Power · 1791
John Power and the distillery at John's Lane
In 1791, in a small inn at the corner of Thomas Street and John's Lane, Dublin, James Power, a Catholic publican of Wexford-Power descent, set up a pot-still in a backyard shed and began distilling whiskey for sale in his own bar. By the time of his son John Power's death in 1855, John's Lane was the second-largest pot-still distillery in Ireland, the most consistently profitable, and the leading exporter of Irish whiskey to the British and American markets. By 1880, under the third generation of Powers, John's Lane was the largest distillery in the world by single-site output. Power's Irish Whiskey was, by the 1890s, by the assessment of the Edinburgh and London trade journals, the most respected Irish single-distillery brand and the principal commercial face of Catholic Old-English Anglo-Irish capital. The distillery is the longest-continuously-operating Irish whiskey brand still on shelves; the original John's Lane pot still no longer operates on the site (closed 1974), but Powers Three Swallows is still produced under the same name at the Midleton distillery in Cork. The label has not changed in form since 1850.
It is the late afternoon of an unrecorded day in the autumn of 1791, in the back-yard shed of the inn at the corner of Thomas Street and John's Lane, in central Dublin, just south of the Liffey. He is twenty-eight years old. He is James Power, born at Dunkitt in County Kilkenny in 1763 to a small farmer of the Catholic Old-English Power line, in his fifth year as the licensee of the Thomas Street inn, married Ellen Walsh of Dublin three years ago, with two small children. He is in shirt-sleeves and an apron, in the back-yard shed where he has had a copper pot-still installed in the past month at a cost of twenty-eight pounds.
On the bench in front of him are: a ledger in which he has been keeping the accounts of the inn for five years; the licence (in Gaelic and English) of the Thomas Street premises as a victualler; and the small printed pamphlet from the Excise of January 1791 setting out the new graduated rate of duty for licensed pot-still distillers, which is at this point the lowest it has been in twenty years. The licence to operate the still was granted to him by the Excise office at the Custom House the previous month.
He thinks: the pamphlet from the Excise gives me a duty of one shilling and threepence on the gallon at this scale of operation. The London market in malt whiskey is paying eight shillings the gallon at retail. The margin is the margin.
He thinks: the pot-still in the shed is rated at five hundred gallons a week. The five hundred gallons will, by my calculation, replace the current trade in the bar within six months.
He thinks: the bar is the test market. If the men of the bar will pay for a single John's Lane against a single Cork or Roscrea, the brand has a future.
He thinks: the men of the bar pay for a single John's Lane.
James Power's small operation grew steadily through the 1790s and the early 1800s. His son John Power expanded the distillery in 1822 to a larger facility on the same John's Lane site; the John's Lane Distillery, by the time of the third generation in the 1880s, was the largest single-site whiskey distillery in the world by output, employing about three thousand men in the trade between Dublin and Liverpool. The Power family's commercial stature in Catholic Anglo-Irish Dublin was second only to the Guinness family of St James's Gate, with whom the Powers had a long mutual social and political relationship through the nineteenth century; the two families were jointly the principal Catholic-Protestant commercial axis of the Dublin merchant class.
The distillery was nationalised into Irish Distillers Group in 1966 in the rationalisation of Irish whiskey production; the John's Lane site was closed in 1974 and the production transferred to Midleton in County Cork, where it continues under the same brand. The original copper pot stills (the Three Swallows of the brand mark, the three small chimneys of the John's Lane distillery as visible from the Thomas Street side) were retained and are on permanent display at the Old Jameson Distillery museum in Smithfield, Dublin. The label of Powers Gold Label, the principal modern bottling, has been substantially unchanged in form since 1850. The bottle on the shelf of any Irish bar in 2025 carries forward, in the lettering and the gold standing on a green ground, the design that the second-generation Power family of John's Lane settled on. The distilling family of John's Lane is the seventh-longest-running family-business succession in the British Isles; the senior cadet of the Power-Talbot line still carries the name on official Irish Distillers business.