Tag: Irish whiskey

The Others

January 9th, 2023

The IWA map of Ireland’s distilleries.

It feels like there are a lot of whiskey distilleries after opening in the last few years, but there are several more waiting in the wings. Some are in various stages of planning, some are built, some have yet to be comissioned. I went through the planning sites and tried to pull together all those in the Republic Of Ireland that fall into this category.

The title is the name of the person or firm that lodged the plans, address should be the location of the planned distillery, and the details are what was on the planning sites. The titles are links to the planning documents if you want to go have a nose at what the distillery is meant to look like. Some counties are missing as their distilleries were either already built or there were no distilleries on the planning pages at all. Any edits, notes or corrections to william.linnane@gmail.com.

Clare –

Name: Wild Atlantic Way Distillery Ltd

Address: Querrin, Kilkee, Co. Clare

Details: to construct a micro craft distillery consisting of ten no. modular dodecagon shaped cabins along with all associated site works to include new site entrance , car parking area, advanced wastewater treatment system and other ancillary services

Cork –

Name: Tower Development Properties Ltd

Address: North Custom House Quay and, South Custom House Quay, Custom House Street, Cork City

Details: Planning permission is sought by Tower Development Properties Ltd for: Redevelopment of the Custom House site at North Custom House Quay and South Custom House Quay, Custom House Street, Cork City to provide a 240-bedroom hotel, 25 no. hotel serviced suites, and a range of commercial uses including retail, office, food and beverage, distillery, tourism and leisure. The redevelopment will have a gross floor area of approximately 31, 604m2.

Name: Muster Developments Limited

Address: The Bodega, Cornmarket Street, Cork

Details: Permission for modifications to existing restaurant/ late night bar to include conservation works to restore the building’s original industrial character, internal alterations to include provision of a micro brewery/ distillery in part of the ground floor, first floor alterations to include an expanded open area and restaurant lightwell, and alterations to the front elevation to include a new escape doorway, at The Bodega, Cornmarket Street, Cork (Protected Structure).

Name: Sam Black (Blacks of Kinsale brewers and distillers)

Address: `Former Shirt Factory’, Cappagh, Kinsale, Co. Cork

Details: (i) Demolition of the existing annexes to the front elevation and side elevation of the `Former Shirt Factory’ (which is to become the production hall) , in addition to demolition of the steel ruin frame structure on site, (ii) Modernisation of existing building elevations (the proposed production hall), comprising alterations to the building façade, including revised material finishes to the roof and elevations incorporating fenestration changes allowing for a brewery and distillery at ground floor level, (iii) Construction of extension to the front elevation of the existing building on site (the proposed production hall) consisting of ancillary office space, retail space at first floor level with lower and upper terraces and associated signage, (iv) A storage hall, (v) The upgrading of the existing access into and through the site including a swale incorporating the length of the site with drainage to Commogue Marsh, (vi) Ancillary on-site car and bicycle parking provision, (vii) Beer storage tank farm, (viii) Malt grain storage silo farm, (ix) Plant including steam boiler unit and cooling ventilation unit, (x) Delivery yard permitting open storage, (xi) Landscaping including fencing, new boundary treatments, lighting, and pedestrian linkages to nearby footpath, and (xii) Pumping station, ground level changes with all other associated site works and ancillary services.

Name: Nigel Sweetnam/Kinsale Spirits Company

Address: Knockduff, Kinsale, Co. Cork

Details: Retention of an existing oyster processing shed, the change of use of the existing oyster processing shed to a craft distillery, and construction of alterations to the existing oyster processing shed, the construction of a solardome, and all ancillary site works.

Name: Comharchumann Chléire Teo

Address: Cnocán na mBáirneach, Cape Clear, Skibbereen, Co. Cork.

Details: Development will consist of: the provision of an integrated whiskey distillery and associated development (with ancillary waste water treatment facilities) comprising: mash house/tun room (171 sqm); fermentation building (236 sq m): stills building and decanting area (298sq m); visitor’s centre shop and staff acilities (134sq m); glazed link area (16sq m) and ask stores (745 sq m), all ranging from one to three storeys in height. The development will also consist of the provision of ancillary plant areas including wastewater treatment plant enclosures and associated pipework; percolation areas; storage areas including water tank and grain silos; ancillary staff and visitor areas; landscaping and boundary treatmets; lighting; changes in level and all ancillary site development and excavation works above and below ground

Name: Bandon Distillery Limited

Address: IDA Industrial Estate, Laragh, Bandon, Co. Cork, (Formally Alcatel Ireland Ltd)

Details: (a) Change of use of part of existing building from light industrial to visitors centre in association with the distillery, (b) alterations to elevations of existing light industrial building to facilitate visitors centre at distillery, (c) construction of raised atrium above part of existing roof in production area, (d) removal of part of building to form an unroofed courtyard and demolition of separate services building, (e) installation of 3 no. silos and 2 no. cooling towers externally and one underground gas storage tank, (f) drilling bored well, and (g) provision of advertising signage – Extension of Duration of Permission granted under Planning Reference: 15/6891

Name: Roaring Water Farm and Enterprises Ltd

Address: Horse Island, Schull, Co. Cork

Details: The development will consist of the provision of an integrated whiskey distillery and associated development (with ancillary waste water treatment facilities) comprising: mash house (157sqm); fermentation house (228sqm); stills house (258sqm); visitor’s centre/cafe (94sqm); visitor’s ‘whiskey bar’ (19sqm); ancillary circulation and link areas (49sqm) and two cask stores (805sqm in total), all ranging from one to two storeys in height. (The visitor’s centre includes the part-demolition of the first floor of an existing ruined former dwelling and related outbuilding (51sqm)). The development will also consist of the provision of ancillary plant areas including: sea water pump and wastewater treatment plant enclosures and associated pipework; percolation areas; storage areas including water tank and grain silos; ancillary staff and visitor areas; landscaping and boundary treatments; lighting; changes in level and all ancillary site development and excavation works above and below ground

Donegal –

Name: MICHAEL R. O’BOYLE

Address: GORTNABRADE, CARRIGART, LETTERKENNY P.O., CO. DONEGAL

Details: (A) THE CHANGE OF USE OF A DOMESTIC SHED TO A NANO DISTILLERY (B) CONNECTION TO EXISTING SEPTIC TANK AND (C) UPGRADING OF EXISTING SEWAGE SYSTEM WITH ALL ASSOCIATED SITE WORKS

