Field Of Dreams

I arrive at Ballykeefe in late summer 2024. Expecting to find throngs of tourists, I’m greeted by an empty car park. No tour buses, no campervans, no cars, no bikes. Many distilleries in Ireland push hard on tourism as a driver of both revenue and brand awareness. Not Ballykeefe. Theirs is a different approach. 

I wonder if I got the date for my visit right until owner, farmer, and head distiller Morgan Ging appears, and explains how they changed their strategy on tours. Prior to the pandemic they had many tour buses lining up outside, but the lockdowns gave them space to think hard on whether they wanted to be a tourism hotspot/glorified toilet stop for busloads of international visitors, or something more low key, more targeted. 

“Covid changed everything for us – we had people here employed, with coaches coming in, but with the figures at the end of it, it wasn’t worth it,” Ging explains. 

“What we did enjoy here prior to covid was the high-end tours. So covid was over and we slowly reopened to the tours part of it but I only did the high-end tours and was looking for someone to manage it for me, but then I started to enjoy these high end tours because the people are really into whiskey. So now the gates closed, now you have to ring up, no hens, no stags, no large groups or anything like that, just high-end tours, private ones. 

“A lot of those are just extremely wealthy people, and we just host them for an afternoon and that is working perfectly well for us. They want to meet me, as distiller and owner, and they love the story. They get to see the farm, get to see the whole place, and we are very happy with that. Not huge revenue, but for me it’s great for the auld head that you are meeting people who are interested in the business, in what we do, in the spirits, the tasting of them, hearing the story. 

“It’s not a generic tour; today our tour will be one way and tomorrow the tour could be something totally different we talk about. It’s unscripted. So I have to keep myself fresh, I talk about the trials and tribulations of the day to the people who come in, and tomorrow it could be something else, and everyone wants to hear stories they won’t hear anywhere else. And that keeps me fresh, keeps the business fresh. So the tourism part of the business at the very start was going to be very important, but today it is very important in that it is people who want to be here. Serious whiskey heads.”

Bus tour companies continued to offer them slots but Ging declined, saying that ‘it’s not Ballykeefe’. The question then is, what is Ballykeefe? 

Back in the late 1980s, Ging was working on the family farm with his father – it was harvest time, and things weren’t going great for them: “Bad weather, bad yield, bad protein, know yourself just one of those seasons. And I said to dad, what about adding value to what we do, and he said what do you mean, and I said what about making whiskey, and he said if you want to do it go ahead, he says I won’t stop you. So this was back in ‘89, ‘90, but we couldn’t get the license.”

The idea of making whiskey had come from a library book Ging was reading, which tracked the rise and fall of Irish whiskey, and he was fascinated by the fact the drink went from the number one spirit in the world to struggling to survive in the 1970s. In his mind he wanted to make a very specific type of whiskey – as it was made a century ago, rather than the newer iteration, which boasted grain spirit and blending. In his research he found repeated mentions of one tasting note that was particular to single pot still Irish whiskey as it was made at the turn of the century.  

“Jameson is a great product and that, but it’s not the way Irish whiskey was hundreds of years ago – Irish whiskey hundreds of years ago was made from malted barley, unmalted barley, distilled in a certain way, brewed in a certain way, aged, and away we went. And there was a beautiful aniseed flavour to it. I designed my equipment here bespoke for Ballykeefe to put back that aniseed flavour in it – the way I brew, the way I ferment, the way I distill. 

“What I wanted to do here when the license became available was to build a small distillery to work and make whiskey for myself and maybe sell it locally but it was never focussed on world domination. It was about making the spirit, the art of making whiskey and all the different flavours you can extract from it.” 

In 2002 Morgan and his wife Anne bought the land upon which they founded Ballykeefe farm. To fund the venture, the couple juggled multiple jobs while expanding their farm from beef production into tillage. However, crises such as the bull beef and horse meat scandals took a toll on the industry and on them, prompting Morgan to revisit his dream of diversification. During a crunch meeting with his accountant, he mentioned his desire to start a distillery. She provided him with a customs officer’s contact, and that afternoon, the officer visited Ballykeefe and told them the plan should be viable — provided that proper planning permissions were in place. Ging removed an old hay shed and lean-to and replaced it with a distillery which sits between a cowshed and the family home. He always wanted this to be part of the farm, part of the family. But the distillery he ended up with was far larger than he had envisioned. 

