Sun Tzu said that if you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will eventually float by. It could also be said that if you wait by the great golden river that is the whiskey industry long enough, every blogger, podcaster, and commenter will float by on a gilt bier eventually. This is the way of the industry – if you have a voice and know how to use it, they will want to use it too. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have been subsumed into the whiskey business – maybe some of us who start blogs or social media accounts dedicated to whiskey always have it in the back of our minds that hey, maybe it would be fun to work in the industry. Others come with an oven-ready business plan. This is the ebb and flow – but after a decade of blogging, I’ve had a few run-ins over the years that make me glad I don’t work in whiskey. Sometimes it’s public relations SNAFUs, sometimes it’s producers themselves just behaving shoddily. Some examples:
A few years back, a whiskey producer took it upon himself to sue another whiskey producer for defamation. They hired a lawyer to send threatening letters to the producer over a comment they made, but, and this is the part that baffles me, they also included a list of other accounts in the legal threats, accounts which had nothing to do with any disagreement between the two producers. It came as something of a surprise to see my name featured, along with a number of other bloggers and writers, as I had nothing to do with this person or their whiskey brand. The funniest part of the whole affair (which ended up being resolved outside court) was that my Twitter account got locked because of the legal threats, and at the exact moment this happened, I was at a whiskey launch where the person behind the action happened to be in attendance, sitting about 15 feet away from me.
For the most part, PR firms are great to work with, and having interned in a PR firm one summer about three decades ago, I know how hard they work at what they do. It is a thankless, gruelling job where a lot of time you eat shit from the press, from clients, from everyone. But sometimes it’s the other way around. I asked a PR for comment from a client, telling them it was only for a blog piece and so there was no pressure but I had to ask. They responded by telling me their client was very busy but that they would ask again at a later date. This is where my part in this mess comes in – I saw the ‘again’ and thought that the PR had asked the client for comment and they had declined, so that was what I put in the piece. Hit publish and away we go. A couple of hours later, PR rings, and a tense conversation ensues in which they explain that they didn’t ask the client for comment at all. I apologise and say I misinterpreted their email. Then, PR keeps going – admonishes me for coming to them for comment from their client in the first place, telling me they are not the person to contact for this despite the fact they were happy to provide comment for print pieces previously and they are, after all, a PR person. After I had been given out to for a few minutes, they put forward the suggestion that the best way to remedy this was that they would go back to the client and tell them that I had never contacted them for comment at all. In other words, they would go and tell their client that I had simply made up the quote. I said, no, that is not a good idea, and we ended the call. The problem is that I actually don’t know if they did follow through with their clever plan and tell the client that I never bothered to contact at all, but given the last invite I received to an event being held by the client was rescinded an hour after I got it, I am going to say, maybe.
Much as I love PR people, I’m not sure they are the people you should be commissioning to write features for print. I have seen one PR repeatedly write massive glowing features about a large client of theirs without mentioning the connection – or the fact that what the paper was printing was technically sponsored content. Another PR writes listicles that repeatedly mention clients. If I can see it by only knowing one or two PRs and their clients, then I am going to assume it is a lot more widespread than that. And even if they aren’t mentioning their own clients, who says they aren’t touting for business by heaping praise on other firms? It also sucks because it diminishes the value of a newspaper, and because the PR is getting paid on the double; by the client for the coverage, and by the paper for the copy. Yes, I still have lofty notions about the business of news, but I just think running copy which may or may not be a massive ad is poor form. There are great young writers out there who deserve a break.
That list could run and run. There is a pretty jaw-dropping piece about a drinks publicist which every brand owner should read. I don’t think anyone can wash their hands of the PR firm they choose to rep them and I don’t think any PR firm can wash their hands of their clients no matter how appalling they are. Everyone is a grown-up and everyone knows what they are doing when they choose a PR firm, and every PR makes the same informed choice in taking on a client. So if a PR firm is simply irritating or openly obnoxious to a journalist or drinks writer or anyone, is the writer likely to approach them again for comment? Similarly, journalists and drinks writers can be the absolute worst, entitled, obnoxious, demanding, unbearable brats, so it does work both ways.
But all the bodies eventually float by. Podcasts, blogs, even social media accounts – the most ephemeral of engagements – often dry up as after a while you kinda run out of things to say about whiskey, or you run out of the energy required to keep going. Shared blogs tend to collapse under their own weight as people fall out, or life takes over, podcasts run out of people to talk to, and all the discourse runs out of steam because you end up saying the same things about the same products (I am certainly guilty of that). The mainstream press is also guilty of the same – this time of year there is a crescendo of Irish whiskey coverage and much of it fails to ask the tough question – after Jameson, what now, after America, where then, after the slump, who survives? It probably says a lot about where Irish whiskey is that we don’t have the same rich discourse that Scotch or Bourbon have, and we are poorer for it.
I got a reminder from WordPress that they have been hosting my dithering for ten years now, but for the most part I have only managed a few posts a year since Covid hit. My joy and enthusiasm in the earlier posts when I was just starting to write about Irish whiskey has waned and for the most part I look at the category now with a pretty jaundiced eye. I think there are many structural weaknesses in the sector and I can’t fix them nor can I find anyone else who wants to as much as I. A few years back I wrote a piece about how bright the future would be when we had a rich ecosystem of bloggers, but what we have now is a lot of DM-for-collab style influencers and others who are really just outsourced marketing for the industry. When brands and producers become clients, your words lose value.
Will this blog exist in another ten years, will I still be posting about Irish whiskey, or will it all dry up and blow away as many whiskey blogs do? I still spend more time thinking about the stuff than I do drinking it, and even with a reduced output I still spend more time writing about it than drinking it, so there is life in the old dog yet. The grim times we now inhabit have actually got me interested in it again – the decade of backslapping is over, and it’s time to take stock – can we use this moment to improve the offering, what do people want from Irish whiskey, is it simply whiskey from Ireland or is there more to it, to us? Have we been coasting on our charm, our national identity, in one market and can we replicate that success elsewhere? How do you pitch Irish whiskey to someone in Asia, Africa, South America – do we continue to trade on the shamrocks and shillelaghs, or forty shades of green? Is ‘Brand Ireland’ that well known?
The Scots have single malt, what do we have? Single pot still is too complicated and the name alone gives me a headache, as, aside from anything, it kinda implies that it is made using only one still, or is distilled only once, or that all other Irish whiskey is column distilled. And once you have explained that the name doesn’t mean what you think it means, you get to bore people into submission with a talk about 18th century cereal taxation policy.
Maybe the shakeout of the category is a good time to reflect on what Irish whiskey needs to be. We spent too long pushing ourselves as ‘not Scotch’ (even the single pot still spiel begins with, ‘well you know single malt right…’) and need to find an identity beyond that. Unpeated, triple distilled and smooth were all part of the not-scotch pitch, so what is Irish whiskey now?
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.”
It’s not just Irish whiskey. We are not the only ones struggling, the only ones being left on the shelf. In the classic breakup style, it’s not us, it’s them, where them is anyone who enjoys an adult beverage. People are drinking less all over the world, there is a move among younger people towards more moderate drinking (which is good) rather than the Covid binges (which were bad) or the decades previous when people of my generation absolutely leathered it (which was very bad). Times change, and people change with it; a global cost of living crisis and greater focus on health and wellness means people are not spending as much as they used to on booze, and if they do, it’s not whiskey they are buying. And this significant fall off in demand means supply has to adjust.
