Triple Distilled Communications

Pubs in Ireland are in crisis – over the last 30 years a gradual (and long overdue) tightening of drink driving laws started a societal shift – much like the declining power of the Catholic church here, the pub is no longer the centre of society.  Across Ireland pubs that had passed through generations were shut, never to reopen. Then came the virus, and an already steady decline accelerated. For those that remain, it is a case of adapt or die.  

Ivor O’Loughlin’s family have been in the bar business since 1986 when his father Declan bought O’Loughlins Bar on Dublin Street in Carlow. Ivor and the rest of his siblings grew up over the bar, and Ivor, after training as a teacher, followed his father into the family business,   which at that stage included O’Loughlins Hotel and Club 23 in Portlaoise and The Irishman pub in Carlow. The hotel was sold in late 2019, and then, in early 2020, disaster struck. 

“Not long after the sale of the hotel, Covid happened. It meant that The Irishman has more or less been closed for over a year now.”

Fortunately, Ivor had been thinking about branching out before the virus: “In terms of Tiny Tipple, I had the idea in January 2020, before Covid. Having been following the whiskey business and the constant new releases, I felt there was an opportunity to develop a kind of formalised bottle share element. I’m not claiming to have re-invented the wheel, as this has been done in the UK on a larger scale already with Drinks By The Dram, Flaviar etc. But I feel that there is a market there in Ireland for a similar service.”

A market there is, for a couple of reasons – whiskey is not an inexpensive hobby, and the ability to try a measure before investing in a bottle is a boon. On top of that there is the possibility of trying limited releases that you would otherwise have to hunt at auction or rely on a generous pal to share with you. And besides, with the pub closed, Ivor needed something to do with himself. 

“All pubs need to diversify in order to survive and I think that as much as I hate saying it, there will be a lot of pubs closing in the coming few years. I think Covid will have sped up the ways in which Irish people consume alcohol in pubs. Sure, pubs will re-open and there will be great celebrations but I am sceptical that things will return to the way they were before for a long time. 

“I started prototyping with bottles and waxes and labels etc back in February 2020. I applied for a Business Innovation voucher through Enterprise Ireland and Carlow Institute of Technology. I worked with the Design+ team in the IT to come up with the label and some packaging ideas (which didn’t come to fruition due to cost). I was insistent on the different colours wax for different styles of whiskey because I felt they stand out and add a premium feel to them. 

“Initially the idea was to focus entirely on expensive premium bottles (€100 plus) as I felt that this was where demand would be but as with the nature of purchasing whiskey – you want to buy and stock every single release. I applied for a Trading Online Voucher which helped cover some of the costs of getting the website up and running. One of the main questions that the people in the IT threw out at me was, ‘How can you guarantee what you are selling is actually what’s in the bottle?’. That question is answered every time you buy a drink at a bar or indeed many other forms of retail. Every brand and customer in the country trusts retailers every single day to do what they say they will do. In particular in the bar industry, brands trust publicans not to sell ‘Cheap Knock off Vodka’ in place of an industry recognised brand. That is a simple question of integrity and the knowledge that any compromise in that integrity results in irreparable reputational damage, jeopardising your business. People also buy with their eyes. I am confident that my packaging looks very well. It stands out. It has a level of detail in terms of transparency with batch numbers, cask numbers, bottle numbers etc. that automatically builds a degree of trust in customers.”

A gap in the market spotted, it has been going well despite only launching in recent times. 

“The big surprise for me was how enthusiastic all the distillers, bottlers and blenders have been. Within a few days many brands reached out offering support and encouragement. There is a will amongst the brands for a service like this. As Louise McGuane said of Tiny Tipple, ”Liquid on Lips’ is so important for smaller brands who are trying to build their footprint’. 

“The best sellers on the site so far have been the tasting flights. There is a real appetite for people to try different whiskies alongside each other without the cost. I have a lot of friends who are only starting their whiskey journey now and it can be a bit daunting to know where to start. Then you spend €60 on a bottle when you are starting out, you don’t like that particular style or release, you may be lost to Irish whiskey forever!”

But aside from offering a great starting point, Tiny Tipples also democratise limited releases and have the coveted Redbreast 10 as part of their offering. 

“The Redbreast 10 Year Old has been very popular. It is the likes of that drink that makes Tiny Tipple appealing. 7,000 bottles of Redbreast 10 were released and it sold out in a few hours, many of them to be hoarded away to be auctioned at a later date. 

“Along with the RB10, the WD O’Connell range has sold very well (the 17YO PX Series is just about gone), JJ Corry releases like the Old Tom (a cracking release) will be sold out soon at the rate its going (again another bottle that was mostly left on shelves as a collectors item) and the Sliabh Liag (the entire Silkie Range) stuff has gone very well. 

“Hopefully, the Tiny Tipples that have been dispersed into the wild will result in many multiples of sales in 700ml bottles for the producers!” 

See tinytipple.com for more. 

Salou looks like it was designed for the social media age – all wide boulevards, parrot-populated palm trees, mountainous horizons, historical buildings, and multicoloured, interactive fountains. Everywhere you look there are stunning foregrounds and backdrops for those Insta moments. Even as you walk along the coast to where Salou ends, there are platforms on the rocky outcrops for you to take those all-important selfies. 

My sixteen year old was delighted – every day we would go for a stroll for her to source content for her social channels, and we weren’t the only ones – everywhere there people waving their phones, filming, snapping and posting. But while Salou had a few wannabe influencers waving selfie sticks, the surrounds of La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona was like a particularly chilling episode of Black Mirror – it was like social media had become a virus, transforming people who should be awed by the staggering beauty of the building into witless goons who just want to use it as a backdrop. We even saw one couple standing in the middle of the road in the face of oncoming traffic in their attempt to get the perfect angle on their shot. 