“The issue for me was at the time that the licensing laws stated you must have a minimum of an 1,800-litre still,” he says, gesturing at his stills. The law has since changed and smaller stills are allowed, but if Ging was to build when he did, he would have to create a distillery larger than the hobbyist scale he had planned in his head. 

“A set minimum, so I had to commit – if I was to fulfill my dream of distilling my own liquid this is what I had to build. You can have smaller stills now in a lot of the distilleries, the new ones that open would be very small, and not commercially viable in my opinion.”

Once he had the permits, he needed the kit, and was fortunate enough to know Peter Clancy, a rep for Barison Industry in Italy, who are distillery designers. Peter – who went on to open his own distillery, Lough Ree – introduced Ging to the owner of Barison Industry, Graziano, who came to Kilkenny and worked out the entire design with Morgan. 

“In fairness to him he was a very patient man,” Ging laughs. Part of his design meant he wanted an extra plate within the lauter tun, a kind of sieve: “So the very, very expensive plate in there had to be laser coated and all that but if you take the turbidity say down in Waterford or Dingle or Midleton, it’s a clear liquid going across. My liquid looks like a cup of strong tea without milk in it, that beautiful reddy orangey colour. Thats where im getting my flavour profile from, I’m losing spirit yield, but gaining spirit flavour profile. If Diageo owned this place it would be run totally different, it would be run on spirit yield, but because Morgan has it, it’s run on flavour. 

“I also do four temperature changes in the mash vessel. Normally it’s two to three, I do four. There is different turbidity coming out of it. So this place is set up so that it’s a one man show – I didn’t want people in there influencing what I did. It’s designed in such a way that myself and Graziano and Peter sat down, we designed the grain mill, brewery, fermentations, still, so I’m here and I can control everything in one spot. 

“Everything is hard-piped, we don’t have any loose pipes lying around the floors here so that goes all the way up around there, down here, in through the floor plate and I can send it anywhere I want, so it’s only a matter of adjusting the pipes.  

“Graziano said we could reduce the price, take this out, put in overground pipes, and I said no, we will do it once and then that’s it, pay for it over a period of time.” 

Ging was just as precise about what he wanted from his stills, again with the sole intent of isolating that aniseed note: “The neck is a little taller than it should be for the size of the pot, that’s part of my design. The more copper contact you have for the sulphates, the cleaner the spirit. Then my line arm is more or less on level, so what I’m trying to avoid is, you know that tangy aftertaste you get with some whiskies, so that’s the oils, those heavier oils. So if you come down at an angle, you’ll run these very quickly,” he says, gesturing at the stills.  

“That’s the big cost of distilleries, running these, it’s boiling your kettles basically. So if you run it down, you’ll save yourself a huge amount of money. Whereas I have it bang in the middle; what that does, it sends some of those heavier oils back into the still, and it prevents them from going forward. So I bring through the lighter oils, the more flavoursome ones, into my spirit. As I said, if the accountant sat down with me at the start he would say ‘no no, you’re angling that down, no no, you can run this faster, no you’re not doing that’. Whereas for me, it was a case that this is what I want to do, this is how I want to achieve it, this is what I have. So it’s actually only about six millimetres of an incline in those, it’s just to prevent alcohol from lying in the back.” 

With the distillery complete and commissioned in 2017, Ging hired master distiller Jamie Baggott who developed their white spirit range. Once they were set up and running, Baggott departed, and since 2018 Ging has been the head distiller, albeit a self taught one. He says he deliberately stayed away from the usual distilling qualifications obtained from Heriot Watt in Scotland. 

“I purposely didn’t because I had learned enough, I was self taught over the years what I wanted, and one of the reasons, I had applied to Heriot Watt and I went to myself, you’re going to learn how to make scotch whisky. And for me….I had no interest in making tequila, I have no interest in making bourbon, at the moment all I wanted to do was make whiskey the way it was made hundreds of years ago – I had researched that and i had learned it and the guys hundreds of years ago they didn’t go off to do a brewing course and learn all the different ethanols and the breakdowns of the spirit and all that, they worked on the flavour profiles and the taste that was coming off the still, was it right or was it wrong, all that. I taught myself that. 