Name: DOYLE’S DISTILLERY LTD

Address: CUMMIRK, CLOGHAN, CO. DONEGAL

Details: (1) ALTERED ROOFLINE AND SIDE EXTENSION TO EXISTING SHED TO ACCOMMODATE CHANGE OF USE (2) PARTIALLY CONSTRUCTED SHED AND PERMISSION FOR (1) CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW DISTILLERY COMPLEX BUILDING TO ACCOMMODATE ANCILLARY OFFICE/RECEPTION/TOILET AREA,STORAGE AREA, BOTTLING LINE, PLANT ROOM, MILLING, MASH TUN, FERMENTATION, PALLET AND STILL AREAS, EXTERNAL SILOS (2) PROVISION OF A SEWAGE TREATMENT SYSTEM AND ALL ASSOCIATED SITE DEVELOPMENT WORKS (3) CHANGE OF USE OF EXISTING SHED TO A DISTILLERY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTRE (4) COMPLETION OF PARTIALLY CONSTRUCTED SHED. A NATURA IMPACT STATEMENT (NIS) ACCOMPANIES THIS APPLICATION

Dublin –

Name: Harvest Lodge Distilleries LTD

Address: Lands at Harvest Lodge, Folkstown Lane ( Folkstown Little Td) and lands at Folkstown Great Td, Naul Road, Balbriggan, Co Dublin

Details: 1. The development will consist of a distillery (total floor area of floor area 5659m2) which includes provision of an ancillary visitor centre, storage shed along with associated external plant cooling tower and ancillary equipment to include water storage tanks, gas tanks along with signage on the buildings.

2. The development will consist of 7 no. separate buildings (total floor areas of 7892m2) for light industrial and warehouse uses each with associated offices, showrooms, signage, access roads, turning/loading areas, footways, storage areas, parking, electric vehicle charge points, landscaping, lighting, fencing, bicycle and bin storage facilities and associated site works.

3. The demolition of existing agricultural sheds and outbuildings associated with Harvest Lodge along with the refurbishment and change of use of Harvest Lodge to a campus management building along with provision of an associated campus maintenance office and associated parking.

4.The provision of a new site entrance with associated works to facilitate vehicular and pedestrian access.

5. The provision of a business park entrance sign along with perimeter fencing and security gates.

6. A proposed on-site pumping station and rising main which will discharge all treated wastewater effluent from the site to the existing public foul sewerage system.

7. Provision of associated on-line surface water attenuation ponds and attenuation as part of the surface water system.

8. All ancillary site development, landscaping and construction works to facilitate foul, water and service networks to include provision of an ESB substation.

Name: Lambay Estate Company

Address: Lambay Castle, Lambay Island, Rush, Co. Dublin.

Details: Change of use of Potting Shed adjacent to walled garden from storage to micro-distillery to include widening of 1no. door opening in covered lobby with new timber door; making good of concrete floors; erection of distillery equipment; provision of water and electrical services; connections to water drainage system to include provision of new percolation area; sundry minor works.

Kerry –

Name: KILLARNEY DISTILLERS LTD.

Address: Aghadoe House Stables, Fossa, Killarney

Details: CONSERVATION AND REFURBISHMENT OF THE DERELICT NINETEENTH CENTURY COACH HOUSE AND ADJOINING COURTYARD (381M2) LOCATED WITHIN THE CURTILAGE OF AGHADOE HOUSE (A PROTECTED STRUCTURE (RPS-KY-21306614) FOR SENSITIVE INCORPORATION AND REUSE AS PART OF A CRAFT DISTILLERY, INCLUDING REINSTATEMENT OF ROOF, ADDITION OF A GLAZED CANOPY TO FORM A COVERED ENTRANCE SPACE AND MINOR ALTERATIONS TO ACCOMMODATE A RECEPTION AREA, CAFE, RESTAURANT, BAR FACILITIES AND RETAIL SPACE AT GROUND FLOOR. REINSTATEMENT OF PERIMETER BUILDINGS WITHIN THE EXISTING COURTYARD IN PLACE OF LOST HISTORIC STRUCTURES TO ACCOMMODATE CAFE, RESTAURANT, BAR FACILITIES (74M2) AND MILL (36M2), AND ADDITIONS TO EXISTING OUTBUILDINGS (42M2) TO ACCOMMODATE KITCHEN, STORES, STAFF FACILITIES AND A NEW ELECTRICITY SUBSTATION. REMOVAL OF RUINED LEAN TO STRUCTURES (55M2) AND TWENTIETH CENTURY TIMBER FRAMED SHED (18M2) AND CONCRETE WATER TANK (15M2). REINSTATEMENT OF FIRST FLOOR MEZZANINE LEVEL (102M2) WITH ATTENDANT STAIRS AND LIFT TO ACCOMMODATE AN ANCILLARY OFFICE AND VISITOR SANITARY FACILITIES. WORKS TO CONSERVE, REPAIR AND EXEND THE PARTLY DEMOLISHED STONE WALL FORMING THE BOUNDARY WITH AGHADOE HOUSE, MAKING PROVISION FOR PRESERVATION OF AN EXISTING WALKING ROUTE BETWEEN THE NEARBY R563 ROAD JUNCTION AND FOSSA PRIMARY SCHOOL, AND REINSTATEMENT OF EXTERNAL GROUND SURFACES WITHIN THE COURTYARD AND FORECOURT. CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW 690M2 STILL HOUSE /MULTIPURPOSE EVENT SPACE ACCOMMODATING DISTILLATION PROCESS EQUIPMENT, TASTING AREA, BAR FACILITIES, LOWER GROUND FLOOR MECHANICAL AREA, ANCILLARY PLANT SPACE, DISTILLING STAFF ACCOMMODATION, TESTING LABORATORY AND ATTENDANT EXTERNAL STORAGE SILOS, PROCESS VESSELS, CO-PRODUCT STORAGE VESSELS, COOLING TOWER, PH BALANCE TANK, UNDERGROUND LPG STORAGE, UNDERGROUND FIREFIGHTING WATER STORAGE AND ALL ANCILLAR Y SITE DEVELOPMENT AND LANDSCAPE WORKS WHILE PROVIDING FOR PRESERVATION OF MATURE AND SPECIMEN TREES. CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW 460M2 MATURATION STORAGE BUILDING INCLUDING CASK FILLING AND DISGORGING FACILITIES, BOTTLING STATION AND ALL ANCILLARY SITE DEVELOPMENT AND LANDSCAPE WORKS WHILE PROVIDING FOR PRESERVATION OF MATURE AND SPECIMEN TREES. CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW ENTRANCE AND INTERNAL ROADWAY FROM THE R563 SENSITIVELY INCORPORATED WITHIN THE WOODLAND TO PROVIDE SOLE VEHICULAR ACCESS TO THE SITE WITH ATTENDANT LIGHTING, SIGNAGE, GATE AND LANDSCAPING WORKS AND PROVISION OF ASSOCIATED CAR, BICYCLE AND COACHING PARKING.

