Triple Distilled Communications

Just outside the town of Midleton, on the eastern side, a vast monolith is rising. The soaring column stillhouse of a new distillery is currently having its cladding attached, a pale presence against the surrounding shades of green, including the original green column building in the older distillery to the north of the town.

The new distillery is the culmination of several expansions by Irish Distillers Limited at its home site, but it is much more than an additional stillhouse. It is a second large-scale whiskey production plant attached to the existing Midleton complex, with its own grain handling, brewing, fermentation, pot still distillation and continuous grain distillation capacity. It is being built on the opposite side of the Dungourney River but connected to the existing distillery, allowing Irish Distillers to continue using much of Midleton’s established spirit-handling, maturation and support infrastructure.

The full project, announced on September 5, 2022, in the teeth of a pandemic-fuelled global drinking frenzy, saw IDL commit €250mn to the new distillery on the 55-acre site. The original plan was for construction to begin in 2023 and production to start in 2025. Irish Distillers forecast about 800 construction jobs and up to 100 permanent skilled jobs once operational.

The plant was explicitly designed to make both pot still whiskey and grain whiskey, meaning it could support the complete Irish Distillers portfolio rather than a single product. The company named Jameson, Powers, Redbreast, Midleton Very Rare, the Spot whiskeys and Method and Madness among the brands the new capacity would support.

Irish Distillers chief executive Nodjame Fouad described the company at the announcement as “always planning for the future growth of Irish whiskey” and noted that Jameson had passed 10mn cases in FY22. Master Distiller Kevin O’Gorman subsequently put a number on the ambition: “By 2030, we’ll be selling 15 million cases of Jameson,” he told Mark Gillespie of WhiskyCast.

Jameson had gone from about 6.5mn cases in 2018 to more than 10mn cases when the project was formally announced in 2022. The new plant contributes 44 MLA of grain spirit capacity and 22.5 MLA of pot still capacity, essentially replicating the core production capability of the existing distillery.

The question now is: does IDL — or the category as a whole — need it?

That production start date of 2025 for the new plant has been pushed back, but the building continues.

Distillers think differently from other producers. When you are making something that needs to sit in a wooden cask for five, ten or fifteen years or more, you look beyond the dips. Even though the new plant was conceived and commenced during the boom years of the past 12 years, now that we are in an unprecedented slump, the plan is still to think ahead.

All this is cyclical. This is just a dip, albeit a severe one. Of cold comfort is the fact that it is not just a dip for the Irish whiskey category, for IDL or for the Irish drinks sector. It is global. People are spending less and drinking less, and this is likely to remain the norm for a while.

Pernod Ricard’s results for the year to June 2026 show a company that has moved a long way from the conditions that drove the spirits industry through the years immediately after the pandemic. Sales are falling, the US is weak, China remains difficult, pricing has become harder and the geographic mix of sales has moved against the group.

Yet the results are not uniformly poor. India is growing strongly, a substantial group of smaller markets is expanding, several large brands are performing well outside their problem markets, and cash generation has improved sharply.

For Irish Distillers, the same pattern is there. Its portfolio fell 4 per cent in net sales, and Jameson declined 3 per cent globally. But Jameson volume increased to a record 11.4mn nine-litre cases and net sales outside the US rose 9 per cent. India, China, Nigeria, parts of Europe and Global Travel Retail are producing growth, while the US has become the main drag on the business.

The central question is no longer whether Jameson can find consumers outside America, as it has already done that. The question is whether those new markets can produce enough value to compensate for weaker sales in what remains one of the world’s richest and most profitable spirits markets.

The distinction matters because Jameson has reached this point after one of the strongest ten-year expansion periods of any large international whiskey brand. Its volume has doubled since FY16.

Jameson sold about 5.7mn cases in FY16 and 11.4mn in FY26.

Yet it has also moved higher within Pernod Ricard. Alexandre Ricard referred to “Jameson being our largest brand” during the FY26 earnings call. He may have misspoken, but it seems unlikely, and his fondness for the brand, where he cut his teeth after joining the family business, is well documented.

Absolut still sells more physical cases — 12.2mn against Jameson’s 11.4mn — so the comment is more likely about Jameson’s commercial importance than simple case volume.

The US remains central to the problem. Pernod’s US business fell 14 per cent in FY26. Jameson’s exact US net sales decline is not disclosed, but Irish Distillers says Jameson grew 9 per cent outside the US while Pernod reports that Jameson fell 3 per cent globally. That gap makes clear the scale of the US drag.

Management is not expecting the old US growth engine to return soon. Ricard said the American market remains Pernod’s number-one market and a highly profitable one, but the group has adjusted its FY27-FY29 expectations because it does not expect meaningful market growth over that period.

Nonetheless, it continues to invest there. The company has just signed a multiyear deal making Jameson the NFL’s Official Spirits Sponsor, with activity around the Super Bowl, NFL Draft and international games. Pernod says it continues to invest in US marketing above its group average.

But America can no longer be assumed to provide the growth that it supplied for much of the previous two decades. So where is the new America?

India is the closest candidate and is already Jameson’s second-largest market by volume. Pernod says Jameson is the number-one imported premium spirits brand there. Strategic international brands recorded double-digit growth in FY26, led by what Ricard called Jameson’s “exceptional performance”.

Trade policy gives Jameson an additional potential advantage. The EU and India concluded negotiations on a free-trade agreement on January 27, 2026. The European Commission says Indian tariffs on EU spirits, currently as high as 150 per cent, are due to fall to 40 per cent under the agreement. The agreement is not yet legally in force: the text still has to complete the relevant legal procedures before becoming binding.

Ricard described the potential effect on Jameson as “a great boost”.

But the balance between supply and demand remains skewed. For distillers, planning ahead meant that during the boom years they produced as much as possible, and now they sit and wait with all this inventory.

A piece in The Wall Street Journal made the argument that the global spirits industry is now dealing with the consequences of overestimating post-pandemic demand. Distillers laid down huge quantities of whiskey and cognac during the boom years of 2021–24, but demand has weakened. Unlike vodka or gin, aged spirits cannot simply adjust production immediately because barrels filled years ago are only now becoming saleable stock.

The problem is global. The WSJ specifically identifies bourbon, Scotch whisky, Irish whiskey and cognac as being in oversupply. Warehouses are full of stock produced on the assumption that the strong growth of the early 2020s would continue. As IWSR’s Koryn Ternes puts it in the piece, barrels effectively represent demand forecasts made years earlier. Those forecasts have proved too optimistic.

The WSJ notes that Pernod Ricard had €7.2 billion of maturing inventory at the end of June 2026, up about 78 per cent from 2019. That includes stock supporting brands such as Jameson and Martell. Rémy Cointreau has around €1.9 billion of inventory, equivalent to roughly three-quarters of its market capitalisation. Diageo has around $8.5 billion of ageing inventory and is responding by reducing distillation volumes by about 50 per cent over the next three years.

But outside Midleton, the building of a new distillery continues, and the giant rises.

The question now is: when it roars into life, who will it feed?