“Right or wrong, I don’t know. But that’s Irish whiskey, it’s not influenced in any way by English, Scottish or American, any of that. It is made by an Irish guy who researched how it was done years ago without any influence from the outside world. So you could pick me up, land me back a couple of hundred years ago, and I would fit in lovely with the boys back then making whiskey. But if you pick me up and land me in Scotland, I won’t fit in, because I don’t know how they do it, or understand, or want to. But pick me up and throw me back a couple of hundred years ago, me and the guys would have great craic making the whiskey.” 

“So for me it’s all about extracting the different flavours for a tweak in the equipment to do that – it’s not about volume and it’s not about commercialism. So if you go down to any of the others, Clonakilty, Waterford, it’s all about volume, it’s a business. 

“For me it’s different – if this had to be a good business, I wouldn’t be doing it. I’m not interested. I’m only interested in the quality of the spirit I can produce and in doing so I will charge extra for my product. We’re not under any financial pressure, so it will be there on the shelf. And if it doesn’t go into a bottle today, it’s a year older next year and it’s more valuable. 

“So financial pressure is not an issue here. It’s all about having a product that is exceptional and I’ve entered some of the competitions in the US spirits ratings and all those things and I’ve got 94 or 95 points, people are happy with what comes out.” 

Ging does give a nod to Waterford’s celebration and elevation of terroir, the concept that wines have a sense of place, that the location of the vineyards has an impact on flavour. For Ging, this place is his own farm, where all his grain comes from. 

“So if you take the guys down in Waterford, what they are doing is they take this particular grain from this particular farm in this particular area with this particular soil type, they distill that and you will get a unique flavour to it. 

“What I do is, I have my own field, grow my own grain but what I’m doing is controlling the inputs. I’m controlling how it is cared for, I’m controlling the protein. I don’t want a real low protein, I don’t want a real hgh protein, I want something in the middle that can give me a flavour profile; real low protein will give you a higher yield, that’s why distillers protein is always lower for a higher spirit yield, brewers protein is a bit higher because you get a lot more flavours from the product. I’m right bang in the middle because I adjust my crop growing season to be bang in the middle. 

“I’m losing on spirit yield but I’m gaining on spirit profile. It’s all about the profile of the spirit, that is what I am worried about. 

“And then other things I do that are personal to me are; there are aphids that attack spring barley every year but if you spray for the aphids it kills the ladybugs and the spiders and all the other insects. I refuse to spray for it. I lose five to ten percent grain yield by not spraying for the aphids but I sleep ok at night. Things like that which people don’t see are important to me. I don’t go making a big scene about it and blowing about it all over social media and that, I’m not into that.

“So what works for me is I have one field allocated to the malt for the distillery, and because I have that field now trained, as such, to produce what I want, I know what works in it because of the soil structure and how to do it, because even though it’s quite a large field there part of it, it’s sandy, there’s part of it is loamy, so I adjust my fertiliser, I adjust everything, so I have that bang on where I want it now. But then in other parts of the farm I grow rye and I grow oats for the distillery so that’s where I play with my ingredients. 

“So that’s where it gets very interesting, I’ve done 100% malted rye, I’ve done 100% unmalted rye with enzymes, I’ve done 51% rye or as they call them in the United States straight rye, I’ve done oats, I’ve done variations of oats with malted barley and with unmalted barley. Basically, I can do what I want because it’s mine. If you were in a commercial business then you’d have to talk to the boss to do what i’m doing, whereas i can just.. I’m like the guys in Moonshiners, you know, this recipe today, so that’s where this is set up, that is why I do it, because I can. 

“So when I woke up in the morning back in 2017 I decided that I might grow some rye. I did research on rye whiskeys and flavour profiles and everything in it and I grew a crop of rye on the farm here and I got it malted with the guys in Minch Malt and then made whisky out of it. Now I should have released that whiskey. I had it old enough to release prior to when Irish Distillers [released their Method & Madness rye and malt], I could have released a year before those guys, but as I said, I’m not into the commercial stuff, chasing sales, what difference does it make? I have the first rye in Ireland and that’s all I know. And I know I have an excellent rye because I have given tasting to different groups that come in here and people love it. It’s just a matter of getting the finger out now and putting it in a bottle.”