Name: JERRY O’SULLIVAN

Address: SPA ROAD AND , CONNOR PASS ROAD, DINGLE, CO KERRY

Details: DEMOLITIONS, CHANGE OF USE, ALTERATIONS AND EXTENSIONS OF A FORMER CREAMERY BUILDING AND ANCILLARY STRUCTURES TO PROVIDE A NEW DISTILLERY AND VISITORS CENTRE TO INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING:(1) DEMOLITION OF EXISTING SINGLE STOREY COLD STORE ALONG WITH NORTHERN BOUNDARY, DEMOLITION OF THE EXISTING SINGLE STOREY ANNEX BUILDING AT THE SOUTHWEST OF THE SITE, PART DEMOLITION OF EXISTING SINGEL STOREY ANNEX AT NORTHEAST CORNER OF FORMER CREAMERY BUILDING AND PART DEMOLITION OF EXISTING SINGLE STOREY STRUCTURE ON THE EASTERN BOUNDARY,(2) PART SINGLE STOREY AND PART FOUR STOREY EXTENSIONS LOCATED AT THE SOUTHWEST OF THE FORMER MAIN CREAMERY BUILDING TO PROVIDE A VISITORS CENTRE AND TASTING ROOM AT GROUND FLOOR LEVEL AND CASK STORAGE AT FIRST, SECOND AND THIRD FLOOR LEVELS. (3)A SINGLE STOREY EXTENSION TO THE NORTHWEST ELEVATION TO PROVIDE A RETAIL SHOP AREA, DISPLAY AREA AND RECEPTION. SEE NEWSPAPER NOTICE RECD 26/02/09 FOR COMPLETE DEVELOPMENT DESCRIPTION

Name: BEAUFORT DISTILLERY LTD.

Address: CAHEROOBEG, BEAUFORT, CO KERRY

Details: CONSTRUCT TWO INDUSTRIAL SHEDS TO HOUSE A WHISKEY DISTILLERY AND ASSOCIATED STORAGE. PERMISSION IS FURTHER SOUGHT TO INSTALL A SEPTIC TANK, INTERMITTENT FILTER, POLISHING FILTER AND FOR ALL ASSOCIATED ANCILLARY SITE DEVELOPMENTS INCLUDING LANDSCAPING AND BOUNDARY TREATMENT

Kildare –

Name: Ciara and Harvey Appelbe

Address: The Old Mill,, Ballymore Eustace,, Co. Kildare

Details: Major renovations of the Mill building complex to house a Craft Micro-Distillery (gfa 453.8sqm) including refurbishment, conversion and consolidation/stabilisation of existing structures (four, three, two and single storey buildings) around existing upper and lower courtyard (Blocks 2, 3 and 4). The craft micro-distillery will include a brew-house, still house, 2 No. warehouses for storing 1,000 No. whiskey casks, empty cask storage space, plant room and cooperage. A minor increase in floor area is proposed in Blocks 3 and 4 in order to provide for new mezzanines and stairs (74.2sqm). It is also proposed to undertake refurbishment and consolidation/stabilisation of structures in upper courtyard (Block 5, gfa 213sqm) with no associated new use. The development includes landscaping, boundary treatment, drainage, parking and all ancillary associated site works (including alterations to existing mill pond to facilitate a detention basin, bunding and spill containment; fire water retention basin). The existing road and pedestrian access to and through the site will remain unchanged

Leitrim –

Name: Paul Carty

Address: Cornaglah, Ballyshannon, Co Leitrim

Details: construction of new building for a proposed micro distillery, septic tank & soakway together with associated siteworks

Louth –

Name: Raymond Thornton

Address: Newtowndarver,, Dundalk, Co Louth

Details: EXTENSION OF DURATION OF 15/142- Permission for development to consist of a single storey sheet cladded steel portal frame building to be a micro distillery (GFA = 415 sq.m.), together with the following associated ancillary works, a single storey new boiler house (GFA = 35 sq.m); an over ground alcohol storage tank (5,000 litres); an over ground LPG storage tank (2,000 litres); an under ground fire water storage tank (180 cu.m); a waste water treatment system/percolation area; a landscaped earth embankment; an oil interceptor; a soakage trench and all other associated site development works. *Significant Further Information received 20/05/2015 -Noting the height of the proposed structure at 12.4 metres high, removal of brick to the proposed elevations, insertion of two new storage tanks, one over ground and one underground, comprehensive landscaping plan, alterations of site boundaries and other ancillary documents*

Mayo –

Name: NEPHIN WHISKEY COMPANY LTD.

Address: LAHARDAUN, BALLINA, CO. MAYO

Details: CONSTRUCT NEW SINGLE STOREY PLANT BUILDING TO HOUSE PLANT ROOMS ADJOINING PROPOSED DISTILLERY BUILDING AT PROPOSED WHISKEY DISTILLERY COMPLEX WHICH IS SUBJECT OF ONGOING PLANNING APPLICATION P14/573. THE PLANT BUILDING WILL BE 83SQM IN AREA AND 5.1M HIGH. THE PLANT BUILDING WILL HOUSE PLANT INCLUDING BOILER, COMPRESSOR AND MOTORISED CONTROLS

Meath –

Name: Meade Potato Company Unlimited

Address: Heronstown, Lobinstown, Navan, Co. Meath

Details: the development will consist of: 1) construction of a farm distillery and farm shop with associated retail area, café, exhibition space, associated parking, ware housing, 2) proposed storm drainage and treatment infrastructure including retention pond, 3) proposed sewerage treatment system compromising of an advanced treatment unit and associated percolation area, 4) all ancillary site development works. Significant Further information/Revised plans submitted with this application

Name: Kells Distillery Ltd

Address: Kells Business Park, Commons of Lloyd, Virginia Road, Kells, Co Meath

Details: part change of use of existing building from use as an industrial building to use as distillery & for a single storey office extension to side of existing building. To install treatment system and discharge to existing council foul water sewer with associated site works. A Natura Impact Statement (NIS) is being submitted with this application

Monaghan –

Name: Mullan Tidy Towns and Community Development

Address: Mullan Village, Emyvale, Co. Monaghan

Details: permission for development including connection to group sewage treatment system, car park and all associated site works. The development consists of the renovation and combined two-storey extension of two derelict structures and change of use to a gin distillery with bar, function room, storage, co-working office space, community facilities and signage. Significant further information received 3/8/21.

