Jameson

Jameson takes its name from John Jameson, a Scot born in Alloa in 1740 who arrived in Dublin in the late 1770s. In 1780 he got the Bow Street distillery up and running, in a city with more than a hundred breweries and distilleries — the year the brand uses as its founding. Between 1785 and 1825 malt was taxed, and Jameson began mixing malted and unmalted barley, the basis of the Irish pot still style. In 1804 his son, John Jameson II, took over Bow Street, and the family carried on distilling for generations; the motto on the Jameson coat of arms is Sine Metu, Latin for "without fear".

By the 1880s the distillery covered almost six acres of central Dublin, and in 1904 John Jameson & Son was granted a Royal Warrant. American Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, closed off one of its most promising markets almost overnight. In 1966 the company joined the only two other distilleries still operating in the Republic of Ireland, John Power & Son and the Cork Distilleries Company, to form Irish Distillers. The last distillation at Bow Street took place in 1970, and since 1975 Jameson has been made in Midleton, County Cork. In 1988 Irish Distillers became part of the French group Pernod Ricard, the current owner, and in the 2020s Jameson passed 10 million cases sold a year.