But putting the whiskey in a bottle is something he is in no rush to do, as he explained: “Our distributor in America wanted everything we had, and I said no no no no, and the reason is that I want a stockpile of whiskey that’s ten years old. When I have the ten year olds there, that’s when I release a lot more. It’s not about shoving it out the door today, and then what do you do tomorrow? Ballykeefe is a distillery that is unique in a way – it’s not a massive commercial distillery, it’s more about the love of the art of distilling. And when we get to a ten year old with the whiskeys we’ll have the rye, we’ll have the oats and it’ll be released then.” 

If he seems nonchalant about the commercial side of the distillery, it might be because he is a farmer first, a calling which is part vocation, part vexation, part hex. Farmers are bound to the land and it to them – as Ging notes, farmers now have burdens that previous generations did not: “You have a lot more stress in farming today than when my father was farming, or my grandfather. Because if you had a bad year, your outgoings were small. If you have a bad year now, your outgoings are massive. The last new tractor my father bought was about 15,000 euros, the last new tractor we bought here was 200,000. And there’s no way around this, there actually no way around this. 

“When the Ukraine crisis kicked off, fertiliser went from a couple of hundred euros a tonne to 1,200 euros a tonne. There isn’t a middle margin there to take profit for the farmer, because you’re a price taker, you’re not a price maker. This year (2024) the tillage farmers are under huge pressure, one, they got very late sowing of the crops so yield will be back, and the price has gone through the floor. So it’s a very difficult game and then in the beef end of things there was no grass growth worth a damn up until now nearly.  

“So animals didn’t thrive, so you’re down 100 kilos a head on your animal and if you’re in the margin and you’re getting three euro a kilo that’s three hundred euro down. That’s you know you’re into negative business then. And that’s why the majority of farmers’ wives are actually working. Farming is more as a disease and people just stay going because they don’t want to be the one to give up. As Kevin Costner said in Yellowstone, ranching in america is the only business where you hope to break even so that you can ranch again for the following year. You know a lot of farming has gone that way. And people don’t realise there’s only two weeks of food in the country. So if anything major happens in the world the shelves have only two weeks food. Okay, Ireland is self-sufficient in milk, cheese, meat, we’re not too bad, but the avocados and all those other nice things we like….” 

He says that while farm distilleries are not especially common now, a hundred years ago they were: “There were a lot of family farm distilleries hundreds of years ago, they grew their own grain, they malted it, made their own whiskey and then the byproducts went to feel their animals, their pigs, their cattle, their sheep, whatever on the farm, so they had zero waste. I have zero waste.  

“When I went at this project in 2015 there was nothing much about global warming, just Al Gore going on, and everyone thought he was crazy, and it turned out to be correct. But I put in a lot of things here that were not necessary to put in at the time, heat recovery, zero waste policies, so from the time I sow the grain in the field there is nothing leaves here except a bottle of whiskey. 

“There’s no waste lorries leaving this premises, I literally use everything on the farm, byproducts to feed the animals and any washdown and that, I have a big tank outside with a computerised system that neutralises the ph and I land spread that so I have a zero waste policy. Pot ale goes to the cattle, distillers grain goes to the cattle, the spent lees and that, which is just the still water high in copper, all that is land spread. So I’ve managed to make a nice circle of the business here so the farm produces for the distiller and the distillery produces for the farm.” 

The beef from Ging’s distillers’ grain-fed Hereford and Angus cattle, known for its marbling and flavor, is dry-aged for 28 days and distributed across Europe and Ireland. Even the straw from the barley harvest is repurposed as bedding for cattle, later becoming fertilizer for new crops, reinforcing Ballykeefe’s commitment to sustainability, which also motivated his refusal to release a sourced whiskey. It’s a practice not without controversy, as sourced liquids are often sold under the brand of a distillery where it was not made, or sold by a distillery under an adjacent brand, the messaging around which is often opaque and misleading as to the source. Of the 47+ distilleries making whiskey in Ireland, only a handful do not source.