Offaly –

Name: TEROBOC LIMITED

Address: KINNITTY CASTLE HOTEL, CASTLETOWN, KINNITTY, BIRR, CO. OFFALY

Details: DEVELOPMENT THAT WILL CONSIST OF THE ALTERATION AND MATERIAL CHANGE OF USE OF EXISTING COACH HOUSE AND STABLE OUTBUILDINGS TO THE REAR OF KINNITTY CASTLE HOTEL, TO A PROPOSED CRAFT DISTILLERY AND VISITOR CENTRE. THE ALTERED BUILDINGS WILL CONTAIN SPACE FOR THE FOLLOWING: DISTILLERY PROCESS, BOTTLING, STORAGE, RETAIL AREA, TASTING AREA AND BAR, CRAFT WORKSHOPS, ANCILLARY STAFF AREAS AND TOILETS. THE WORKS WILL INCLUDE REPAIRS AND ALTERATIONS TO THE EXISTING BUILDINGS AND SITE DEVELOPMENT WORKS INCLUDING NEW COURTYARD SCREEN WALL, LANDSCAPING TO COURTYARD, FOUL AND SURFACE WATER DRAINAGE. THE PROPOSED DEVELOPMENT CONSISTS OF WORK TO A PROTECTED STRUCTURE

Roscommon –

Name: Neil Stewart

Address: Mocmoyne Td., Boyle, Co. Roscommon

Details: Extension of Duration of PD/17/166 – Permission for the change of use of part of existing mill building from production of grain and maize products to a whiskey distillery (floor area 739.58 sq.mtrs.) incorporating the installation of plant, together with minor alterations/works to existing building (which is on the record of protected structures – Reg. No. 3180439) together with all ancillary site works and services at

Tipperary –

Name: Steelworks Investments Ltd

Address: Dundrum House Hotel, Dundrum, Co. Tipperary

Details: an Integrated Tourism Development comprising the following works at Dundrum House Hotel, Dundrum: a) Construction of a two-storey boutique whiskey distillery and service yard with borehole for water supply and associated car-parking, in lieu of previously approved (10/317) three-storey dormer, forty-four bedroom Hotel and Conference Centre. b) Construction of a Golf Course Maintenance Building and associated storage areas. c) Construction of a Bottling Plant and whiskey storage area, including ancillary stores. d) Demolition of existing Hotel Entrance Lobby and associated circulation areas, and demolition of existing Basement stores and services spaces. e) Construction of a two-storey over partial existing basement building to the North West of existing hotel, comprising replacement Function Room with additional floor area. Pre-event space, circulation areas, Meeting Rooms, increased basement area for service areas, sanitary facilities, plant rooms, kitchens and storage areas. f) Construction of new two-storey building over existing basement, adjacent to Protected Structure S023 to comprise Hotel Entrance Foyer, lobbies, reception, circulation and mezzanine areas. g) Alterations to Protected Structure S023 comprising removal of existing lift shaft, installation of new lift, alterations to external opes to connect to new extension, internal alterations to room layouts, repairs to building fabric including floors, walls, roof, windows and doors, construction of pediments and hipped roofs to existing wings and installation of mechanical and electrical services. h) Landscaped gardens to South West and North East of Protected Structure S023, including hard and soft landscaping. i) Retention of revised layout of previously approved (10/317) Golf Driving Range and associated facilities, including new Practice Green. j) Associated car parking, roadways, site services, landscaping, screening, site boundaries, upgrade works to existing waste water treatment plant and all associated site development works. All works to be carried out within the curtilage of Dundrum House Hotel which is a Protected Structure Ref. S023 in the South Tipperary County Development Plan 2009 – 2015 and to connect to the existing Waste Water Treatment facility constructed under Permission 04/1239

Waterford –

Name: Gortinore Distillery Ltd

Address: Old Woollen Mills, Kilmacthomas, Co. Waterford

Details: development consisting of : a change of use of the former Old Woollen Mills (Grain Store) to industrial use and a spirit’s distillery including ancillary retail use. The works consist of the following: A; Internal, external alterations and demolitions within the mill and silo buildings. B; three storey extension to the front entrance façade of the mill building including alterations to the mill façade and flat roof structures. C; addition of ventilation stacks to the roofline of the silo building, replacement of its roof covering, alterations to the façade, extension and alterations at basement level and alterations to the building gable for vehicular and services access. D; new vehicular entrance, car parking, delivery and vehicle turning area, walled compound for storage of gas, water and generator to the southern end of the site. E; new pedestrian route from the parking area to the building access routes and Main Street, Kilmacthomas and all other associated site works (A PROTECTED STRUCTURE)

Wexford –

Name: JOHN STAFFORD

Address: 1798 VISITOR CENTRE, PARNELL ROAD, ENNISCORTHY, CO. WEXFORD.

Details: PERMISSION FOR CHANGE OF USE AND ALTERATIONS TO PORTION OF EXISTING VISITOR CENTRE (SHED STRUCTURE) TO A MICRO DISTILLERY BUT RETAINING THE MAJORITY OF THE VISITOR CENTRE AS EXISTING (INCLUDING CAFE, DISPLAY AREAS, KITCHEN TOILETS AND PARKING FACILITIES) WITHIN THE CURTILAGE OF A PROTECTED STRUCTURE RPS. NO. WCC E081, NIAH REF. NO. 15604032 AT 1798 VISITOR CENTRE, PARNELL ROAD, ENNISCORTHY, CO. WEXFORD.

Wicklow –

Name: Mezen Consultancy Services Ltd

Address: Tinakilly Upper, Rathnew, Co. Wicklow

Details: conversion of existing agricultural building for use as a micro distillery facility with visitor tasting and viewing areas together with new toilet facilities, connection to existing services and ancillary site works
For The Ages

December 19th, 2022

Few aspects of the whiskey industry make our eyes roll like marketing. A side effect of being exposed to far too many breathless press releases filled with bunkum, it has come to be seen as part of the whiskey business rather than whisky industry; it’s about hustle, not grind – sales, not substance. Among the nerds there is respect for the craftspeople who make the liquid, who manage the casks, who blend and bottle. But the marketing department? Does anyone ask about them when doing a distillery tour?

Except, marketing is everything – tone, mood, voice, ethos. A world without marketing would be a grey one indeed – every brand has a story, an arc, every product has a spin-off storyline within that universe, and marketing is what brings it all to life.

In Irish whiskey we have – according to Dr John Teeling – more than 700 brands and 42 distilleries, so we have an overabundance of marketing; endless stories about celebrating heritage of or paying homage to some ancestor or place or historical incident. Most of these whiskeys came from the same few places, and may or may not have a non-disclosure agreement in place which prohibits identifying the source, so marketeers are left to fill in the blanks with superficial swirls of the mists of time. And people – ordinary, normal people, not obsessives – love it. Irish whiskey is selling in huge amounts in the US, so all that storytelling is paying off.

