Roe & Co Distillery

James's Street and the Weight of What Was Here Before

Walking along James's Street toward The Liberties, the industrial scale of the surrounding architecture tells you something important before you arrive anywhere. This was not a neighbourhood of small workshops. The buildings here were built to process grain at volume, to barrel and age and ship at a pace that once made Dublin one of the most productive whiskey cities on earth. By the mid-twentieth century, most of that infrastructure sat idle. The recovery has been slow, deliberate, and in some stretches, genuinely impressive.

Roe & Co Distillery sits at 92 James's Street in a former Guinness Power Station, a late Victorian structure that supplied electricity to the nearby brewery complex. The bones of the building, its high ceilings, brick facades, and industrial proportions, read as a physical argument for the neighbourhood's significance. The Liberties was the engine room of Irish whiskey production before decades of industrial decline reduced the district to a fraction of its former output. What the building holds now is both a working distillery and a structured visitor experience, and the two functions are harder to separate here than at more conventional attractions.

Irish Whiskey's Long Contraction and the Current Expansion

To understand why a distillery in this location carries editorial weight, it helps to know what the Irish whiskey category looked like thirty years ago. At its lowest point, Irish whiskey production had contracted to a handful of operational sites, with Midleton in County Cork and Bushmills in County Antrim accounting for the overwhelming majority of output. The category had ceded ground to Scotch, bourbon, and Japanese whisky across international markets. The recovery that followed was one of the more remarkable reversals in the spirits industry: Irish whiskey became one of the fastest-growing whisky categories globally through the 2010s, and that growth triggered a wave of new distillery investment, much of it concentrated in Dublin.

The Liberties, with its documented history as the centre of Dublin's distilling trade, became a focal point for that reinvestment. The Teeling Distillery opened nearby in 2015, the first new Dublin distillery in a generation. Roe & Co followed, taking its name from George Roe, whose nineteenth-century distillery on Thomas Street was at one point among the largest in the world. That naming decision is not incidental. It positions the brand explicitly within a historical lineage rather than as a contemporary standalone, and it frames the visitor experience as a point of connection to that broader story rather than a marketing exercise.

The Experience Format and What It Prioritises

In many cities, distillery visitor experiences split between passive tours that funnel guests through production areas and more interactive formats that treat the distillery as a venue in its own right. Roe & Co sits firmly in the latter category. The format is designed around hands-on engagement with the blending process rather than observation of production at a distance. Visitors work with component whiskies to understand how the house style is assembled, which places the emphasis on education and palate development rather than spectacle.

This approach reflects a wider shift in premium spirits tourism, where the most credible visitor programmes are those that give guests a transferable skill or a deeper understanding of the category rather than simply a branded environment to photograph. The Liberties now has enough distillery infrastructure to form a coherent whiskey trail, and Roe & Co's programming sits at the more considered end of that offer. For visitors arriving from elsewhere in the city, the journey through The Liberties itself, past the old Guinness storehouse and along streets that retain the scale of their industrial past, forms part of the experience before the front door is reached.

Where This Fits in Dublin's Broader Visitor Offer

Dublin's food and drink scene has developed considerably in range and ambition over the past decade. On the restaurant side, the city now holds Michelin-starred addresses across multiple price tiers, from the long-established Patrick Guilbaud, which has held two stars for decades, to more recent arrivals like Chapter One by Mickael Viljanen and Glovers Alley. Bastible and D'Olier Street represent the city's modern Irish cooking at a more accessible price point. See our full Dublin restaurants guide for a complete overview of where the city's dining sits right now.

The distillery experience occupies a different but complementary position in that offer. Where the restaurant scene is primarily about contemporary technique applied to Irish produce, Roe & Co is about historical context and the reconstruction of a production tradition. A visitor who spends an afternoon in The Liberties and an evening at a table in the city has covered two distinct but related dimensions of what Irish food and drink culture has become.

For those travelling more widely through Ireland, the contrast with rural restaurant destinations is instructive. Places like Aniar in Galway, Bastion in Kinsale, Chestnut in Ballydehob, dede in Baltimore, Liath in Blackrock, and Campagne in Kilkenny each anchor their menus in hyper-local produce and place. The Liberties operates on a different register, one defined by urban industrial heritage rather than agricultural terroir. Further afield, Terre in Castlemartyr, Homestead Cottage in Doolin, House in Ardmore, and Lady Helen in Thomastown complete a picture of Irish dining that extends well beyond the capital. For international reference points in spirits-adjacent precision and programme depth, the comparison would be experiences closer in spirit to what Le Bernardin in New York City or Atomix in New York City represent in their respective categories: experiences built on craft transparency and category education rather than ambient theatre alone.

Know Before You Go