Having spent a month in England, France and Northern Ireland this summer, Shae and I made our way down from Belfast to Dublin for the last four days of our trip.
We’d visited the Republic of Ireland three times in the past and Dublin on one of those occasions, but there was a lot that we’d missed out on and so we were keen on returning to the city.
We’d planned to visit the Guinness Storehouse and Jameson Distillery, but our four days there inadvertently became even more alcohol-focused when we discovered that the hotel we’d booked was in the center of all things whiskey.
Here’s all the fun stuff we got up to while there and why our livers were glad once the trip was over 😉
Dublin
AirCoach
Dublin is in the Republic of Ireland and is a couple of hours south of Belfast. To get from Belfast to Dublin we took a coach (AKA a bus in the US akin to Greyhound) which cost €12 (~$11.50) per person. The journey was uneventful and we soon arrived in Dublin ready to start seeing the city.
Hyatt Centric The Liberties
We were visiting Dublin for four nights and booked the first three of those nights at the Hyatt Centric The Liberties. This was good value when using points as it was in a great location and only cost 12,000 World of Hyatt points per night. Unfortunately when we booked a couple of months before our stay there weren’t any suites available and so I wasn’t able to redeem a suite upgrade award in order to get an upgraded room.
It wasn’t a big issue that we weren’t able to get upgraded though because we kept ourselves busy exploring Dublin and so didn’t spend much time in the room itself. Our room was perfectly fine though – they’d only had rooms with two twin beds available when booking our stay and those were comfortable.
I have Globalist status with Hyatt which meant we received complimentary breakfast every morning. Rather than having a buffet breakfast, there was a menu you order breakfast from and I got some kind of full Irish breakfast every morning.
The hotel had a nice-looking bar too, but we were so busy out drinking at other places in the city that we didn’t end up having a drink at the hotel itself.
Hop On, Hop Off Bus Tour
During this international trip, Shae and I did a hop on, hop off bus tour in Paris and then in Belfast. We subsequently paid for a 48 hour pass with Big Bus Tours in Dublin; we did this to both learn more about the city and have it act as our transportation to visit places like Jameson Distillery, Kilmainham Gaol, etc.
Most of our rides played a pre-recorded guide, but on one journey we had an incredibly entertaining driver who did the audio guide himself. I didn’t catch his name, but he injected a lot of personality into that particular journey and it was a lot of fun.
Teeling Whiskey Distillery
Our room at the Hyatt Centric The Liberties wasn’t quite ready when we arrived, so we left our bags with them and planned to go off and explore the neighborhood.
The hotel is in the Whiskey Triangle of The Liberties. The area had many whiskey distilleries in the 1800s, but they closed one by one as Scotch whisky became more popular and Prohibition in the US affected the exportation of whiskey. Some distilleries have reopened in recent years and in the lobby of the hotel there was a sign highlighting distilleries – and the Irish Whiskey Museum – that were nearby.
I hadn’t realized when booking our stay at the Hyatt Centric that it was close to so many distilleries, but seeing that map intrigued us both. With some time to kill before our room would be ready, we figured we’d visit the distillery closest to our hotel – Teeling Whiskey Distillery.
We arrived just a minute or two before a tour was due to start, so it was perfect timing. There are three main types of tour listed, but they’re essentially the same tour – the difference between the three is which drinks you have included at the end (prices listed were correct as of September 2022):
- Teeling Tasting Tour – €17 (~$16.50)
- Teeling Small Batch
- Handcrafted whiskey cocktail
- Teeling Trinity Tasting Tour – €22 (~$21)
- Teeling Small Batch
- Single Grain
- Single Malt
- Distillery Select Tasting Tour – €30 (~$29)
- Teeling Small Batch
- Single Malt
- Distillery Exclusive
- Single Pot Still
Shae, at the time, wasn’t a big fan of Irish whiskey and so she went for the cheaper Teeling Tasting Tour as she figured she might be more likely to enjoy the cocktail. I wanted to have the full experience and so I paid for the Distillery Select Tasting Tour so that I could try four of their whiskeys.
Our tour guide was excellent and it was a far more enjoyable experience than the tour I’d done a few days beforehand at the Old Bushmills Distillery. There was a Teeling Distillery in Dublin that opened back in the 1700s, but that was one of the distilleries in the Whiskey Triangle (also known as the Golden Triangle due to Irish Whiskey’s color) that eventually closed.