But among the 42+ distilleries we do have operating on the island of Ireland, there are many who are doing some wild, creative things, but nobody knows because they don’t push the message out. It’s a crowded market populated with noisy non-distilling producers shouting about heritage, so you need to speak up to be heard.

It often feels like West Cork Distillers’ affordable, accessible whiskeys didn’t get the love that others in the category do – perhaps there was a reverse snobbery, that they weren’t seen as exclusive or expensive or elusive enough. They are, after all, priced well below their competitors – their NAS single malts with a variety of finishes all retail for less than forty euro, their standard blend is €26 and their cask strength blend is €46.95. These are everyman whiskeys, widely available and affordable. Maybe that is why they never really stood out, or maybe WCD’s ingredients business and third party sales took up all of the time and energy that would otherwise be spent building their own brand. But it would appear that they are entering a new phase.

The first sign that things might be changing was a Scotch Malt Whisky Society bottling of a seven-year-old Irish single malt released under the not especially cryptic name of Let’s Go West! Given the age and the fact it was a ‘County Cork’ distillery, there could really only be one source – West Cork Distillers. There was a confidence in the release – this was an age stated bottling that would go out to serious whisky heads. In a piece written for the SMWS magazine Unfiltered, Lee Connors interviewed the master blender at WCD, Iven Kelleher, who explained how their spirit was traditional, with fruity elements, but with cereal and biscuit notes not normally associated with the category (there is loads of great nerdy distillation info in the piece so it is well worth a read). So WCD got the SMWS seal of approval, despite the relative youth of the spirit. It showed a confidence on the part of WCD and a willingness to show the whisky world what they are about.

John O’Connell of WCD speaking at the Cork launch of their new whiskeys in the Shelbourne bar.

The second sign that changes are afoot in Skibb is that West Cork Distillers now has a marketing department, headed up by Sinéad Gilbert, who spent 12 years with Irish Distillers Limited, most recently as their global marketing manager. The Clonakilty native joined WCD at the start of September and has much to work with – a great story, considerable amounts of mature, varied stock, and that wonderful west Cork aura.

Aside from all this, there is also the fact that WCD are booming – according to this piece by Seán Pollock in the Indo, in 2021, WCD reported pre-tax profit of more than €4.5m, up from €1.3m the previous year. So they are in rude health, despite missing out on one of the biggest Irish whiskey brands in the last four years. Recent court filings between MMA fighter Anton Lobov and his former friend and business partner Conor McGregor over the profits from the Proper No. Twelve whiskey brand revealed that Lobov initially worked out a supply contract with WCD, and that the Notorious whiskey branded bottle McGregor brandished at the Floyd Mayweather post-fight press conference was entirely produced by WCD.

My favorite picture I snapped tonight.

Who wants a drink of Notorious Irish Whiskey with #ConorMcGregor? 🥃 pic.twitter.com/Oj88KhN3PB
— Peter Stringer (@peterstringer) August 27, 2017

Per the Indo, under the deal Lobov had worked out, McGregor would retain 100pc ownership of the brand and the company incorporated to sell the whiskey, with profits split on a 50/50 basis with the distiller. No investment capital was required. Lobov claims that shortly after the launch, he was sidelined in the project, the source distillery was changed to Bushmills (the grain element which allegedly makes up the bulk of P12 comes from Midleton), and ultimately McGregor went on to launch the fastest growing Irish whiskey brand in the world, and was then bought out by the parent firm in a deal worth millions. So an opportunity missed for WCD, or a bullet dodged, depending on your own particular views.

Off the back of all this comes two new whiskeys from WCD; one a five-year-old single pot still bottled at 43%, aged in first-fill ex-bourbon casks, composed of a mash ratio of 66:33 malted versus unmalted barley. The first distillation was completed in the ‘Rocket’, WCD’s pot still designed and built by the team in West Cork from an old boiler from a hotel. It is known to be the ‘fastest pot still in the world’ – although I’m not sure their new marketing team will be keen to push that message out when slowing food and drink production down is the ethos of the day. On that note however, the second and third distillation is slowed down so much that a second intermediate still was added along with a second spirit still.

The second release is a seven-year-old single malt, again given the same distillation treatment in the Rocket et al, then matured in Bodega Olorosso casks from the Tolerina Rodriguez bodega in Cadiz, Spain for four years and further aged in first fill bourbon barrels for three years. Bottled at 46%, and again both are non-chill filtered and natural colour. And a final very crucial point: there is a recommended retail price of €49.99 for the pot still and €55 for the single malt. In Irish whiskey, those prices are outliers.

After milling my way through both bottles I can say that I favour the malt; the Cork Whiskey Society who had a tasting with WCD pre-launch seemed to prefer the pot still. At the RRPs you could buy both for a whisper over a hundred. I would write a review but given that I own nine casks of WCD (four malt, four SPS and one grain) it really does feel like a conflict of interest. This isn’t a pump and dump scheme.

However, if you are in the market for a festive tipple or you are looking for something for the whiskey lover in your life, these bottles are affordable, boldly age-stated whiskeys from a distillery that seems to be finding its voice.
Resurrection Man

November 30th, 2022
In Cork Airport’s duty free there is a large screen showing adverts for Midleton distillery’s single pot still collection. The smooth-talking gent hosting the videos lavishes the Cork whiskeys with praise, and assures us that Midleton’s single pot still collection is the ultimate expression of the art.

In the decade since those videos were created, their host Peter Mulryan has had something of a change of heart. The author, producer, and presenter may have been the face of Midleton’s single pot still whiskey in 2012, but in the years since he has become one of the most vocal critics of what he sees as Irish Distillers Limited’s reformation of the definition of single pot still. He could have spent his time criticising from the sidelines, using the skills he honed in his decades working in the media to gradually force change. But instead of words, he chose action (and also words, but mainly action).

Mulryan put his money – and the money of his investors – where his mouth was and chased his dream of being a distiller. He chucked in his job with Ireland’s national broadcaster and opened a distillery – first in a lock-up in a rural industrial estate in west Waterford, then expanding to a converted hardware store in the sleepy village of Ballyduff a few miles away. It turned out that Mulryan and his team – several of whom worked on those single pot still videos with him – were quite good at distilling, as the Blackwater Distillery spirits have won multiple awards. The team are also quite good at business, as they landed massive supply contracts with supermarket giant Aldi. But Mulryan never softened his tone about the technical file, the State document which lays down the laws on Irish whiskey, and specifically, how to make single pot still (SPS) Irish whiskey.

