This Rare Irish Whiskey From The 1930s Is Now Up For Auction

Next week an incredibly rare bottle of George Roe Irish Whiskey will go up for grabs during an online auction. By the time the hammer drops, it’s expected to net more than $14,000. What makes it worth that stately sum? Well, this particular distillery, which shuttered in 1923, is steeped in liquor lore. And nearly a 100 years after the last liquids rolled off its massive stills, there remains precious few unopened bottles left in the world.

Many modern drinkers are now familiar with this specific name after Diageo launched Roe & Co. Irish Whiskey back in 2017. Then, last year, it swung open doors on a sleek new stillhouse and tasting room directly across the street from the Guinness Storehouse in the historic Liberties district of Dublin. It’s just steps away from where the original liquid was crafted, inside the dismantled Thomas Street Distillery.

This particular neighborhood has seen the construction of several whiskey facilities over the past decade. Yet it remains a distant shadow of what it was throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries. During that time, the section of city was laying down more whiskey than anywhere else in Ireland. In fact, with its 8 outsized copper pot stills, the Thomas Street Distillery was then the largest in the world. By the late 1800s its output was more than twice that of its crosstown rival—a small distillery on Bow Street named after John Jameson.

Alas, by the 1920s, a slew of setbacks conspired against the seemingly boundless success of the category. First it was the proliferation of blended Scotch whisky—cheaper and easier to produce than the pot still variant that the Irish stubbornly held onto. Then it was the loss of its biggest export market during Prohibition. A final blow to the industry arrived in the form of the Anglo-Irish trade war—a direct result of Ireland’s exit from the United Kingdom in 1921. Two years later, the once-ubiquitous George Roe was no more.

But liquid from its very last run in 1923 ended up in barrels, to be aged for the full 16 years that its label demanded. It is estimated that the soon-to-be auctioned batch of whiskey met the bottle sometime in the early 1930s. Nonetheless, that 16 year age statement remains accurate. Remember: whiskey stops aging once it leaves the barrel and goes into the glass.

The legend, too, is preserved just the same. After all, this isn’t so much a bottle as it is a portal to a bygone era; history that holds true nearly 100 years after the mothballing of the Thomas Street Distillery. And that memory will soon be stewarded by the highest bidder at Victor Mee’s online auction.

If you don’t have $14,000-plus to spare on a 750ml portion of hooch, you can always consider sampling the modern reincarnation of Roe & Co, instead. Unlike its predecessor this one is a blended whiskey, sans age statement. It’s also a tad cheaper, typically retailing at $40. So, yes, it actually resembles the original in name only. But as you’ve just learned, there’s a whole lot to savor in that name.