This latest incarnation of Teeling Distillery was opened by some of the original founder’s descendants and was the first new distillery to open in Dublin for more than 125 years.
The tour was great, but needless to say the best part of it was the end of the tour when we got to do our tastings. Shae was surprised when she enjoyed the Teeling Small Batch and she loved the cocktail.
I greatly enjoyed my tasting too and we bought a bottle of their Distillery Exclusive to go.
The Dublin Liberties Distillery
Having enjoyed our time at Teeling, Shae and I figured we should try to hit up all the distilleries displayed on the map at our hotel. Our first port of call the next day was The Dublin Liberties Distillery which, similar to Teeling, was only a short walk from our hotel.
This wasn’t quite what we were expecting. It was more of a café than having a traditional distillery tasting room, but we were still able to try three of their whiskeys – Dubliner, Oak Devil and Dead Rabbit. They were all good; I think Oak Devil was my favorite of the three, while I think Dead Rabbit was Shae’s favorite.
Pearse Lyons
Our next stop was Pearse Lyons, another of the stops on the hop on, hop off bus tour. Unfortunately this was a bust.
When arriving there was no one at the front desk of the building, so we waited what felt like ages until someone finally showed up. We asked if we could do a tasting, but they said that you can only do a tasting if you do a tour and they were all booked up that day. They weren’t offering tours the following day either. The person at the front desk didn’t seem overly keen on helping and with Pearse Lyons not offering any way to try their whiskey without paying to go on a tour, we had to give them a miss and wouldn’t be likely to make much of an effort to visit them on a future trip to Dublin.
Roe & Co
A few hundred yards down the road from Pearse Lyons was Roe & Co, another whiskey distillery. The Roe & Co name dates back to the 1800s when it was the largest distillery in Ireland, producing millions of gallons every year. They closed down in 1926, but a new Roe & Co Distillery was set up in 2019. They’re owned by Diageo, the company that also owns Guinness whose Storehouse is also only a few hundred yards away.
Roe & Co offer tours, but you can also visit their Power House Bar to try their whiskeys and cocktails. With us having toured Teeling the previous day and knowing we’d be touring Jameson later that afternoon, we decided to forego the tour and just tried some drinks instead.
I tried two sets of three whiskeys, while Shae had a couple of cocktails. Shae didn’t think much of her first cocktail, while their whiskeys were a mixed bag. There were three that I liked, a couple that were OK and one that tasted more like paint stripper.
Shae’s second cocktail was a winner though – she ordered a sweet highball and loved it.
Jameson Distillery Bow St
From one distillery to another to another. After having drinks at Roe & Co, we made our way over to Jameson Distillery Bow St as we’d heard a tour there was a must-do in Dublin.
I can see why their tour gets such positive reviews as it’s a very engaging and interactive tour, with our tour guide being particularly good. It’s almost engaging and interactive to a fault though because it felt overly polished and corporate rather than it being a distillery tour of a plucky upstart that you want to root for. I guess that shouldn’t be too surprising seeing as Jameson is a large corporation, but our tour guide mentioned the performance tour was put together by people who’d worked for Disney and it shows. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just didn’t feel very authentic.
At the end of the tour you get a tasting where you can choose Jameson neat, Jameson on the rocks or a Jameson cocktail. I had it with one ice cube, while Shae went for their cocktail that had ginger beer and something else.
In addition to doing the tour, I paid extra for their cask draw add-on.
This took us into a room not accessible during a regular tour where we got to try whiskey drawn straight from a cask.
The whiskey drawn straight from the cask was much more full-flavored than regular Jameson and I would’ve happily had far more of it.
Guinness Storehouse
As if all that whiskey wasn’t enough, the next day we visited the other notable alcohol attraction in Dublin – the Guinness Storehouse.
We got a little unlucky with our timing because when we arrived for our tour time we noticed everyone was standing outside. It turned out there was a fire drill, so we had to wait a little while before being able to enter for our own tour.
The Guinness Storehouse tour is self-guided which is nice as that means you can do it all at your own speed. I had to work later that day, so we had to tour a little more quickly than we might have otherwise. Despite that, it still took a good couple of hours, so I’d allow for at least three hours if you don’t want to rush through.
Partway through the tour there was a small tasting of Guinness.