Having written five books on Irish whiskey, Mulryan was well placed to point out what he saw as inaccuracies in the technical file, saying that he could find no historic mashbills which complied with the document’s requirement that the mash for SPS must contain a minimum of 30% malted barley and a minimum of 30% unmalted barley, with up to 5% of other cereals such as oats and rye added if required.

Writing on his distillery’s blog, Mulryan seethed about Midleton’s SPS whiskeys: “The official Redbreast website is even more confident: ‘this is the traditional way of making Irish whiskey since the 1800s.’ Except of course it’s all a load of horse manure. These whiskeys are not a reflection of anything, except perhaps corporate sleight of hand and a lack of oversight. If truth be told, the ‘tradition’ being celebrated here goes all the way back not to the nineteenth century but to October 2014.”

In numerous posts he used the phrase stolen heritage, gushed about traditional single pot still whiskey and its wild and varied mashbills, and worked with whiskey historians Fionnán O’Connor, Charlie Roche, and Will Murphy in digging up as many as he could. Mulryan then set about proving that SPS – the old, bold SPS as opposed to what he framed as the more modern, corporate IDL version (which he gives fair credit to as an excellent whiskey, it should be noted) – was a viable commercial product rather than a dusty relic reflective of palates now long dead. In a post on New Year’s Day 2020 he explained how between February and September 2019 they distilled more than 100 different SPS mashbills, the majority traced back to a specific distillery, date, or both, from 1824 to 1955. The recipes came from ‘just after the 1823 Excise Act (the foundation of the modern industry)’, right through the Victorian Irish whiskey boom.

“We’ve distilled outliers featuring 40% wheat, and 38% oat, but mostly that range of ‘other grains’ settled comfortably in the 20% – 25% band, with oat being predominant. All mash bills contained barley and malt, and all featured either oats, wheat and rye. Some have all five elements. However, not one of these real single pot still mashbills is compliant with the current Technical File. That’s not how we planned it, it’s just one of those awkward facts,” he wrote.

If this seems like a lot of work, you might well be right, as Mulryan added: “We could have spent 2019 churning out single malt, or compliant SPS, but we chose not to. As a result we only ran at close to 50% capacity. It was an expensive exercise, but we can now safely say there isn’t another distillery in the country/world that has dug into the SPS category as deeply as we have.”

Alongside the SPS missives were posts about their use of heritage grains, oats and green malt, along with pieces slamming a lack of transparency in Irish whiskey and an overabundance of brands built on sourced liquid – “We have the talent, but are downing in a sea of tribute acts” he wrote. Mulryan then went on to release a sourced whiskey named Velvet Cap (preceded by The Retronaut, a sourced, one-off 117-bottle release), along with procuring sourced whiskey stock for Aldi which was released under their Púca range. Ironically, for all Mulryan’s enthusiasm for clarity around sourced whiskey, this press release from Aldi doesn’t exactly make it crystal clear that Blackwater did not make the whiskey (the Blackwater online store, however, is clear on Velvet Cap being sourced).

But Blackwater’s main business was always making, not sourcing. During the pandemic they started a taster’s club where they experimented with spirits and flavour, sending out packs to fans with new spirits in each. They continued to win awards, and the technical file – once seen as the stone tablets of Irish whiskey – is about to be reopened for edits and adjustments, a move welcomed by Mulryan.

Much like their county neighbours Waterford Distillery, Blackwater have used a lot of highfalutin words like terroir, provenance, and grand cru (even their slogans are similar – Waterford’s motto is ‘where barley is king’ while Blackwater have ‘let the grain reign’). They both like a bit of sabre-rattling at ‘the big guys’ (neither are exactly little guys), and both have a lot of raw attitude. Mulryan’s jousting in the media even went so far as to claim that, unlike many others, he wasn’t in the whiskey business to make loads of money, something which may come as a shock to his investors.

All of this brings us to Blackwater’s first whisky (sic, natch), which comes to us burdened with great promise and even greater expectations. With typical bombast, the new releases come with a huge amount of detail on the liquid, but also have a hardback pamphlet titled A Manifesto For Irish Pot Still Whisky. Per the press release:

The Manifesto release is limited to just 1,000 numbered boxes, each containing 4 x 200ml single cask Irish whiskies. (Priced €250 & Delivery). Inspired by mash bills (recipes) from 1838, 1893, 1908 and 1915, this is a unique opportunity to taste the whiskies enjoyed by previous generations. Each one is different, representing a distinct time and a place. The whiskies in this Manifesto release cannot be labelled as pot still Irish whisky, nor can there be any allusion to it on the label; even though historically that’s exactly what these four whiskies were.

The four samples – and my notes on them – are:
- Dirtgrain Irish Whisky, Mash Bill #38 – 40% Laureate Barley, 40% Costello Wheat, 20% Gangway + Laureate. Aged in Apple Brandy Cask. 47.1% ABV – this one packs a punch. I drank these out of sequence – ie, I went by number rather than the layout here – and this one hit hard, big wallop of flavour, presumably from the cask. Raises the issues about using different casks in these samples – what is creating the different profiles here, the grain or the wood? Maybe the mashbills would shine most at new make stage?
- Dirtgrain Irish Whisky, Mash Bill #93 – 46% Laureate Barley, 35% Gangway + Laureate, 15% Husky Oat, 4% Peated Laurate Malt. Aged in Sherry Cask. 43.1% ABV – deepest colour of the four, sherry cask, mashbill from 1893, and a bit o’ peat, always an extra string to the bow of a young whisky. Mulryan makes the case that age does not always equate with quality, but I think a lot of people selling young whisky would make similar claims. I do think there is a cut off point beyond which whisky, like the rest of us, becomes a little less vibrant, but I think the youngest age for decent whiskies that I have had is about six years old.
- Dirtgrain Irish Whisky, Mash Bill #08 – 50% Gangway + Laureate Malt, 35% Laureate Barley, 15% Husky Oat. Aged in Bourbon Cask. 45.3% ABV – a light gold colour, the palest of the lot, it slithers out of the test tube like syrup. A startling viscosity. Citrus, candied orange peel, Juicy Fruits. Reminds me of a young Aultmore I have, despite the mashbill. Good youth, no rawness – but not a long finish.
- Dirtgrain Irish Whisky, Mash Bill #15 – 40% Laureate Barley, 30% Gangway + Laureate, 15% Husky Oat, 12% Costello Wheat, 3% Performer Rye. Aged in Rye Cask. 44.2% ABV – nose hard to dig out, palate also taking a while to present. Official notes say orange blossom and dark chocolate; for me there is more that malty flavour from dog biscuits – don’t pretend you’ve never eaten one. Rye cask here so a pop of spice. Pleasant if a little nondescript.
So what to make of this – I like the moxy. I like the manifesto and I’ve put it to the testo, and while the whisky is young, all hold promise. But that isn’t the same as saying that you should run out and buy this. But I’m not a whiskey nerd – I like the stuff, and I love tasting these whiskies, but this is not aimed at fairweather friends of Irish whiskey like me. The full Dirtgrain package is €250, featuring four 20cl bottles of the samples above, along with Mulryan’s mashbill Necromicon, and can be purchased now. There will be another batch next year, and the year after, and after that Blackwater will transition to more traditional releases. A taste of the past, that looks to the future.

