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Whiskey’s journey from ‘demon drink’ to ‘feminine spirit’ thanks to Irish women and witches
From veritable cure-all to the devil’s drink right through to a boundary-breaking, female spirit, whiskey’s reputation is imbued with the significance of Irish women and witchcraft. Shamim de Brún takes stock of the history and brings us into the present, where Irish women are taking control of knowledge, rituals, potions and spaces.
When you think of witches, you generally picture pointy hats, long fingernails, green skin, broomsticks, and maybe some cauldrons bubbling in a thunderstorm. You probably don’t picture Irish whiskey. But for a long, strange stretch of history, the two were as inseparable as childhood best friends. Not in the “cute cocktails with a spooky name” sense. In the “this woman made a drink, therefore she is clearly communing with the devil” sense.
The very origin of distilled liquor is steeped in feminine mystique. Maria Hebraea (Mary the Jewess) is credited as the inventor of distillation. She stumbled on the magic of alcohol while questing to make gold from grain. Whiskey or uisce beatha, which translates to ‘the water of life’, was seen as mystical alchemy. Medieval chemists viewed distillation as a spiritual act. By heating a substance and condensing its vapours, they believed they were capturing its “spirit”.
In Ireland, whiskey was a veritable cure-all. We took it for everything the way we take paracetamol now. Whiskey was a balm, a salve, an antiseptic, a painkiller, a warning, a fertility aid, a treat, a celebration, a protection against na síoga (the fairies) and more. According to Whisky Magazine, in Tudor times “women distilled malt spirits as … ‘strong waters’ for social and convivial drinking occasions, and some practised as apothecaries, alchemists, and druggists”. The seanfocail “An rud nach leigheasann im ná uisce beatha níl aon leigheas air,” which literally translates to: “What butter or whiskey does not cure cannot be cured” encapsulates whiskey’s curative reputation.
When the English crown discovered that Ireland drank more whiskey than beer, they tightened the noose. Where Irish women saw cure, the Church of England saw heresy. And where England saw profit, they smelled witchcraft. Dr. Christina Wade, PhD and author of the seminal book Filthy Queens, blames the English for bringing the “she’s a witch” finger-pointing with them when they colonised the island.
Taxes rose. Stills were seized. Home distillers and local distributors, often women, were criminalised. Those untaxed bottles became evidence of ‘sin’. Whiskey was rebranded as the “demon drink.” Women who once healed with it were recast as sorceresses. Their craft erased, their names forgotten.
The Red Book of Ossory, a 14th-century collection of documents that reads like a cursed Pinterest board, is the earliest written example of whiskey and witchcraft colliding. The “grab bag” of documents hosts the oldest recipe for whiskey ever found in Ireland, and contains notes on heresy, the prelude to Ireland’s first witch trial, the Magna Carta (casually), and even a letter from King Edward III fretting that his fellow Englishmen were “going native” having lived among the Irish for too long.
The book was consolidated by Bishop Richard de Ledrede, the medieval hype man for witch hunts. Archival scholars emphasise his “obsession with witchcraft”, which culminated in the trial of Alice Kyteler, accused of sorcery in Kilkenny in 1324.
When Adam le Blund, Alice Kyteler’s second husband, dropped dead of “drinking to excess” the neighbours were clutching their pearls. When her third husband died in a similar vein she started to garner a reputation as a sort of Black Widow. By then, Bishop de Ledrede was already accusing her of whipping up “magical powders and potions from gruesome ingredients.” The whispered claims she’d bewitched four wealthy husbands into early graves in order to pocket their fortunes for herself and her son, William Outlaw, grew legs. Sparse as Ireland’s witch-trial records are, Alice Kyteler still stands out as the country’s first alleged witch.
She may have been poisoning her husbands for monetary gain. She could also have just been living as a fully realised woman outside the parameters of the church. According to Mallory O’Meara author of Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol, “A drunken woman was the antithesis of a good, compliant, God-fearing woman” and some women were accused of being witches for “singing dirty drinking songs.”
Kyteler’s Inn in Kilkenny dates back to the 13th century and was reportedly founded by Dame Alice Kyteler. The inn was known as “a place of merrymaking and good cheer,” suggesting she operated a business centred on drink in a time of weaponised temperance. Women have been put to death for less.
After the Reformation, the ruling class turned protestant, and protestant culture brought with it an obsession with sobriety and self-discipline named temperance, which is reminiscent of the wellness bros’ quest for self optimisation of today.
Witches, once burned for their stills, now win awards for them.