Great Northern Distillery (GND) in Dundalk is one of the biggest producers on the island. Founded by industry legend Dr John Teeling after he sold Cooley to Beam Suntory, GND boasts both a grain plant with a capacity of 12 million litres, and a malt plant with an eight million litre capacity. This makes GND the second-largest distilling complex in Ireland, and their strategy revolves around supplying mature and new make malt, pot still, and grain bulk whiskey to customers who have their own brands of Irish whiskey, offering products ranging from new make to 18-year-old whiskeys. GND distils the equivalent of one million bottles of whiskey each week, serving more than 300 customers who operate worldwide. Late last year it was revealed that Great Northern Distillery enjoyed pre-tax profits of €32m.
Even that doesn’t capture how much output – or potential output – the industry has, as in 2023 Bushmills opened their new €43.5 million Causeway Distillery, more than doubling their production capacity from five million litres of alcohol per annum to 11m litres per annum. They also have planning permission for a new grain distillery.
This table shows sales by case:
Critics of the Irish whiskey boom would say that it is really just the Jameson boom – and looking at those figures, you can see why. If the total cases sold in a year is 15.5 million, and more than ten million of them are Jameson, you have a boom based on one brand making up two thirds of all sales. Jameson, obviously, is a broad church, and unless you saw a pretty granular breakdown you couldn’t say whether there is a chunk of those that are non-core Jamesons. But I would hazard a guess that the bulk is the core blend – that easy sipping, smooth, affordable and approachable Irish whiskey upon which the category balances. Such was the demand over the last 15 years for this iconic drink that Irish Distillers Ltd started work on a new distillery alongside their current plant in Midleton, the engine room for much of the category since 1975. The proposed expansion will facilitate an increase in production capacity of the distillery across the expanded site from 70 million litres per annum (MLA) to 133 MLA. It was intended to be operational in 2025.
On Thursday last, Irish Distillers Limited announced it was pausing production in the main distillery for three months, telling the Irish Farmers Journal that it was ‘adjusting its production schedule for a routine, periodic review’ but that it would recommence in the summer. On Sunday, the Sunday Times revealed that not only were they pausing production, the completion dates on the new distillery had been pushed out, telling the paper that the timeline of the new distillery had ‘evolved’ but that construction was still progressing on site and Irish Distillers remained ’absolutely committed’ to the new distillery (this may also be a factor in the delay). The same piece in the Times also revealed how Bushmills had slashed production of whiskey, while John Teeling’s Great Northern Distillery had also cut back on malt whiskey production since December. But while the three biggest producers are cutting back, mid-size operators are far more vulnerable to falling sales and rising costs.
In mid-February, the Irish Independent reported that another Waterford-based producer, Blackwater Distillery, was struggling to survive, with a process adviser appointed in an effort to rescue the business. In late February the Irish Independent also reported that Powerscourt Distillery breached a loan agreement with a large US lender after a €4.6m funding round was delayed. All three of these were founded or funded by people who understood whiskey – Mark Reynier had decades of experience with Bruichladdich, Powerscourt had the founders of Isle Of Arran distillery on the board, and Peter Mulryan had spent decades studying the industry as an author and journalist. These were not uninformed prospectors who had blundered their way into the industry. They knew the risks, the rise and fall. But I doubt the words ‘natural lifecycle’ bring much comfort when things get tight, and they are not so small that they can afford to quietly shut until things pick up, nor are they big enough to ride out the storm without hardship. And these are simply the ones we know about.
The few industry people I spoke to about what happens next had an air of cold optimism – that this was, in fact, the natural lifecycle – there was always going to be a crash, always going to be a shakeout, always going to be losses. Not much comfort to anyone who invested in a distillery – either as a professional or casual aficionado (feel free to ask those who bought Nephin casks how they feel about their investment). Reality has sunk its teeth in and is not letting go, and of the 48 or so distilleries that are GI-certified producers of Irish whiskey, the future is not as bright as it was five years ago – below is a list:
We have had ten years of extraordinary growth in the category but what remains to be seen is where the natural level lies for Irish whiskey – how many distilleries can survive the hard times, and in ten or 20 years, how many of the 47 or so will remain. If the current American President applies 25% tariffs on all Irish whiskey, it may be a far lower number than any of us could predict.
In January 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded over the Pacific Ocean shortly after takeoff from Florida. All seven crew died, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, there as part of the ‘Teacher in Space Project’. As a result of her presence on the trip, the launch and the explosion that followed were witnessed live in many schools across the United States. The image of the pinwheeling fragments of the shuttle falling to earth were burned into the minds of a generation.
In his 1987 spoken word album No More Cocoons, former Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra did a piece about the tragedy, titled, with his usual subtlety, Why I’m Glad The Space Shuttle Blew Up. In it he mocked the disaster but went on to explain why he was glad that the space shuttle blew up: The next mission of the ill-fated Challenger was to launch the nuclear-powered Ulysses solar probe satellite into orbit in late May; both Ulysses and its companion mission, the Jupiter-bound Galileo probe — also scheduled for launch that spring — contained nearly 50 pounds of plutonium-238 as fuel. Scientists warned that if that radioactive plutonium were released as smoke or dust, say via an in-air explosion, it could pose a severe public health risk to those who inhaled the cancer-causing particles. Dr. John Gofman, a professor of medical physics at UC Berkeley, cautioned that a cloud of plutonium over Cape Canaveral could render parts of Florida uninhabitable. In other words, sometimes a tragedy is better than an apocalypse.
The news that Waterford Distillery had gone into receivership was met with shock by some, a complete lack of surprise by others, and no small amount of glee by those who felt they had it coming – the brand was too aloof, the product too young, too expensive, too pretentious. Terroir was a dead scene, here was the proof. But while there are many, many lessons from the slide into silence of one of Irish whisky’s brightest stars, above all it was a lesson in economics. Rising costs, falling sales, massive debts – this is the hydra headed beast that killed Waterford and it will kill many others as it slouches across the land.
Beyond the mainstream stories of distillers battling to stay open as investors call time, there are numerous rumours of some of the biggest producers either cancelling planned expansions, reducing production, laying off staff, or simply pulling down the shutters, albeit very quietly. When Irish Distillers Limited announced they would be pausing production at Midleton Distillery – which celebrates 50 years of production this year – for three months, it was hard not to read words like ‘scheduled maintenance’ and not raise an eyebrow. The timing would certainly seem to suggest that after a decade of growth, maybe now was the perfect time to shut and repair, because apparently the demand for the product just isn’t there right now. Given that Irish Distillers are constructing a €250 million carbon-neutral distillery adjacent to its existing facility in Midleton, you’d certainly hope it will be again at some point in the future.