New in!

An exciting release from @BlackDistillery that shines the spotlight on how grain, not the cask, can shape a whiskey. The manifesto box is all about recapturing whiskies lost to time.

€250 | https://t.co/YUHk2IRmhE pic.twitter.com/ZpSB5JGNtr
— Celtic Whiskey Shop (@Celticwhiskey) November 30, 2022
Lights, Camera, Macallan

November 26th, 2022

I like a The. Many of my blog posts are given titles with a ‘the’ randomly thrown in at the start, because I think it adds gravitas. In reality it makes everything I write sound like pompous waffle; The Glorious Now, The Pathfinder, The Slow Cut, The Quiet Corner. Scroll through this blog and you will be greeted with an array of bombastic titles opening on a The. Obviously enough I like a The in whisky too. There is a swagger to a The in a brand name – but it’s really something that needs to be earned. I’m not sure The Bells works. Maybe if they got Quasimodo in as brand ambassador.

The Macallan are the epitome of superlux – the Chanel of whisky, a magic brand that operates in a sphere beyond this mortal realm. While us chuds and morlocks bicker about whether a hundred quid is too much to spend on a whisky, The Macallan is selling random fusions of liquid and crystal art for tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds. Veblen goods or emperor’s new clothes, you decide, but they pull all of it off with confidence and style. Which makes their latest creation a little odd.

Everyone loves Four Weddings And A Funeral. Pre-fall fop king Hugh Grant, Andie McDowell not knowing if it’s still raining despite being absolutely drenched in the stuff, all the other very white and upper middle class characters whose names I cannot recall. A large part of its success is down to the wonderful direction by Mike Newell, who has a relatively low-key career despite bagging a Harry Potter and managing to coerce one of the most subtle on-screen performances from Al Pacino in Donnie Brasco (by subtle I mean not screaming about asses).

But Newell’s latest gig is a curious one indeed, as he has directed a short film/long ad for The Macallan. I wasn’t expecting it to be a bold visionary statement – Newell’s most recent big-screen venture was 2018’s painfully nondescriptThe Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – but I thought that the The Macallan might push the envelope a little. Reader, the envelope remains unpushed.

The mercifully short film is a mishmash of Monarch Of The Glen and a sort of tweed-clad Downton Abbey. Starring Emily Mortimer (who once starred in a little known Irish film called Last Of The High Kings opposite a then relatively unknown Jared Leto) in the lead role, the film tells the tale of how The Macallan became one of the first female-led distilleries in Scotland. Per the press release:

Janet Harbinson, known as ‘Nettie’ is a remarkable figure in The Macallan’s history. In 1918, just months before the end of the First World War, her beloved husband Alexander, who had been running the distillery at the time, sadly passed. Nettie was highly committed to the local community and following his death, she assumed control of the distillery as it was the best way to secure The Macallan for its employees and help the community.

Without setting out to do so, she also crafted The Macallan Fine & Rare 1926, which achieved legendary status after it fetched $1.9M at Sotheby’s in 2019. Several years on, it continues to be the world’s most valuable bottle of wine or spirit ever sold at auction.

Thanks for that Nettie, great job. I would suggest that whoever masterminded The Macallan becoming the key superlux whisky brand in the world probably deserves more credit, but that’s just my own begrudgery (great piece on how they did that here).

The film is striking because of its blandness – it feels painfully beige. Maybe having their wings clipped by the UK’s advertising standards authority over their deliriously pretentious Icarus ad – which looked like a pastiche ripped right from Zoolander – left them shook, but I doubt it. Everything about their operation – from the Tellytubby wonderland of their distillery to their presumably ironic grasping hands reaching around The Reach – says that safe isn’t normally part of their lexicon.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film is that the script was written by award-winning screenwriter Allan Scott, whose Hollywood hits include Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Don’t Look Now, Castaway and the excellent Netflix series, The Queen’s Gambit. The mindlowing part is this: Allan Scott is the pen name of Allan Shiach – a former chairman of The Macallan and great nephew of Nettie Harbinson. So you have someone who has helped craft some genuinely incredible work (Don’t Look Now for the love of Christ!) and is also so well connected to The Macallan that you would have to assume that they would be able to get something really remarkable over the line, and yet we end up with a short film that looks and feels – as one wag put it to me via DM – ‘like a fucking Hovis ad’.

Of course, I am looking at all this through the prism of Irish whiskey – a few years back I asked where is our Macallan. I don’t think we have an answer to that question just yet, although Midleton’s Silent Distillery releases were a good foray into the space of ultralux, super-rare whiskey. Ultimately Midleton’s strength – being the home of multiple styles and multiple brands in one very modern industrial setting – might also be its weakness in this instance; beyond the stocks from old Midleton, why pay €50,000 for a whiskey from the new distillery when you could buy a bottle of Jameson for €30? Maybe you can split the beams and have a superlux offering from the same place that creates so many mid range brands, but I don’t see it. I assume Bushmills is the one to watch – with oodles of heritage (not quite the four centuries they claim, but at least two) and a focus on one product – single malt – they should be ripe for it. The Bushmills, anyone? Perhaps some day we could even see a short film directed by time-obsessed auteur Christopher Nolan about why a distillery built in the late 1700s thinks it was built in 1608, but until then we will have to rely on our Scottish neighbours to lead the way in audiovisual self-indulgence. And in the meantime, here’s this:

Living on Milk and Alcohol 🧐🥴🤢#revenge #goats #goatsmilk #whisky #dispute #funny #fpl #laugh #animals #drfeelgood pic.twitter.com/EwtdGh5RPk
— Scott's Irish Whisky (@WhiskyScotts) November 19, 2022
My Fellow Scarabaeinae…

November 8th, 2022
Whisky has been good to me. From the first time I wrote about it in a newspaper almost ten years ago, I have been on many amazing junkets at home and abroad, and I have been sent many bottles and a continuous supply of samples. This isn’t humblebragging, but it’s important to note that while I don’t work in the industry, I kinda work with it (or against it, depending on who you ask). I am whisky-biz-adjacent; think of me as one of those feeder fish, swimming alongside a whale and nibbling at parasites on its skin, or perhaps some sort of dung beetle. In short, I have my place in the ecosystem.