“I made a huge decision to start in that I wasn’t taking in anyone else’s liquid. Sustainability. Guaranteeing what product it is, where it comes from, so if it’s in a Ballykeefe bottle it’s from Ballykeefe and I can stand over it so if you have a problem with the liquid come talk to me, it’s my liquid. I can stand over all of it – how it was produced, where it was produced, and the environmental aspect of it. If I take in someone else’s liquid I have no control over any of that. And I didnt get into this business to sell other people’s products – I got into this business to make whiskey to the best of my ability, and that’s what we’ve done here.”

He is also not obsessed with volume, preferring to let the distillation sit within his busy life as a farmer, and a father of four, preferring to only distill around 42 weeks of the year: “You might think I’m totally crazy, but I work when I want to. 

“I get up at 5am in the morning, I open up out here and I turn on the still and charge the still and I go out and turn on the boiler, I get back in the still is full the boiler is running and then i go in and have the breakfast, then feed the cattle, keep an eye on this, I could be finished here, at harvest time I don’t work here because we are busy on the farm, and springtime when planting time comes in I shut this for a couple of weeks and go do that. I like what I do, I like the flexibility of it, like if this was owned by Diageo you’d be on a 9-5 Monday to Friday. It’s not for me.

“When I go out it gives me an idea when I come in here, so for instance, I think about the botanicals for the gin; I’d often be off in the tractor working or I could be in the mart and something just comes to me – yeah you need to increase the peppercorn, you need to increase the grapefruit peel…It just comes to me because I never rush into it. It just comes to me and I go yeah that’s what I have to do when I go back.” 

This approach means that despite being able to produce a potential 600 casks a year, he is happy with the number he makes: “This can do between four to six hundred a year, if you want to go flat out you’ll get 600, but nice and handy what I do is about 400. But what we did when the crisis on he fuel hit the gas bill went through the roof but we had a contract with Calor which  was good, it wasn’t on price it was on a date, so I burst my hump and made all I could up to that date and then stopped because it just wasn’t feasible. Now that it’s down, we’re back producing again so we didn’t lose our volume, we still have the volumes on it. So you just have to work around with what you do.”

They have more than a thousand casks in storage right there on the farm, in a warehouse next to the cowshed. They are happy with their sales, their reach, and Morgan clearly feels an immense sense of pride in the farm, the distillery, and his family. He tells me about one Christmas when a large order came in with a rush on and how all the family got involved in packing the order, and then sat in the kitchen with sandwiches and tea at midnight. As he says, special memories. 

The distillery features from time to time in mainstream press, more often in agricultural publications, and once on a TV show called The Great Giveback where Morgan and Anne helped a family whose mother had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. As an entirely field to glass operation, Ballykeefe ticks all the branding and marketing boxes – terroir, transparency, tradition – yet seem happy enough to quietly keep farming and distilling without much promotion. This, combined with their highly targeted tourism offering means they are something of a well-kept secret – whiskey lovers might find it frustrating just how low key he is, but this is, after all, his choice. He’s happy to keep tipping away. 

“I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, what I wanted to do was just take us from where we were totally commercial and as I said only for Pernod Ricard taking the brand Jameson and making it a world success, there’d be no market for this. So you have to say thank you to those guys. But at the same time, Irish whiskey, which they are selling their product under the label of was a way different product when it was famous. And that’s what I wanted to go back to. I just want to go back to that, yeah, you do your stuff, that’s perfect, there is room for everyone. But this is my little niche, this is what I’m doing.

“When people come here to talk to me they are interested in the distillery and what I’m doing, I explain all this to them and they are extremely happy going off and walking out that door as brand ambassadors for Ballykeefe, and the amount of business that has come back through the door because of those people because they go and say it to someone or connect with someone and one thing leads to another and you get your reward that way.

“We’re in America, Germany, France, and Italy, we are all over the place without making a huge noise and scene. I had a friend who was in the south of Italy cycling, and he called into a little restaurant, and he looked up at the bar and there was a Ballykeefe gin, whiskey and vodka sitting behind the bar. That gives you incentive to keep going.”

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