There is a global decline in whiskey. The Scotch Whisky Association reported a 3.7% decrease in the value of Scotch whisky exports in 2024, and the value of rare whisky – and whiskey – at auction has also fallen significantly. Just as Waterford’s receivership wasn’t the fault of the distillery or the brand or their outspoken founder Mark Reynier, Irish whiskey is not suffering alone, nor is it entirely to blame for what is happening. People are spending less and drinking less. But if Jameson is slowing, everything is slowing. The rising tide we heard so much about over the last decade – the one which lifts all boats, the effect of which sparked a revolution in Irish whiskey and saw distilleries mushrooming all over the island – is on the way out, and who will be left afloat once it is gone will be very interesting to see.
What I would hope to see is that of the 48 or so (I’m waiting on a full list of GI verified Irish whiskey producers from DAFM) currently operating on the island, 30+ will pull through. One industry veteran half-jokingly said he thinks it will end up that there will be ten multinational owned and ten indies and that will be it, but you would hope the number will be higher. But what we have now is, I assume, what we will have going forward and that any planned distilleries will be hitting pause as well. The problem with the mood shift is that getting funding now for any whiskey related business means you have to contend with someone simply googling ‘Irish whiskey’ and seeing a lot of bad news. People with money will catch a vibe, and take their business elsewhere.
But this moment has been some time coming – early last year I wrote a piece for the Spirits Business that asked – what next for the category? The tone was generally upbeat and most of the voices in the piece had a level of cautious optimism about the future. By the end of summer last year that had changed – rumours of a slowdown abounded, St Patrick’s Day sales in the US were down, costs were rising and distillery staff were starting to appear on LinkedIn delighted to share they were open to new opportunities. Behind the scenes, there was a real fear. Much of it seemed to stem from America – Irish whiskey just wasn’t selling like it had.
By the time the news of Waterford’s receivership broke, everyone was on tenterhooks. Scottish distilleries faced the same headwinds but had a far larger market share, and multiples of the sales Irish producers had. In many cases they also had decades or centuries of experience of the highs and lows of making whisky – most Irish distillers had only hit the market in the previous decade, and presumably investors not used to the cyclical nature of whiskey might not be happy to be told, things are bad right now but will pick up again in two years or so. So plugs start to get pulled.
I am constantly amazed that anyone, anywhere, ever, would invest in a distillery – massive outlay to get it up and running and five to ten years before you can start to make a few bob selling the stuff. It’s unsurprising that the vast majority of distilleries on the island of Ireland filled in this five-year gap by buying in stock from larger producers, sometimes passing it off under their own distillery brand, sometimes creating an adjacent brand which they were very discreet about revealing as sourced. I suspect those who used another distillery’s products will survive better than most – Waterford, after all, sourced nothing and had no vodka, or gin. A distillery cannot survive on provenance alone, it would seem.
Auction prices are already falling, Irish whiskey is not the hot topic it was five years ago, and a certain amount of excitement is gone. But that had to happen – with the big producers reducing supply, or others simply going under, balance will be restored. None of that is comforting to those who will lose their jobs or their investments in these businesses but a shakeout was almost inevitable. The belle époque had to end. Better it happens now than in another five years when there could be another ten or 15 distilleries operational and thus farther to fall back to earth. Our space shuttle has blown up, but it could be much worse.
John Gavin used to draw on the walls when he was a child. It was probably the first hint of the career he would later pursue, given how much of his design adorns various surfaces across Ireland. After studying Visual Communications Design, his father spotted a job in the Irish Times and John had his first job in Dublin. This started him on the path that would lead him to working in London with brands like Adidas, Mercedes Benz, Volvo, Radisson Hotels, and the BBC. He also ran his own studio for a few years in London but says the call to return home was always very strong – so in 2011 he came home to Waterford and set up TrueOutput. Gavin says that all their work comes via recommendation, which allows them to be selective on what is the right fit for the studio: “At the moment we’re working on a large branding project for a new hotel on St Stephen’s Green, an exclusive spirits project for The Cashel Palace Hotel, and we’ve just completed a rebrand of the 73-year-old Wexford Festival Opera; we like diversity, unique challenges and making great things for great people.”
In 2014 it was announced that Mark Reynier, who had reopened Bruichladdich Distillery on Islay off the coast of Scotland, had bought the former Guinness Brewery at the end of the quays in Waterford city, and that he planned to open a distillery there. The stars were aligning; Gavin had been to Bruichladdich and appreciated it not just as a whisky fan but as a designer – the brand was known for its un-whisky-like bottles and styled itself as a ‘progressive’ distiller. Whatever Reynier was going to do in Ireland, chances were it would be bold.
“I knew he was going to do something special. I took a punt and got in touch and he said to pop down the next day. The place was as Guinness had left it and they were working on reconfiguring it to become a distillery. I was a bit like going to Willy Wonka’s factory to meet the man himself. We chatted about Waterford and our work and ended up going for a pint. There was no work for us at that stage but the seed had been planted.
“We eventually began to do a trickle of work, like signage and getting a website up and running. Proving our skills and building a relationship along the way. When the offer to pitch for the full brand and packaging came we jumped at the prospect. We were up against larger specialist firms in the UK, but we eventually got the nod from the board and it was the beginning of a very interesting journey.”
When building a brand, work starts from the ground up – Gavin had to fully immerse himself in whisky design to begin the process.
“It starts with in-depth research and absorption into the industry. Coming to it already with an interest in the whisky world, we had a little head start. You need to understand what is out there and where they fit into the landscape. You begin to see patterns in the design approach, with common tropes being used over and over. This helps understand what kind of things to avoid and also gives an impetus to push ourselves farther. The crux of the brief from Mark was to create “A brand unlike any other, for a whisky unlike any other.” So from the outset we knew it wasn’t going to be like anything else.
“We were given a key to the operation. Immersed in every aspect of their unique whisky making process. Understanding barley varieties, meeting the farmers growing that barley, the maltings, the custom made storage facilities, and then once it arrived at the distillery the process of making spirit. Learning about the unique machines at their disposal like the hydromill and mash filter. Getting to know the team with the affable Ned and Neil at the help of distilling and brewing. Then out to the custom maturation warehouses, all set up to flow with sea breezes. The bottling lines and the technicality of that part of the puzzle. The fascinating concepts of terroir, and biodynamics. The honesty and integrity was unlike anything I’d ever seen and we had unfettered access to it all.
“After the research, the next phase is looking at the brand strategy where this will be positioned which gives a platform for the visual work to grow out of. Following on is the visual brand identity phase, it is hard to explain but this diagram goes some way to illustrate the process – organised chaos.
“The development of the visual brand identity; logo, colour, symbols, typography, tone of voice is a long process of exploration, editing, discarding, and ensuring no stone is left unturned in the quest to solve the problem.”
Behind the striving for a subjective perfection – ie, a happy client – Gavin was also aware of the burden on him to build something fresh, modern and bold that would stand on its own two feet and be loved by fans worldwide.
“There is undoubtedly a weight of expectation on your shoulders. This is going to be launched across the world, to be critiqued, and for whiskey fanatics to pore over every detail. We kept a very tight creative unit; myself, my team, Mark Reynier and Mark Newton (Head of Brand) and this ensured we were insulated from outside interference to really explore way beyond the normal in a project of this kind.
