special whiskey tasting at the end of the tour. so when the xander asked for 4 volunteers (2 guys and 2 girls) to test irish whiskey against other foreign whiskeys, and i raised my hand, i was picked.

the tour was nice--basically the same as the bushmills tour, even down to the same "...so we have happy cows" and "...so we have happy angels" jokes. at the end, xander seated the 4 volunteers at a special table for the whiskey tasting, i got to test jameson against two other irish whiskeys, johnny walker red and jack daniels. since all three irish whiskeys were made by jameson's parent company, the 4 of us were saved on choosing our favorite (or it didn't matter if we chose jameson or not). and since johnny walker red is the bottom of the barrel of the johnny walker scotches and jack daniels is just plain nasty, it was an easy choice to pick jameson. after the tasting, the 4 of us received special diplomas for our services and were sent home.

next, denis and i met up with jake and luise, sylvia and sylvia's brother michael at the brazen head pub, the oldest pub in ireland. we sat down, had a few pints and watch pradraig (pronounced proh-rag in gaelic) harrington win the open at carnoustie. we expected a huge reaction from the pub since pradraig was the first irishman to win a golf major in something like 46 years. instead, there were a bit of cheers and 4 old irishmen started signing the national anthem rather poorly. that was it. apparently the irish were more interested in their guinness.

needless to say, i was pretty wrecked today. and i have an 8:06 tee time at portmarnock in the morning. ee gads.