Shae and I paid an extra €8 (~$7.75) per person to add a STOUTie to our tour. What’s a STOUTie? It’s a pint of Guinness with your face on the head of it – seriously, how cool is this?!
The photos on the head of the Guinness pint are generated by something similar to a 3d printer that uses malted barley extract to paint the picture. Here’s a video of it in action:
Having quite literally drunk our faces off, we finished off the tour by heading up to their bar on the top floor which features the highest garden in Ireland. This is where you can get the complimentary drink that comes with all Guinness tours, but we’d already had our fill of Guinness for the morning and so gave our two free drinks to a group we’d met in line earlier on that morning.
Kilmainham Gaol
We tried visiting Kilmainham Gaol during a trip to Dublin back in 2017, but it didn’t quite work out. We hadn’t realized tickets sold out quickly back then, so we showed up thinking we could get tour tickets at the door only to find out they were sold out for the day.
The person working that day kindly let us in to look around the museum part of the site, but we were disappointed to have missed out on a guided tour. Shae and I therefore made sure we bought our tickets ahead of time.
It turns out that we could’ve given the tour a miss. Perhaps that’s a little unfair as maybe it depends on which tour guide you get. Our tour guide was nice, but it felt like she’d simply memorized her script as we went around, rather than drawing us in with her storytelling abilities.
Ultimately, I found the tour fairly dull. We were mainly told about the people who’d been in some of the cells, but there wasn’t much context provided as to why they were jailed, nor any information as to what life was like in the jail.
Our tour guide also had a tendency to stand right in front of whatever she was talking about, then when she was done talking we’d have to immediately move to the next room as another tour group was coming. That meant it was hard to get photos of notable parts of the site without her standing in front of them most of the time – this next photo being an exception.
The layout of the museum is somewhat confusing too. Most of the exhibits are arranged in chronological order based on certain time periods, but it’s not an obvious route through the exhibits. You come up some stairs and have 1916 to your right and 1922-24 to your left, but you actually need to start in the 1798-1915 section that’s hidden away behind a wall. Thankfully we noticed a small sign on the wall showing the different date-ranged exhibits, but it’s not laid out in an intuitive way.
Doner Kebab
One of the things I like to eat whenever we head back to the UK is a doner kebab. It’s similar to a gyro in the US, but better. It’s totally unhealthy and is the kind of thing you’ll eat after having a few beers down the pub, but it tastes so good!
Anyway, I didn’t get a chance to have one when we were in England, but thankfully Ireland isn’t too far removed from the UK and there was a fast food joint across the street from our hotel that did doner kebabs in addition to pizzas, burgers, etc. It felt a little healthier than I was expecting, but it hit the spot and fulfilled my kebab needs for now.
Wok In
For dinner another night we decided to walk over to get that most traditional of Irish meals – Asian food 😉 When looking at reviews online, Wok In Noodle Bar had good reviews for tasty food at a reasonable price and that’s exactly what we got.
St Patrick’s Cathedral
I had to work on a couple of days while we were in Dublin. We were able to do some of our activities after that work time, but it still left Shae with some spare time.
As a result, she went to visit a couple of attractions without me. One of those was St Patrick’s Cathedral which was only a minute’s walk from our hotel – here are her thoughts on it.
St. Patrick’s Cathedral had a very different vibe to Sacre Coeur and the Liverpool Cathedral – it was much more crowded and busier with tours the day I went. I purchased joint tickets through the Marsh’s Library website for both the Cathedral and the Library. Both were worth the visit, but I enjoyed Marsh’s Library much more – more on that below.
One of the things that stood out in St. Patrick’s, that others commented on as well, is the tile flooring. It’s intricate and I found that I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
If you have a great interest in cathedrals, St. Patrick’s in particular, you’ll enjoy the free and thorough audio tour available. There was more to hear than I had time for, but I was glad to have a bit of extra information available.
Marsh’s Library
The other place Shae went to visit without me was Marsh’s Library – here’s what it was like.
Our hop-on, hop-off bus tour stop was outside of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Marsh’s Library was right next door. Hearing a tiny bit about the library I knew it was somewhere I really wanted to see in person. I wasn’t disappointed – if anything, I wish I’d had more time.