“Having the luxury of time at this development phase was vital to enable us to reach the final destination. Everything needed to be meticulous, as precise as the production processes used to make the whisky, no room for errors. The final results are the product of almost 4 years of work. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication. The first limited edition bottles of Waterford Whisky were launched in 2020. The release was tempered by a certain pandemic but that didn’t stop it being an instant success, selling out immediately.
“Once released, the product and brand take on a life of their own. Years of work released into the world. The reception has been really positive with genuine engagement and excitement. We went to the whisky shows, and someone would comment on the bottle design and Mark would pull me into the conversation to say here’s the guy that designed it. That level of connection and detail is not something people get to experience. We’ve also found out there is nothing quite like the fervour of whiskey fans. We’ve also picked up lots of design awards and accolades along the way.”
I asked John Gavin if working on a brand is a 50/50 operation with the client, and how he navigates that tension between what they want and what you would choose.
“The best results come when there is collaboration. We like to work this way. You get to the core of what is required, the real insights. It’s about listening intently. It takes a lot of effort to listen really hard and then deliver beyond expectations. We never go into a project with any preconception of how it might look.
“Mark brought this incredible vision and we interpreted that. He was not prescriptive of how he wanted it to look. But he knew it when he saw it. We would present, discuss and iterate. There are components from the very first presentation that were retained and followed through to the end. We create an entire brand world, all the components are like ingredients or materials used to communicate the ethos and as practical tools for marketing and day to day brand activity.
“Funnily the Bruichladdich design is one we had admired for a while. But it was a hindrance because we needed to distance Waterford from that, and ensure it didn’t look like Mark’s 2.0 version of it. So it needed to be a clearly different proposition.
“We were given full freedom to express our creativity through everything. But it would not be possible to deliver without the vision, faith and creativity of Mark Reynier and Mark Newton.”
Gavin says that being part of the vision from day one created a more coherent concept, and that even before the distillery was commissioned TrueOutput were at the table ‘discussing what it could be’: “Anything you see designed for Waterford we’ve been involved with. The bottle design, logo, packaging, every label, the 25-metre square map hanging over the stills room, websites, exhibitions, interiors, art installations, signage, animations, apparel, printed collateral, vehicles, we have designed it all.
“This ensured 100% creative control and consistency of execution across every touch point. We understand the overall complexity and can bring creative solutions to ideas that accelerate the brand. Design is not something you just plug in and out, if it’s embedded from the start the value is immeasurable. We have created efficiencies, through things like design systems for trade shows for example, and saved the distillery money through creative thinking by coming at things from another angle, particularly on the bottle design. The old quote, “good design is good business” rings true.”
Asked what the best part of the project was, he says that the opportunity to collaborate with Mark Reynier was not something that comes around too often, but of the brand itself, the iconic – and defiant – blue bottles are up there.
“I’d have to say the blue bottle is the real standout of the project. It’s what everyone comments on and is intrigued by. The design challenge was to make something unique – with the dream of perhaps creating an iconic classic. We were inspired by blue glass bottles once traded on the quays in Waterford and the contours on the bottom of the glass were inspired from the corrugated ridges on the distillery building itself. The curves, proportions, weight, silhouette were all painstakingly considered. It is our most technical project to date, so much so that the final bottle was modelled in software commonly used to design aircraft. The day we saw the bottles, thousands of them, rolling off the production line was quite a moment.
“I’m also very fond of the little barley symbol, (you can see it on top of the stopper), which has gradually become a shortcut to the brand and appears across lots of different applications. Shaped like a grain of barley which is at the core of everything they do. It conveys the continuous cycle of nature, the furrows in the fields, the panelling lines of the distillery building and the eye of mother earth herself. We’ve had enquiries from as far away as Taiwan asking us to talk about it. The devil is in the details.”
As for other Irish whiskey brands he admires, he says that the minimalism he favours is not always common in the language of whiskey brand design.
“I do lean towards a ‘less but better’ philosophy and there isn’t much of that in Whiskey branding. Most whiskey seems to cling onto the past in terms of how it looks. I also can see the ‘mutton dressed up as lamb’ from a mile away, where the product in the bottle is inferior to the attempts to dress it up.
“But make no mistake, whiskey branding is not an easy thing to pull off. The multiple stakeholders, the competitive landscape, labelling compliance red tape can all have diminishing effects on the end product. So I applaud anyone who can get a design from concept to shelf. In my opinion the branding must elevate and also represent honestly what is inside. Truth always wins in the end.”
Biodynamic is a great word. It sounds terribly modern – bio anything means good right? While dynamic is one of those buzzwords we throw into a job application to make us sound less like a sloth. The term, however, is not modern, it is a century old, and the style of farming it refers to is something that, even when it was dreamed up in the 1920s, was better suited to an earlier time. With its focus on strange rituals, observation of lunar cycles, and general rejection of modernity (and science), biodynamics is more of a mediaeval ideology, when peasants scrabbled in the fields and petitioned an empty sky using arcane rituals before living to the ripe old age of 32. The wikipedia page for biodynamic agriculture does a far colder interpretation of the discipline than I could manage, so I will let that explain how it (allegedly) works:
Biodynamic agriculture is a form of alternative agriculture based on pseudo-scientific and esoteric concepts initially developed in 1924 by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925)..Biodynamic agriculture uses various herbal and mineral additives for compost additives and field sprays; these are prepared using methods that are more akin to sympathetic magic than agronomy, such as burying ground quartz stuffed into the horn of a cow, which are said to harvest “cosmic forces in the soil”. No difference in beneficial outcomes has been scientifically established between certified biodynamic agricultural techniques and similar organic and integrated farming practices. Biodynamic agriculture is a pseudoscience as it lacks scientific evidence for its efficacy because of its reliance upon esoteric knowledge and mystical beliefs.
Rudolf Steiner, who could see dead people.
Built on a series of lectures by occultist philosopher Rudolf Steiner, a man who claimed to have seen ghosts and have a complete understanding of time aged 15, biodynamic agriculture feels like the end point of a downward spiral that begins with normal organic farming and somehow gets radicalised into an anti-science screed. It is a scientology of the soil, but just as there are very famous people who seem to have made that particular system of living work very well for them, there are farmers who have used biodynamics to great acclaim. They just happen to be farming grapes.
Domaine Leroy in Burgundy, Chateau de la Roche-aux-Moines in the Loire, Maison Chapoutier in the Rhone Valley, and Domaine Zind Humbrecht in Alsace, all practise biodynamic agriculture, and are the names most often trotted out when people try to tell you biodynamics is great, actually, and it works, actually. But there are many other wine producers who also use it, and it is generally held that whatever is in the system, it does actually work. The question is why.
