poitín

Poteen (also spelled poitin or poitín) is Irish illicitly distilled whiskey, produced in a small pot still hidden from excise authorities. The word comes directly from the Irish Gaelic poitín, meaning 'little pot' — a diminutive of pota (pot), itself borrowed from English or Latin. The diminutive suffix -ín is the Irish equivalent of the English '-let' and is applied affectionately to small things: a diminutive of pot giving us both the vessel and the drink produced in it. This affectionate naming of a dangerous, often toxic, spirit is characteristic of Irish linguistic culture, where the most transgressive activities receive the fondest words.

Distillation in Ireland predates English colonial rule, but the imposition of excise taxes under various seventeenth and eighteenth-century acts transformed what had been communal practice into crime. The Distillery Act of 1779 required licensing, and unlicensed production became officially illegal. Irish farmers who had made spirits as a normal part of agricultural life — using surplus grain, apples, or potatoes — suddenly found themselves producing contraband. The small pot still moved into the hills of Connacht and Ulster, into bogs and mountain valleys where revenue officers rarely ventured.

The quality of poteen varied enormously. Well-made poteen — from grain mash, carefully distilled — was comparable to any legal whiskey and had devoted followings. Poorly made poteen, using contaminated water, lead pipes, or methanol-contaminated ferments, caused blindness and death. Stories of poteen's dangers are as much part of Irish folklore as stories of its pleasures. The risk of the product mirrored the risk of making it: both were genuine, and both were part of what gave poteen its cultural charge.

Poteen was legalized in Ireland in 1997, when small producers were permitted to bottle and sell it commercially. This created an odd ontological situation: legal poteen is no longer poteen in the traditional sense, since the illegality was inseparable from the identity of the drink. Today commercial poteen is marketed as a craft spirit, smooth and regulated, while traditional unlicensed poteen persists in rural Ireland as it always has, invisible to official statistics. The word has also entered English as a general term for any home-distilled spirit.