{"id":4853,"date":"2016-03-13T22:55:28","date_gmt":"2016-03-14T04:55:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/?p=4853"},"modified":"2016-03-14T03:18:25","modified_gmt":"2016-03-14T09:18:25","slug":"protestant-whiskey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/protestant-whiskey\/","title":{"rendered":"Protestant Whiskey"},"content":{"rendered":"
Det. Jimmy McNulty: “Can I get a Jameson?”<\/p>\n
Bartender: “Bushmills okay?”<\/p>\n
McNulty: “That’s Protestant whiskey.”<\/p>\n
– The Wire<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n I actually didn’t know about this until fairly recently. Apparently it is, or was, a thing among certain Irish-Americans to signal their genuine Irishness by refusing Bushmills<\/a> and drinking Jameson<\/a>, supposedly the whiskey of Catholics and supporters of the Republic of Ireland.<\/p>\n It is a fact that Bushmills is distilled in Northern Ireland, and Jameson hails from County Cork in the Republic. In 1996, an Irish-American group called for a boycott of Bushmills, citing a report that only 10% of Bushmills distillery employees were Catholic. The mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown, got behind the boycotters and posed for reporters dumping a bottle of Bushmills down a city drain<\/a>. A Bushmills spokesman explained that, obviously, they imposed no religious test on their employees. The boycott fizzled, and Bushmills sales, never huge in the U.S. in the first place, were uneffected.<\/p>\n