Alcohol and religious orders have enjoyed a long and productive association. Think of Carthusians and Chartreuse, Benedictines and Benedictine (as well as the less reputable tonic wine), Trappists and strong, dark beer. We owe the distillation of spirits to inquisitive (and doubtless thirsty) Religious who learned it from Moorish sources. “Strong water” or aqua ardens was the result. The technique was later improved by the thirteenth-century Oxford Franciscan proto-scientist and alchemist Roger Bacon; but it was early Irish monks who gave to the most celebrated and now most widely drunk of all distilled spirits its name. “Whiskey” or “whisky” comes from uisge beatha, pronounced “ooshkie bayha”, the Gaelic for water of life or aqua vitae. The