Holidaying in Spain makes economic sense, as certain things are cheaper there than here; food, accomodation and medicine to name but three. This meant that I came home with 20 packs of Avamys sinus spray (11 euro over the counter there, thirty euro on prescription here) and some booze. Lots of booze, thanks to this gent on Twitter, who upon hearing I was going to Salou, informed me that the must-see spot in the area was not Gaudi’s beautiful architecture, or the stunning coastline, or even the colossal amusement park, but was in fact the local offie.  And lo, so it was that I found myself on more than one occasion in the Wine Palace Salou, enjoying their air conditioning and their remarkable selection of spirits, meats, beers and friendly staff. They have very few Irish whiskeys, but to give an idea of the prices they charge, they had the WCD ten year old for 19.99. Why can’t we have this in Ireland, we cry! I have no idea, but I am generally of the belief that you can never understand a country’s economy without working there – then you get to see what is and is not working, and most importantly, how your taxes are collected and how they are being spent. The average industrial wage is higher in Ireland than it is in Spain, so life here costs more than it does there. As for alcohol, it is taxed at a high rate in Ireland, as the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland recently pointed out, noting that 25 EU member states pay less excise tax on Irish whiskey than Ireland: 

A new Drinks Industry Group of Ireland report, Excise Tax Rates in Europe: How Ireland Compares in 2019, authored by Dublin City University economist Anthony Foley, shows that Ireland continues to have the second-highest overall excise tax on alcohol in the EU, the highest excise tax on wine, the second highest on beer, and the third highest on spirits.

Despite Ireland’s renown for the production of some of the world’s most popular drinks products, the Irish government levies a tax bill of €12 on a bottle of off-licence-bought Irish whiskey and 54 cents on a pint of Irish stout served at a pub, restaurant or hotel.

In terms of excise tax, Italian tourists pay four times less excise on a bottle of Irish whiskey in an Italian supermarket than they would if purchasing it for the Irish distillery that produced it.

In France and Germany, countries equally renowned for their drinks industries, excise tax rates on wine and beer are far lower. A shopper in France pays just three cents in excise on a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, while a patron at a German beerhall pays five cents in excise on every pint of lager.

It is a common theme – why come to Ireland to buy whiskey when it is cheaper back home? And therein lies a bigger question about Irish whiskey – why is it so expensive? Partly it is through strategy – it was framed as a premium product almost from day one, and those notions never went away. Smooth, triple distilled, luxuriant. But high taxation domestically ought to be of little concern to producers when the vast majority of it is being sold in export markets and thus beyond paddy taxman’s reach. Just look at the stampede into the sector – surely they aren’t all terrible accountants who grossly misread the Irish tax code? Clearly there is profit to be made.  

Taxes on drink here are high and sales of drink are high, and even though those sales are falling, the cost to society and public health from abuse of alcohol has also been high. In fact, the WHO recommend high taxes as a way of negating the ill effects of abuse.

Alcohol deserves a high price because it deserves our respect. Neither should alcohol be seen as a basic human right – perhaps we should reframe our thinking on it and see it, not as one of the central struts of Irish identity, but as a decadent, occasional pleasure. Personally, I cannot imagine my life without it, but I have to accept that no matter how I try to rebrand that, it is still a drug and my love for it makes me an addict, albeit an incredibly pretentious one. 

In Salou I bought two Spanish brandies, then when I came home I ordered another, and my general take on the products is that they are excellent – incredible liquid, exceptional value and a welcome counterpoint to my whisky obsession. Sometimes you just need to recalibrate those taste buds by diving into another spirit altogether. I still love whisky, but even your mouth needs a holiday from time to time. But the bottles I bought were not just Spanish brandies, they were Catalonioan – like any sophisticated pisshead, I like to imbibe some local gatts on my hollibobs.  If you want to know more about these brandies, there is an excellent piece here by Joe Micallef which goes into how they are made. Micallef is the chap who wrote of the Irish government’s ‘schizophrenic’ attitude to alcohol in Forbes, an article appeared to earn him some favour with the IWA parent group Drinks Ireland, who hosted him in Dublin a few months later. 

It’s worth pointing out that A) using the term ‘schizophrenic’ with such negative connotations, utterly unrelated to any discussion of mental health, is generally to be avoided, and B) governments have always struggled with the dilemma of massive tax gains from the sale of alcohol, and the enormous cost to public health, law and order and society at large from the abuse of it. All nation states struggle to balance this equation – Soggy Sweat’s If By Whiskey still captures the essence of the dichotomy, many decades after he spoke those words. 

So booze is cheaper in Catalonia. You know what else is cheaper? Human rights. The images from the marches in Barcelona do make for easy viewing; ludicrous jail sentences being handed down for ‘sedition’, ie, holding a referendum. It cuts to the bone of our approach to ‘cheap’ hols and ‘cheap’ booze – a price is always paid somewhere, and not by us.

Ireland is a progressive, wealthy country. I am happy to live here and to pay taxes here. Certainly there are ways that those taxes could be collected in a fairer manner – don’t treat tiny producers the same as massive transnationals – and spent more wisely – infrastructure, modernisation, etc – but generally I am ok with taxes as long as we don’t see riot police baton-charging citizens. I paid more than thirty thousand euro in taxes last year, this year will be slightly less than that, and I am happy to do it. I’ve lived a life of almost relentless privilege, but when I needed State support, it was there for me. That said, The Wine Palace does ship to Ireland.