Spoiler – it probably isn’t the lunar phases stuff. Biodynamics, as an extension of organic farming, means a lot of attention paid to the process of farming. The preparations, as they are known, require quite a bit of work – the most famous one is the cow horn packed with manure, but it isn’t even as simple as stuffing some shit into a horn:
For the production of horn manure, you need fresh and well-formed cow dung, without straw from lactating cows. In case you don‘t have enough dung from lactating cows you can also use dung from heifers. The best manure comes from cows grazing outdoors on pastures or from cows fed with a clover grass mixture supplemented with hay and straw. Runny cow dung should not be used. Straw or other plant parts must be removed from the cow dung. Only undamaged and well-formed cow horns should be used. The horns should come from one’s own cows as far as possible. Cows should have calved at least once. The cow horn contains a bony core. To remove it, the horns can be placed in a safe spot in the sun or put in a compost heap for a short time. The horn will come off readily from the core after five to seven days. Horns of cows that have calved can be easily recognized by their calving rings. These rings are missing in horns from bulls. In the northern hemisphere, cow horns are filled with dung from the end of September to the end of October; in the southern hemisphere in March-April, sometimes in May. Manure is filled into the horns either by hand or with
the help of a spoon or spatula. Care must be taken to ensure that the horns are filled right into the horn tip. To avoid cavities, the horns can be tapped with the tip of the horn on a solid surface or a stone. Horns that are either over filled or under filled will cause poor transformation of the manure. For larger amounts of horn manure, a sausage filler can be used. The dung in the cylinder is pressed into the cow horn.
All of the above is before you come to the explanation of digging the pit to bury the horns o’ plenty in. Contrast all this to simply decanting a slurry pit into a spreader and hosing the field, or lashing a bit of fertiliser at the crop. Sure, it all takes craft and work, but biodynamics takes a lot of work. Perhaps this is why it persists despite being more than a little out there.
Speaking of out there, Mark Reynier. He’s the Lord Summerisle of all this – Bruichladdich, Waterford, the terroir, the organic, the biodynamic, the madness, the soil, the soil, the soil. Sumer is icumen in, lhude sing cuccu!
Waterford Distillery is unique in the Irish whiskey category because Reynier is unique in his approach to whisky – the focus on grain, the extraordinary branding, the attention to detail in the aesthetics and the unique messaging. I have my quibbles about it all, but nobody can deny that it is an incredible brand. I’m just not sure about all the wine stuff – does whisky need this? Do we need cuvees, terroir, biodynamics? Does it elevate whisky to use these terms and ideas in its production? Is whisky somehow inferior to wine? Terroir in whisky was tenuous enough, despite what Waterford’s research says, so is the terroir of biodynamic barley really something we should be excited about?
Above all it is an experiment in both flavour and marketing, as was terroir. I think terroir had its chance to root itself in whisky distilling, and I think that moment might have passed. Reynier’s rum distillery in Grenada has allegedly been sold, and it appears that job number one for the new owners was to shut the cane-growing operation which was supplying the distillery. Presumably, continuing the costly terroir project was not high on their agenda.
It drives home the point of just how expensive all these experiments are – from the single farm distillations, to the resurrection of old barley strains like Goldthorpe, to the organic, the biodynamic. I quibble about the price of almost every whiskey and while Waterford is no different, I can see where the money went. It’s a project unlike any other.
I don’t have to quibble about the price of their latest biodynamic, the Cuvee Luna, because they sent me a bottle to review, but it is normally €100. I’ll let them explain it in their usual slightly vaudeville way:
Eccentric to some, regenerative to others, Biodynamic agriculture goes beyond the ordinary ecological mindset. Drawing upon ancient lore of lunar cycles & exotic preparations, it seeks to charge soils with vitality & barley with vibrancy.
Practised by the most visionary & curious, we too are intrigued about the most natural flavours we can capture in spirit. Now, for the first time, we bring distinct Biodynamic harvests from original Biodynamic pioneers Trevor Harris, Alan Mooney and John McDonnell together in our most profound, esoteric and evocative Cuvée Concept yet.
Inspired by the greatest Bordeaux châteaux and Champagne houses, Cuvée Concepts are our most complex and creative single malts. Our oldest vintages of Biodynamic barley – 2018 and 2019 – separately distilled and matured then layered by Head Distiller Ned like a single malt millefeuille. Each vintage brings its own unique characters; a harmony greater than the sum of its considerable parts.
Maturation was for five years, one month and 19 days, this cuvee was created on March 21, 2024, bottled July 2024 at 50% ABV and contains three single farm origins. Cask composition is 37% US first fill, 17% US virgin, 25% Vin Doux Naturel, and 21% Premium French. Non-chill filtered and natural colour, the official notes are:
NOSE: Green apple, hay, malted biscuits, white pepper, peaches, barnyard, cherry tomatoes, dry soil, light herbal tea, breadcrust, birch.
TASTE: Pepper spice, dry, breakfast cereals, chewable, lemon curd, pesto, green peppers, porridge with cream, malted biscuits, herbal tea, grapefruit.
FINISH: Creamy, gentle spices with dryness that turns herbal and lingers into an Irish goodbye.
Aside from the questionable impacts (or lack thereof) of biodynamics, is the fact the barley was grown according to a form of agriculture based in mysticism something we should celebrate? There are elements of biodynamic farming that make a kind of down-home common sense – treating the farm as a unique ecosystem, balancing all its needs using only livestock and produce from within – but biodynamics is still a pseudoscience, and as society becomes more advanced, it is becoming more and more of a pseudoscience. When it was conceived a century ago, it was a rejection of modern advances – it held that fertilisers and pesticides were bad, and that mysticism was a better route to good soil health. It feels like a system built around the ‘retvrn to tradition’ mindset, where modern society is weak and corrupt, and the olden times were stronger, cleaner, more pure. Perhaps there is an element of this kind of weird proto fascist nostalgia in a lot of whisky marketing – fawning over the days of yore makes up a good chunk of many brand narratives, as though life in the olden times wasn’t nasty, brutish, and short, as if society wasn’t incredibly cruel, and unfair, and riddled with inequality. Biodynamics is an ideology as much as an agricultural practice, and is more a question of faith than anything – if you think it matters that the barley for this whisky was grown in this slightly odd way, then this is for you. But even if you don’t, it’s still a nice dram.
Some AI generated slop I made to go with this blog post.
Conor McGregor is going premium. It seems a little surprising, given how strong his brand is and how well his whiskey is selling in America – in 2023, Jameson dominated Irish whiskey sales in America with 3.9m nine-bottle cases sold, followed at some distance by Tullamore DEW at .317m. But breathing right down Wm Grant’s neck is McGregor’s Proper No. Twelve whiskey at .309m, having grown 12% from 2022 to 2023 in a period when others saw sales slow. Given that his whiskey brand is a mere six years old, and is competing against brands with a century of history and vast multinationals behind them, the rise of Proper No. Twelve is something to behold. And while McGregor is still the face of the brand – and it is hard to imagine the brand existing without him as the face of it – he sold his share to current owners Proximo for a deal worth a reported US$600 million.
Part of the triumph of Proper No. Twelve is that McGregor knows how to market himself. He released a product which, much as it jars with our modern sensibilities, is still often seen as a man’s drink, and with most of his fans being combat sports aficionados, it was an instant success.
McGregor also chose to sell it at a reasonable price point, in stark contrast to a lot of Irish whiskeys in America that come with wild notions about their own value. But McGregor’s success at selling his whiskey in America also came about because he is the embodiment of a particular stereotype of Irish people which exists in American lore – he is a fast talking, quick-witted, short tempered brawler who is no less menacing outside the ring as he is inside it. He also looks slightly leprechaunesque. America ate him up, and other Irish whiskey producers would often find themselves being asked by US media – and what do you think of Conor McGregor? Isn’t he great? It’s a big question for any Irish whiskey lover – on one hand, he is introducing millions of people to the category who might not otherwise have ever gone beyond Jameson; he is also an authentic working class voice in a category dominated by legacy brands whose tales of aristocrats and wine merchants can get a little stale. But a quick browse through the ‘controversies’ section on his Wikipedia page will tell you why people here in Ireland might not be too proud of one of our most famous sporting sons.
