Old Bushmills Distillery

About the distillery

Old Bushmills sits on the River Bush, two miles inland from the Causeway Coast in north Antrim. It holds a royal licence granted by King James I in 1608 to Sir Thomas Phillipps to distil whiskey in the surrounding hundred. The licence is the oldest of its kind in Ireland. The continuous operating company on this site dates from 1784, formally established by Hugh Anderson, and has run, on and off, ever since.

What Bushmills makes is Irish malt whiskey, triple-distilled in copper pot stills. The triple distillation is the central technique — once in the wash still, twice in the spirit stills, producing a lighter, cleaner spirit than the doubly-distilled Scotch tradition. There are ten pot stills on the floor at Bushmills, working day and night, drawing on water from Saint Columb's Rill, a small tributary of the Bush that runs through the basalt of the headland.

The site is a working distillery first and a tourist destination second. There are around twenty warehouses on the grounds, holding several hundred thousand casks of maturing spirit at any given time. The smell of evaporating whiskey — the "angel's share" — is on the air around the buildings. The pagoda-roofed kilns from the older malting era still stand and have become the visual signature of the place, although the malting itself is now done elsewhere.

The tour takes about 40 minutes and walks visitors through the working stages — mash tuns, fermentation tuns, the still room, the warehouses — and ends with a tasting. The route is the same every day but the still room is never the same room twice. Bushmills is now owned by Proximo Spirits, which acquired the brand from Diageo in 2014, and in 2023 the company opened a second, larger distillery a short distance away called the Causeway Distillery. The old buildings continue.

For more on the whiskey itself — the bottlings, the cask programme, where to buy it — see the food & drink entry. This page is about the visit.

Essential information

Getting there

Off the A2 in the centre of Bushmills village, signposted. Free car park. About an hour from Belfast, ten minutes from the Causeway.

Book ahead

Tours sell out at peak times. Book online for the day and time you want, especially summer weekends and bank holidays.

Photography

Photos generally OK in the courtyard. No phones in the still room (alcohol vapours / ignition risk) — the guide will say. Plenty of time outside.

Driving and drink

Designate a driver if you want the full tasting. Non-drinkers and drivers can swap their dram for a take-home miniature.

The shop

Distillery-exclusive bottlings on sale here that don't appear elsewhere, including hand-filled casks. The 1608 expression is duty-free and distillery-only.

Refreshments

Café and a pub-style bar on site. Wider choice in Bushmills village — the French Rooms and the Bushmills Inn are five minutes' walk.