RAISING EYEBROWS, CAPTURING HEARTS

Midleton, in County Cork, Ireland, looks as much like Minneapolis, Minnesota, as it does Barbados. Minneapolis does not have endless rolling hills in infinite shades of green. You won’t find the deer roaming freely or a nearly 200-year-old distillery making some of the world’s best-known, best-selling whiskeys. Temperatures in Minneapolis can fall below minus-40 in the winter. Yet Brian Nation, who spent 23 years at Midleton Distillery, home of Jameson, Red Breast, Powers and others, made a none-too-impulsive decision in early 2020 to hand in his resignation, pack up his family, and abscond to the American Midwest. His destination? O’Shaughnessy Distilling Company, which was still under construction in a circa-1945 building that once housed a potato-processing plant in Minneapolis’s Prospect Park. In the interest of diplomacy, we will call the neighborhood less than bucolic.

But where some would see desolation (aside from the buzzy two-storey Surly Brewing next door), Nation saw a glow of promise. When cousins Michael and Patrick O’Shaughnessy, the distillery’s founders, were finished with the buildout, Nation would have a veritable blank slate on which to devise