McGregor’s keen business sense is never in doubt, and when he chose to expand his whiskey range, he opted for mass appeal with an apple flavoured edition, complete with playful ad campaign.
Perhaps his next pivot was inevitable – after the flavoured whiskey, the only way was up into the premium sector, and so this label appeared on TTB, the American site which publishes labels for whiskey bottles and where nerds go to see what might or might not be coming down the tracks.
It’s a 13 year old single malt distilled matured and bottled at 43% on ‘Ireland’s North Coast’. Given the age, the location, and the fact that Jose Cuervo own both McGregor’s whiskey brand and the iconic Northern Ireland distillery Bushmills, I’m going to assume that is where the spirit is from. The malt component of the standard Proper No. Twelve release also allegedly comes from there, with the grain being part of the large amount of grain spirit Bushmills has which was made in Midleton Distillery; again, allegedly. The back label has some typically American-focussed bollocks:
This appears to be the first of a series of premium releases – there is no evidence of what the price will be, but if McGregor opts to take the piss – as so many producers and brand owners in the category have done before him – it could be in the €80-€150 region. If you are upset by that, there is always the Bushmills 14 year old single malt which you can usually get on sale for around €60, which you can buy without feeling like you are condoning the various horrors of Mac The Knife’s increasingly toxic public image.
Pat Rigney has pedigree. That was how his career was described to me by another whiskey maker about ten years ago. It had just been announced that Rigney was opening a distillery in Leitrim and I admitted I knew little of him, so this was how he was described – as a man with pedigree. There followed a roll call of some of the brands he had worked on, for, and with – the brands he built and sold, the drinks companies he had founded and steered, and how whatever he was up to in Leitrim, it would be successful. Pat Rigney knew his onions.
Rigney grew up in Stepaside, Co. Dublin, attended Sandford Park School in Ranelagh before completing a B.Comm at UCD. After graduating in 1983 he found himself working for William Grant in Clonmel, then moving to Gilbeys, the Irish arm of International Distillers And Vintners (IDV) which would later become one of the component parts of Diageo. At Gilbeys he worked on the Baileys Irish Cream brand as a regional director for ten years, managing the Americas and Australasia markets.
At this point cream liqueur was the flavour of the month. Other brands were copying Bailey’s success and even iconic Dublin coffee house Bewleys had released a coffee cream liqueur of its own – so Gilbeys decided that they would play them at that game. Pat Rigney headed up the team who were tasked with creating a new coffee cream liqueur, so he commissioned the creators of Baileys, led by David Gluckman. During an early morning pitch in a hotel adjacent to Dublin Airport, Gluckman interrupted the proceedings by ordering a pint of Guinness, explaining that he had had a heavy night. According to Gluckman, Rigney, as head of the client contingent, thought it a bit excessive but after some playful banter the pint was ordered and delivered – Gluckman then stood up, pint in hand, and delivered what he called the fastest presentation of a new idea he had ever pitched. Using the pint to illustrate his vision, he pitched a coffee cream liqueur where, like in a stout, you drink the dark through the light – what if you used a two chamber bottle to create a drink with two component parts which would be poured into and united in a glass as one. That drink ultimately became Sheridan’s, perhaps best known for its ubiquitous presence in duty frees and being a standard festive gift of choice for returning emigrants.
After that success, Rigney went out on his own. With a small team of fellow drinks creatives including David Phelan, they started building brands that they would own, and ultimately, sell on. Roaring Water Bay Spirits Company released successful brands such as Boru Vodka in 1999 and white chocolate cream liqueur Coole Swan shortly after, but they also released a whiskey. It was built in the style of the vodka; the vodka came in a three-part bottle with three flavours, the whiskey came in a three part bottle with blend, malt and grain; the vodka was called Boru after the former high king of Ireland Brian Boru, the whiskey was called Clontarf after Boru’s famous battle; and the vodka was charcoal filtered for smoothness, so naturally the whiskey was too – taking their lead from Jack Daniels, they charcoal mellowed the whiskey. The whiskey came from Cooley, the charcoal was made from windfall oaks in west Cork, and the filtering and bottling took place at Terra in Cavan. Speaking at the time, Rigney said that Cooley was a natural supplier as John Teeling lectured him in college. Also as there were only two other distilleries on the island at the time – Bushmills and Midleton – it was probably their only option.
Roaring Water Bay Spirits Company ended up being merged with Great Spirits Company (of Knappogue Castle whiskey fame) to form a new company, Castle Brands. In 2019 Pernod Ricard bought the group for US$223 million.
Rigney was not done. Alongside these products he also started Fastnet Brands and Dalcassian, a wine and spirits distribution company, and invested in a range of other companies in the drinks, pharmaceutical, tourism and equestrian sectors.
In 2013 he started to look for a new challenge – he had shown he knew how to build a brand, but he wanted something physical – a wellspring. The Irish food board, Bord Bia, were looking for new Irish products to market, the gin boom was in full swing and the long-dormant Irish whiskey category was starting to accelerate. Rigney and his wife, now business partner, Denise started to look around for a base – his parents had met in a small village in Leitrim named Drumshanbo so he chose that as the home of what would become The Shed Distillery Of PJ Rigney.
At the time, there was little to speak of in terms of buzz in the Irish whiskey category – in 1975 New Midleton Distillery opened, but it was another 12 years before Cooley started operations, then another decade before Kilbeggan joined them. In 2013 Dingle Distillery and Echlinville Distillery started, but that didn’t mean anyone outside of the drinks sector could see what was happening. No banker could have foreseen what was coming and thrown money at anyone looking to build a distillery. So for all his pedigree, Rigney says that securing funding was incredibly difficult.
“When we established The Shed in 2014 it was at a time when it was not in vogue to do so. Raising finance was a nightmare – we were rejected by all the financial institutions, despite our good track record – everyone except for Enterprise Ireland’s High Potential Start Up Scheme who were pivotal to getting us up and running.”
Rigney says he is proud of the fact that he has since paid back in full and with interest the funding he received through the scheme, but even with that help, they still needed to dig for the funds to make the dream come true.
“We boot-strapped the start-up from savings and family borrowings, locating at a social enterprise in the heart of Drumshanbo at the former Lairds jam factory.”
The Shed boasts three copper pots focused on Irish whiskey, a two-and-a-half-thousand litre copper gin still, and another copper pot and three columns focused on vodka, all made by Arnold Holstein in Germany. They prepare all of their botanicals and all of their grain on site with their own mills; they cask all the whiskey themselves and all bottles are filled and labelled on site. In April this year it was announced that they were investing €10 million to double the whiskey-making capacity from 1,000 casks per annum to 2,000, with €3 million spent in the past 12 months and at least another €7 million to come over the next three years to support the company’s growth and to double its capacity to 120,000 cases of whiskey a year. Along with the distillery, they also have The Jackalope Café, and in 2022 they boasted a massive 50,000 visitors. They also have an 80-acre nature reserve, and 100 acres of commonage for livestock, which they share with local farmers. They also bought the local Methodist church and plan to turn it into an events centre and community space.