Marsh’s Library is a public library from the Enlightenment. It was made a public library – forever – by an act of Parliament. This has left it mostly unchanged since then and well protected. There are books in the library that are in languages long dead and books from all over the world from the 1700s onwards.
One thing that many people come to Marsh’s to see are the reading cages. These were designed to keep anyone from taking the precious volumes. Marsh’s is a reference library, so you can’t check books out to take with you; you read the books on site and return them to the librarians. The cages meant that even smaller tomes could be seen on the desk, by the librarian, when the reader was allowed out of the locked space.
One thing I was surprised about was that you don’t have to wear gloves to look at the books or read them. You just need clean, dry hands. This is because the friction, between the fabric gloves and some of the materials a few of the books are made of, can cause damage to the books.
I’d like to re-visit Marsh’s Library on my next visit to Dublin and even find a book to enjoy in a locked reading cage of my own.
Hilton Dublin Airport
Our first three nights in Dublin were spent at the Hyatt Centric The Liberties which is right in the thick of things, but we moved hotels for our final night.
Our flight back to the US was due to leave Dublin late morning on our final day. When planning our trip there had been huge issues with delays at European airports when it came to checking in, getting through security, issues with baggage, etc. Dublin was one of the airports most badly affected, so we didn’t want to risk delays with getting to the airport in the morning because it can take about an hour to get from the city center to the airport when there’s traffic.
As a result, we got a late checkout from the Hyatt Centric thanks to my Globalist status, then took an Uber to the Hilton Dublin Airport. I’m glad we booked it a couple of months ahead of time because they were fully booked when we came to check in.
Considering it’s an airport hotel and we didn’t get an upgrade, our room was a good size. It was a little strange walking into the room having the two armchairs already converted into beds seeing as there was a king bed too and it was only Shae and I using the room, but I guess it’s convenient for people who might be travelling as a party of three or four people who want to immediately take a nap after getting off a flight.
We ordered room service for dinner as we couldn’t be bothered to head down to the restaurant. I ordered their beef and Guinness pie which came with parsnips, carrots and broccoli. Those are my three favorite vegetables in order, so this meal hit the spot. The pie unexpectedly came topped with melted cheese; I don’t like cheese, but it was easy to peel that off as it was just a thin, melted layer of it.
Shae ordered steak and fries and it hit the spot for her too.
Dublin Airport
After having complimentary breakfast courtesy of my Hilton status (something you can get with the Hilton Surpass and Aspire credit cards or an Amex Platinum card), we took the hotel’s free shuttle bus to the airport.
A feature of Dublin airport that we loved is that as soon as you’re through security, there’s a large water stand. Seeing as you’re not allowed to bring large amounts of liquids through in your carry-on, it’s nice that there’s this immediate option to buy bottles of water for only €1 (~$1) rather than having to buy one at inflated prices from a store in the airport post-security. It’s done on the honor system, so you just drop your cash in a slot which can also be a good way to use up loose change left over from your trip.
Flight Back
We’d flown in economy with United from New York to London and returned on United too, this time from Dublin to Chicago. That’s because we’d left our car in Chicago before flying to New York for a couple of days at the beginning of our trip to watch Hamilton.
Booking the trip as two one-way tickets would’ve been expensive as even just one one-way transatlantic flight tends to be priced more expensively than a round-trip flight. To get around that, I was able to book a multi-city ticket which worked in a similar way to buying a round-trip ticket price-wise, but meant to could fly in and out of different airports on our way out and back.
We were both disappointed to be leaving Dublin as we love it there…
…but were also very happy to be heading home as we’d been away from Truffles for just over a month.
Truffles initially seemed sad to be leaving the pet sitter she’d been with and her two pup buddies, but she soon came around to being back on the road with us.
I didn’t have much time to relax though as I was soon heading back overseas for the Frequent Miler 3 Cards, 3 Continents challenge – more about that in our next post.
All Posts In This Series
- Hamilton, Stonehenge, Thermal Baths & More: Week 1 Of Our 5 Week International Trip
- Castles, Gardens, Seals, Otters, Friends & Much More: Week 2 Of Our 5 Week International Trip
- London, Paris & London Again: Week 3 Of Our 5 Week International Trip
- Liverpool & Belfast: Week 4 Of Our 5 Week International Trip
- Dublin, Ireland: The End Of Our 5 Week International Trip
[…] Dublin, Ireland: The End Of Our 5 Week International Trip […]