Many of you have been following our international voyage these past two weeks. Last week I wrote about Iceland and the heart-shaped stoplight in Akureyri that told me to stop in the name of love. This week we landed in Ireland, and Cork turned out to be our last stop. By the time you read this, I will be sitting at Heathrow, waiting for a flight home after twelve days of refreshment and beauty, still thinking about one afternoon in particular.
When our ship pulled into Cork, we had four excursions to choose from. We could kiss the Blarney Stone and come home with the gift of gab and a sweater. We could walk the Titanic Heritage Trail and stand where the last passengers boarded. We could take a walking tour of the city. Or we could tour the Midleton Distillery and learn how Irish whiskey is made. I skipped the stone. A woman who talks for a living does not need help in the gab department, and I got the Tremendous DNA, which comes with more gab than a million Blarney Stones. I picked the whiskey tour, and I do not drink whiskey. I tasted it once. Yuck!
I picked it because of Mike. My husband is half Irish, and his grandfather made barrels for a living. That is the whole reason we booked this cruise in the first place. I had never set foot in Ireland, even though I lived a short hop away for two years. When I was stationed at RAF Lakenheath from 1994 to 1996, the Troubles were still going on, and the IRA bombings with them. We understood we were not the target, yet we stayed clear of the whole island all the same. It took me thirty years to finally get there, and when I did, I went with a man whose family came from that soil.
Stephen Mansfield wrote a book called The Search for God and Guinness, and I read it years ago during my doctoral studies. It has shaped how I have seen this whole subject ever since. It begins in an Ireland where the water was famously undrinkable, and the gin and whiskey that replaced it were devastating civil society. In a disease-ridden, starvation-plagued age, Arthur Guinness brewed beer as the healthier alternative, right alongside monks and evangelical churches doing the same thing. The lesson I took from that book was the righteous use of wealth. Anything at all can be used to benefit and bless your brothers and sisters, even spirits and beer, and what the Guinness family did with their money over two centuries of housing, feeding, and doctoring Dublin is one of the great stories of faith put to work. Mansfield himself came from a family of teetotalers. He wrote it in response to the crumbling values he saw in corporate America, and then found himself speaking to corporate audiences around the world.
So I walked into Midleton curious rather than thirsty. That one taste years ago had convinced me the stuff was lighter fluid, which is precisely why I was interested to see how something like that had captured the whole world. Somebody, somewhere, took the first sip and thought everyone would love it, and they were right, because Jameson is the best-selling Irish whiskey on earth.
Then the guide said the thing that has been rattling around in my head ever since. Ninety-five percent of the flavor of whiskey comes from the barrel. Not the barley, not the water, not the yeast, not the triple distillation the Irish are famous for. All of that matters, yet none of it accounts for the majority of what ends up in your glass. You can pour the finest ingredients in the world into a bad vessel and get nothing worth drinking.
The tasting comes at the end of the tour. By the time we got there, I had taken in so much wisdom about the craft, and had so much new appreciation for the people who do it, that I was certain the whiskey would magically taste wonderful this time. I was wrong. It still tasted like lighter fluid to me. It was definitely not my cup of tea, or my cup of whis-key.
I have spent my career pouring things into people—training, coaching, mentorship, budget, opportunity, second chances. I have learned the hard way that the pouring isn't the variable. Two people can sit in the same session, get the same feedback, and be handed the same opening, and one turns it into something remarkable while the other leaks it out the bottom. The barrel does not merely hold the whiskey. It changes it. That is what a person does with what you give them, and it is why the same investment produces such wildly different results.
The aging rules make the same point from another angle. In Ireland, the spirit is not legally whiskey until it has spent at least three years in wood. There is no way to hurry it, and there is no additive that substitutes for time in the dark. I had to laugh when I heard that number, because three years is exactly what I tell every author I publish and every entrepreneur I coach. It takes at least three years to build a fan base, and three years to build a book of business. Most people quit somewhere around eighteen months because nothing visible is happening, when what is actually happening is the same thing that happens to whiskey in a warehouse. The work is going on in the dark where nobody is watching it, including you. Stay with it.
What struck me even more is what happens after that minimum has been served. The longer it sits, the more it is worth. We live in a culture that treats getting older as a slow decline in value, and here is an entire industry built on the opposite premise. At sixty-three, I will take that trade every day of the week.
Scripture has been making this argument the whole time, which I didn't fully appreciate until I stood in a warehouse, looking at barrels stacked three high. Jesus talked about wineskins, about how you cannot pour new wine into old, rigid skins without losing both. Paul wrote about treasure in jars of clay: the power belongs to God, and the jar still matters because it carries the treasure into the world. The first miracle was water into wine at a wedding, and the master of the feast exclaimed that the best had been saved for last! Transformation runs through it all, and in every case a vessel is involved.
Here is where I have to be honest, because this metaphor has a real problem if I leave it where it sits. If the barrel makes the whiskey, then what about the person who did not get a good barrel? Plenty of people were shaped by parents who were not there, by a childhood that took more than it gave, by institutions that failed them. Telling that person the vessel determines everything is telling them they lost before they started, and I do not believe that for a second.
The coopers themselves answer it. A cooper does not spend most of his time building new casks. He spends it repairing old ones, pulling out the staves that have gone bad, fitting new wood in their place, resetting the hoops, and putting the barrel back into service. Irish whiskey rarely goes into a brand-new barrel at all. It goes into casks that already held bourbon or sherry, wood with a previous life soaked into it, and the distiller works with what is there. Then there is the char. The inside of the barrel is set on fire, because uncharred wood gives back almost nothing. Fire is what opens the grain so the vessel can do its work.
Some people inherit a good barrel. Some people have to become their own cooper, pulling out the bad staves one at a time and setting the hoops back where they belong. Some of us were opened up by fire we never asked for. The vessel still determines what comes out, yet the vessel is not fixed, and that is the whole hope of leadership development as a profession.
Which brings me back to why we were in that room in the first place. Mike’s grandfather, Andrew Mihalik, was a cooper at the Fuhrmann and Schmidt Brewery in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, and everybody called him Coop. His tools are in our house right now. The grindstone on its heavy wooden frame, the shaving horse with the clamp still mounted on it, and a few of his barrels. When he had wood left over, he built furniture out of the staves, and a round table and a plant stand he made with his own hands sit in our living room today, banded with metal hoops, still holding something.
I admire Mike for keeping all of it, and I understand the instinct because I am in a legacy business myself. When my father passed, I grabbed up every jot and tittle he left behind. Letters, books, pamphlets, notes, his cuff links, his bow ties, his bolos, his albums, even his beloved karaoke machine. It has been a treasure trove for me ever since, and I still go back into it and find things I need. When I hold one of those bow ties, I am doing exactly what Mike does when he looks at his grandfather’s craftwork. He spent more than sixty years building something, and I have spent my career carrying it forward rather than starting over with my own name on the door. Pay attention to who came before you, and keep what they made. It is a vital part of who you are, and none of us gets to be entirely self-made, no matter how the culture flatters us on that point.
I still do not like whiskey. I walked out of that warehouse with something better than a taste for it, though, which was a picture I can hand to any leader who asks me why the same investment lands so differently in two different people. It is the barrel. It has always been the barrel. The good news is that barrels can be repaired, and every single one of them had a cooper.
Mike read this before I posted it, and he gave me a better ending than the one I had written. So I will leave you with his question instead of mine. Who was your cooper? Who is your cooper now?
P.S. In case you missed it last week, my new book Natural Born Follower releases this September. It is about followership, and why the people who aren't out front determine far more than anyone gives them credit for. Given where this post ended up, you can see why the barrel stayed with me.