Asked if he had any advice for those looking to follow his path, he says patience – and money – is key: “Think it through. Now is a challenging time to set up a distillery in most parts of the world – be aware of the pitfalls and opportunities that lie ahead – don’t be naïve and prepare for it to take longer, a lot longer to work than anticipated. Ensure you are financed for at least seven years or more from the get-go. A distillery in particular is about the long game.”
What marks The Shed out in the whiskey landscape is its focus on gin – for many Irish whiskey start-ups, clear spirits are released to keep the lights on: You make the vodka and gin while you wait for the whiskey to mature. Not so with The Shed – from the outset, this was a gin distillery that also made whiskey. Their gins came in beautiful bottles, with slick label designs and interesting botanicals – their centrepiece Gunpowder Gin is made with gunpowder tea (as opposed to actual gunpowder). They also release special editions – Brazilian pineapple, Year Of The Dragon and Distillery Cat ceramic bottles, a Sardinian Citrus edition, and a Californian Orange iteration. Their Sausage Tree vodka is made with the oblong fruit of the African Kigelia plant as well as nettles, and comes in a blazing red glass bottle. Rigney knows how to build eye-catching, imaginative brands – so why build a distillery? There are many non-distilling producers who have achieved great success without the burden of a production site. Rigney admits that it was not a decision for the faint-hearted, but one that was necessary.
“Having our own family distillery was essential to give our Drumshanbo and The Shed Distillery brand a place, authenticity and transparency. It was always a massive dream throughout my 42-year career in the drinks industry to establish a full working distillery as I crossed the world over and back countless occasions – myself and Denise were actually talking about it the other day and 4,500 days travelled to the four corners of the world since 1982 and still counting.
“Starting with just one employee (head distiller Brian Taft) and Denise and I working other jobs for five years we now employ more than 100 extraordinary persons in Drumshanbo distilling, bottling and marketing our brands to more than 100 countries across the world. We now have seven fully trained distillers at The Shed.”
This search for authenticity is also behind the decision not to release any sourced liquids – many new distilleries in Ireland happily release products from other distillers under their own labels, but it leads to inauthentic brands and disillusioned consumers. For Rigney, sourcing was not part of the equation, no matter how tempting it might have been: “Our reputation for truth, authenticity and place in Drumshanbo is paramount and the foundation of our promise and core to the brand essence. We must ensure our customers have full confidence on where Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish Gin and our Drumshanbo Irish Whiskeys come from – our motto is ‘every precious drop distilled at The Shed Distillery of PJ Rigney, Drumshanbo’.”
This is the first brand he has created that carries his name; albeit an exaggerated version of himself. The PJ Rigney of the brand is a persona, a character, part Filleas Fogg, part PT Barnum – a traveller and explorer, alchemist and apothecary, finder of curiosities and showman. Perhaps it’s a side effect of a lifetime working on brands, that being the face of one necessitated some separation, or the feeling that somehow Pat Rigney’s story is less interesting than that of PJ Rigney, but there is something slightly discordant about it. Maybe this is the architecture of brands – that they are built on extensions, exaggerations, stories, myths. But in whiskey, sometimes a little bit of grit and some rough edges are really what helps a brand gain purchase. Many similar sized enterprises to The Shed get more traction, because their founders are less polished, more outspoken, and are perceived to be more raw and real. In this regard, all of Rigney’s pedigree – especially in the dark arts of marketing and brand building – is a disadvantage. But The Shed make excellent whiskey, with their latest seven year old single pot still, matured in Sicilian Marsala wine casks, being a standout. Their focus is on single pot still and it makes up 90% of their whiskey production, and they have reaped the rewards – it was named one best in class at the 2023 Irish Whiskey Awards and The Shed Distillery was named International Distiller of the Year at the 2022 Wine Enthusiast awards in San Francisco where Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish Gin also won the overall award for best international spirit of the year.
As they mark ten years of growth and expansion this year, Rigney is cautiously optimistic about the future: “While the drinks industry is going through a reset internationally, Irish whiskey has great potential to grow and take more market share. It is not without risk however. In our case our focus on exceptional quality will endure and secure our future. Taking decisions for the long term rather than for the short term with our family values at the core will be key. We will continue to innovate and bring excitement to our fans across the world.”
Two fallacies were debunked at the Waterford Distillery Festival 2024 – one, that organising a piss-up in a brewery – or any drinks production site – is easy. The team at Waterford Distillery went all out, decorating the massive site with brand-themed chains of coloured paper, setting up cocktail and craft beer bars, organising food and drink trucks, hosting masterclasses, tours, talks and setting up a stage where a series of musicians played live throughout the day. The chap I spoke to who was manning the merchandise stall normally worked as an accountant with the firm – this was all hands on deck. Organising a piss up in a distillery is, it would appear, no mean feat, especially when you’ve sold 700 tickets.
The second phrase that needs binning is that today’s rain is tomorrow’s whisky – it really does seem unlikely that rainfall could be harvested, purified through reverse osmosis, then used in mashing in, fermenting, distilled, and casked within a 24 hour period and even then, you would need some wild technology to speed age it by three years. That said, ‘today’s rain is three-years-from-now’s whisky’ doesn’t quite roll off the tongue so well.
But inaccurate as it may be, today’s rain being tomorrow’s whisky was still a phrase I uttered a few times during the festival in Waterford Distillery. I said it when we arrived in the pissing rain, when we looked out at the band playing the courtyard in the pissing rain, and when I was standing at the bar in the pissing rain waiting for a drink and a gust of wind lifted the canopy overhead and disgorged about 25 litres of water down my back, to the amusement of those behind me. It just did not stop raining for the whole day, but what should I have expected from an outdoor event, in Ireland, in a city called Waterford, in high Irish summer, organised by a guy whose second name is literally ‘rainier’. The omens were never great.
A barman.
Yet somehow, it was still a fantastic day out. My wife, who is sane and thus has no interest in whiskey, however it is spelled, thoroughly enjoyed the day because Waterford is a very, very stylish brand – their bottles look cool, their labels are beautiful, their whole ethos is interesting and weird, and that elevates it above a lot of the category. Its un-whiskey-ness is an instant eye-catcher for the normal drinkers, or whisky curious, of the world. My daughter had the same reaction when she saw the bottle I was sent of their new release, the Koffi, and took a photo of it for her Instagram. Perhaps being a whisky that echoes (or aspires to being) a wine is a good thing, actually.
I have come full circle with Waterford Distillery – before they had produced a drop I was guzzling down the Kool Ade, singing their praises and explaining in painfully lengthy profiles and thinkpieces just how this was going to change everything.