In 1829, Presbyterian minister John Edgar literally dumped whiskey out of his window in Belfast to prove a point, kicking off what became a national movement. From there, temperance societies popped up everywhere, policing drinking and respectability itself. Young women were cast as promiscuous temptresses and became old haggard crones as they aged. Each of these stereotypes was demonised for their ability to apparently lure unsuspecting men astray with whiskey. They pushed for Sunday closing laws, tighter licensing, and an end to the rural “drop by” culture, which had defined Irish social life for centuries.
Like with many things that made up indigenous Irish culture, whiskey was coded as uncivilised. Drinking became shorthand for sin, laziness, and domestic ruin. All the moral chatter and column inches delegitimised the people who made it, especially small home distillers, whose very existence became a symbol of the backwardness that the reformers wanted to erase. Add a little social paranoia, and suddenly you have a recipe for witch panic.
These women weren’t artisans, hosts, entertainers, or scientists anymore. They were sorceresses. Their “potions” weren’t curing headaches; they were corrupting souls. Their whiskey wasn’t keeping the party going, it was corrupting the town. Whiskey was branded the “demon drink.” A moniker it still bears to this day. ??The suspicion never quite lifted. Even in the 19th century, long after Alice Kyteler, another woman faced trial.
Clare’s own bean feasa (wise woman), Biddy Early was a legend with a bottle in hand. So legendary, in fact, that you’ll find her name above bars in New York and Boston. She was famed for her whiskey and her generosity. In Lady Augusta Gregory’s folklore collections, you see it plain as day. A farmer trudges in with a bottle for Biddy, and she cracks it open there and then, laughing, “you’ll maybe want it, my poor man.”
Her cottage, they said, had a chest brimming with the stuff, and no passerby was too ragged or too random to be waved inside for a quick dram. Richer clients similarly brought whiskey as tribute. Rumor had it Biddy could even use the whiskey bottle as a divining tool: in one tale she pours a stranger a drink, then “held the bottle up… and looked into it,” revealing danger on his road.
To the poor, she was a saviour. To her enemies, she was a witch. In 1865 she was charged under the Witchcraft Act 1586. She was brought before a court in Ennis, though no witness would stand against her. She walked free. But the whisper of sorcery clung.
Though surprisingly few witch hunt records were kept, (we don’t even know the names of some of the women put to death in Ireland for witchcraft) the culture kept doubling down. Over time, the association between women, alcohol-making, spirit-drinking and witchcraft stuck hard enough to reshape the entire industry. Men slid into the dwindling distilling roles women had pioneered.
Whiskey became a shorthand for masculinity, while women were actively discouraged from drinking it. In Ireland, pubs became symbolic spaces of exclusion, the snug as both a literal and metaphorical barrier. Ads featured men raising glasses to “brotherhood.” By the 20th century, the notion that whiskey was inherently male-coded seemed “natural”.
And yet. Witches always return.
Today, women are distilling, blending, and maturing whiskey again. They have been for years now. Alex Thomas is the creative force behind Bushmills’ Sexton Single Malt. Deirdre O’Carroll is rising at Midleton. Sarah Dowling made her mark at Cooley. Louise McGuane became a whiskey bonder to sell the most expensive Irish whiskey ever sold, ‘The Chosen’ in 2019.
There’s something inherently witchy about this. Not in the literal “eye of newt” sense, but in the way witchcraft has always been about agency: women taking control of knowledge, rituals, potions, spaces.
You see it in the marketing shifts. Aisling Bea’s ‘Widen the Circle’ campaign was a welcome change for Jameson after many years of actively trying to appeal to the ‘lads and dudes’.
You see it in the way female distillers, such as Lora Hemy in Roe & Co talk about craft: balancing precision and intuition, tradition and innovation. You see it in the cultural reclamation of witchcraft itself, from Instagram moon rituals to Practical Magic revival aesthetics. Whiskey is the spirit of grain; witches are spiritual.
Some Irish distilleries and brands have explicitly embraced occult imagery. Morrigan Irish Whiskey is named after the shape-shifting Celtic war goddess often associated with witches. Jameson Irish Whiskey has played on witch themes in Halloween marketing. They have featured cocktail recipes like ‘Witches’ Brew Punchbowl’.
Even tourism promotes the mix: This November 7, Pearse Lyons Distillery in Dublin is hosting a theatrical Whisky & Witches experience that combines drams with “spellbinding” lore about “the women who shaped the world of alcohol… and how some were branded as witches.” Taking a spirit once used against women and turning it into their own source of strength through storytelling.
The old language of suspicion has been turned inside out. Witches, once burned for their stills, now win awards for them. At Samhain, people still pour whiskey onto graves, leave drams for the fairies, sip in memory and ritual. The spirit remains what it always was: boundary-crossing, life-giving, divine, and damn tasty.
They called it the demon drink. They called the women who made it witches. Now it’s the female spirit again.
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