Then I had some of the whisky, and try as I might to love it, it was not the ambrosia I had been promised – this was not the most profound single malt the world had ever seen, nor was it the mindfuckery it pledged to be. My mind was left distinctly unfucked by the samples and bottles I tried; this was whisky released too soon, with too much buzz, and too high a price. And behind the buzz, there was a period where almost all of the debate was around terroir in whisky and whether it was a) plausible, and b) likely to have any discernible impact on flavour in the finished product. When I finally got to try the product, it didn’t seem finished, as it was too young, and if this was terroir in action then maybe stick it back in the cask until it’s less noticeable. In the end I had to accept that if there was terroir in whisky, then there was terroir in many other food and drink products and, while interesting, it was at best an element of flavour rather than the defining characteristic. Consider the terroir of milk – which type of grass, what type of soil, what breed of cow, who is the farmer, what kind of milking parlour, pasteurised or not. We don’t argue these points because on some level they make perfect sense, on another they make no sense, and in the end none of it matters. There’s nice milk and less nice milk. Find the nice.
I think Wayerford’s take on terroir had its time to win us over, and that time has passed, partly because Koffi (named after French experimental artist Nathanaël Koffi, who designed the patchwork of colours on the label) is a good enough whisky that it doesn’t need any high concepts. It doesn’t need to be sipped with a slightly wrinkled nose and then described as being interesting, because it is good. Good enough that when I was sent a bottle, I started to succumb to Waterford Distillery’s charms all over again and saw the world beyond terroir. I booked tickets to the festival for my wife and I, booked a hotel room, and headed back to Jonestown to drink deep of the Kool Aid once more.
In the four years since their first release, the buzz around Waterford – and associated fractious discourse around terroir in spirits – has abated. This could be due to a rising number of new Irish distilleries launching their inaugurals, or it could be that consumers felt a little underwhelmed by some of Waterford’s output. Sales were brisk however, with the Business Post claiming they were to the tune of €3.3 million in 2021, up from €2.8 million the year before. But the mild furore around terroir has dissipated somewhat, helped by the growing chatter of new entrants releasing their own spirit. The signal to noise ratio has shifted and the grand pronouncements from Waterford have become less piercing. Now everybody is shouting about everything, to the point where Waterford’s latest release was greeted with something of a shrug of the shoulders by the commentariat.
Naturally the release comes with a lot of bumpf – this is how it is intro’ed on their website:
How do you assemble the world’s most profound natural whisky possible? This Spring, with the introduction of The Waterford – Cuvée Koffi, we attempt to answer that very question. 24 distinct Single Farm Origins, each revelling in its own distinct terroir-derived flavour, augmented by four distinct cask types across a world-leading cask profile of Good Wood, layered into our most complex Cuvée Concept like the greatest wines of Champagne and Bordeaux, and with total traceability and transparency from field to barrel. This whisky layers some of our earliest Single Farm Origins, each of which is over six years old. It is the apogee of our range, our new flagship single malt, our oldest and most complex possible whisky – our lodestar.
Yes, lodestar, that thing we all kinda know from that Trump anon letter. What I would say to a whisky lover is – forget all the above, and all the other associated guff that almost any release from Waterford seems contractually obliged to be released with: The Koffi release is quite good. It was good enough that I wanted to physically revisit the distillery, and despite the pissing rain and getting soaked when I could have had cheaper drinks in a warm pub somewhere in Waterford city, I stuck with it. Koffi is good.
My one outstanding quibble with Waterford is that their stuff is just too expensive. I could frame that another way by saying it is young, but youth isn’t the issue here – I have had some banger Scotches and Armagnacs that were five years old or less, but they all cost me sub-€50. I have heard the stock response to this complaint of mine many times, that making whiskey here is completely different to in Scotland, and it is simply more expensive, but as a consumer I am telling you that I don’t care and that I don’t want to pay €70-€90 for a four-to-seven year old.
Fortunate then that the good people at Waterford Distillery sent me a bottle of the Koffi. It comes, as all Waterford releases do, with a code which you can enter on their website to dig down into what is in the bottle. In short – it is a blend of 24 single farm distillations and was matured for six years and five days before being assembled on October 25th 2022 and bottled on July 18, 2023, with all natural colour and a chunky ABV of 50%. The site also lists what farm went into which cask and all associated details if you are into that kind of thing.
Straight out of the bottle and gloriously unburdened of all this info, I found the Koffi to be most pleasant. A lot of the younger whiskies on the market here tend to be a little thin – they lack the depth and the oomph that you’d expect from beverages of equivalent price, but this was pleasantly meaty – and in a sea of new releases where cask finishes take the headline on the bottle and in your glass, the Koffi is very stripped back and real; no bells and whistles, just a very direct whisky. Think Steve Albini’s productions – raw but polished, real and live and in your face. Chatting to others at the event the consensus was the same – this is a good whisky, and the festival is a great day out, no matter the weather.
A few years back, a whiskey producer took it upon himself to sue another whiskey producer for defamation. They hired a lawyer to send threatening letters to the producer over a comment they made, but, and this is the part that baffles me, they also included a list of other accounts in the legal threats, accounts which had nothing to do with any disagreement between the two producers. It came as something of a surprise to see my name featured, along with a number of other bloggers and writers, as I had nothing to do with this person or their whiskey brand. The funniest part of the whole affair (which ended up being resolved outside court) was that my Twitter account got locked because of the legal threats, and at the exact moment this happened, I was at a whiskey launch where the person behind the action happened to be in attendance, sitting about 15 feet away from me.
For the most part, PR firms are great to work with, and having interned in a PR firm one summer about three decades ago, I know how hard they work at what they do. It is a thankless, gruelling job where a lot of time you eat shit from the press, from clients, from everyone. But sometimes it’s the other way around. I asked a PR for comment from a client, telling them it was only for a blog piece and so there was no pressure but I had to ask. They responded by telling me their client was very busy but that they would ask again at a later date. This is where my part in this mess comes in – I saw the ‘again’ and thought that the PR had asked the client for comment and they had declined, so that was what I put in the piece. Hit publish and away we go. A couple of hours later, PR rings, and a tense conversation ensues in which they explain that they didn’t ask the client for comment at all. I apologise and say I misinterpreted their email. Then, PR keeps going – admonishes me for coming to them for comment from their client in the first place, telling me they are not the person to contact for this despite the fact they were happy to provide comment for print pieces previously and they are, after all, a PR person. After I had been given out to for a few minutes, they put forward the suggestion that the best way to remedy this was that they would go back to the client and tell them that I had never contacted them for comment at all. In other words, they would go and tell their client that I had simply made up the quote. I said, no, that is not a good idea, and we ended the call. The problem is that I actually don’t know if they did follow through with their clever plan and tell the client that I never bothered to contact at all, but given the last invite I received to an event being held by the client was rescinded an hour after I got it, I am going to say, maybe.
Much as I love PR people, I’m not sure they are the people you should be commissioning to write features for print. I have seen one PR repeatedly write massive glowing features about a large client of theirs without mentioning the connection – or the fact that what the paper was printing was technically sponsored content. Another PR writes listicles that repeatedly mention clients. If I can see it by only knowing one or two PRs and their clients, then I am going to assume it is a lot more widespread than that. And even if they aren’t mentioning their own clients, who says they aren’t touting for business by heaping praise on other firms? It also sucks because it diminishes the value of a newspaper, and because the PR is getting paid on the double; by the client for the coverage, and by the paper for the copy. Yes, I still have lofty notions about the business of news, but I just think running copy which may or may not be a massive ad is poor form. There are great young writers out there who deserve a break.