I reside in a hinterland, like most whiskey bloggers, coughing up the odd post and getting the odd freebie, but getting no closer than that. But even that role comes with a certain amount of responsibility. Nobody is sending me samples, bottles, or off on jollies because of my shining personality. They do it because they want coverage, and this behaviour is really nothing new. When I worked in a newspaper we were inundated with gifts, junkets, books, concert tickets. I have a very clear recollection of declining a four-day, all expenses paid trip to an electronic music festival in Copenhagen (The Bug was headlining!) as I simply couldn’t be bothered. That is how entitled and spoiled we were. So when we think about entitled social media influencers swanning around like they are demigods, please be assured that they are simply the latest iteration of a very old tradition. Influence used to be held by entities such as publishers, now it is held by individuals, and it’s a lot harder to enforce rules when you are dealing with multiple entities across multiple platforms in multiple markets. But hey, you gotta try, especially where booze is concerned.

The International Alliance for Responsible Drinking (IARD) is the body which oversees and decides the rules for influencer marketing in spirits. Last year they released the Influencer Guiding Principles – five specific rules that apply to any content involving influencers who work with beer, wine, and spirits producers. Of course the first task here is to figure out what is meant by working with and what is working for, along with what an actual influencer is. The IARD has a handy definition:

An influencer is an independent third-party endorser who shapes audience attitudes through blogs, posts, tweets, and the use of other social media including game streaming platforms.

I would suggest that this definition is so vague that it technically encompasses everyone with a social media account, or 99% of the people on the internet. Endorsing is what we do when we share our opinions on things – doesn’t matter if it’s a restaurant, a whisky, a politician. In my own definition, an influencer is at its lowest level, someone who got something for free because of their profile. Anything from that benefit-in-kind benchmark onwards is what I would call an influencer. That doesn’t narrow it down much from ‘everyone on the internet’ but it is headed in the right direction, as the IARD definition of influencer marketing draws a line between those offering thoughts or opinions on a product they paid for and those who either got it for free or are being paid in some way:

Influencer posts are considered marketing (instead of user generated content) when the influencer has received compensation through financial remuneration or there has been some form of editorial control by the advertisers (European Advertising Standards Alliance (EASA) definition).

So it’s not technically influencer marketing to get a bottle of whisky for free, but is it when the firm offers some form of editorial control – which again is a little vague. Is sending through the press release about the bottle editorial control, is saying ‘we hope you like it’? There are simple and gentle acts of persuasion that could fall under the banner of ‘editorial control’. I presume they mean a more formal, concrete version, like ‘share this at this time with this caption please’. But it goes to show that influencer marketing is only going to get bigger.

The IARD’s five guiding principles (to which the Irish Whiskey Association and the Scotch Whisky Association have both signed up). They are:

1. Where available, all paid influencers must use age-affirmation mechanisms on digital platforms to prevent minors from seeing this content. Age-affirmation mechanisms on posts has not yet been adopted by all platforms and IARD members will continue to advocate for effective age-gating mechanisms on sites used by influencers. When utilizing those platforms where age-affirmation mechanisms for influencers are not yet effective, paid influencers should be aged at least 25 years and primarily appeal to audiences above the legal purchase age.

2. Influencers used in the digital marketing and advertising of alcohol should be vetted and, to the best of the producer’s knowledge, should have no reputational association with harmful use of alcohol, and should not feature posts that would not be compliant with the standards around irresponsible drinking behaviors outlined in our alcohol marketing codes.

3. For paid content, all influencers should have a written agreement with the beer, wine, and spirits brand or its agency, signed by both parties.

This should include:

a) Information linking to legal requirements relevant to national or regional context, or both

b) Disclosure guidelines – asking influencers to clearly and conspicuously disclose their link to the brand so that it is clearly presented as marketing content

c) Responsibility guidelines – asking the influencer to comply with the company’s responsible marketing code including ensuring that content does not condone or encourage illegal behavior or excessive consumption

d) Best-practice tools for influencers when engaging on social media platforms, for example, information on branded content pages and details on how to age restrict their posts

e) Feedback mechanisms so that influencers can flag any engagement or issues around responsible drinking with an agency or brand

For content featuring gifted products, influencers should be provided with clear terms of engagement that include disclosure guidelines and a requirement to follow the company’s responsible marketing code.

4. Influencer posts must be monitored by brands or their agencies for compliance and the influencer should fix or remove them within 72 hours if they are not compliant. If the influencer does not address issues within 72 hours of notification, or repeatedly posts non-compliant material, then we will reassess our relationship with them.

5. Brands should regularly audit and monitor campaigns for compliance.

And my typically incoherent thoughts on each:
1. Age gates – so a booze-based OnlyFans then? Honestly, how is anyone supposed to ensure no kids see the content – it’s the internet, if you want to protect our blessed innocents, maybe don’t let them online in the first place. I have four kids and the least of my worries is that they will be exposed to influencer-led alcohol marketing. There is a wild west out there and children are seeing things they never should, and, no, I’m not talking about Shit London Guinness. As for age gates, I have repetitive strain injury from clicking boxes to assure various sites that yes I am old enough to drink, and then some. Do we really think a 14-year-old is going to go elsewhere when confronted with one? Or will they giddily click through to The Forbidden Zone Of Delight that is the corporate page of a global drinks giant?
  
  As for influencers trying to focus their appeal on those above the legal drinking age, the clearest example of this notion gone wild is in what happened to the late, great Scotch Trooper, who took beautiful photos of Star Wars figures and bottles of scotch and landed himself in hot water for it. I would make the case that when it comes to using Star Wars figures in your booze content, you will mostly appeal to middle aged Comic Book Guys like me rather than my kids, who are all busy playing Fortnite.
1. Vetting influencers, best of luck with that. Maybe whoever owns Proper Number Twelve could do the same for their influencer in chief.
1. Contracts would be great and I assume that for larger campaigns involving serious celebrities/influencers, they are de rigeur. However, much of what I am concerned with here is the nano-influencer who has less than ten thousand followers on their social media channels, but creates high-value, highly targeted content. Should they get a contract and presumably a non-disclosure agreement with every free bottle they get sent? Certainly the bottles I receive never come with clear terms and conditions, nor do they appear to be in any way transactional. But I think most whiskey lovers know what’s up when they get a bottle/sample – you need to mention it somehow, and the brand would be very hopeful that this mention would be positive. Perhaps that is what differentiates influencer marketing with someone like me being sent a bottle – there are no guarantees that I, or any other blogger, will say anything nice about it.
1. Would a post, even one laden with errors, be of any relevance after 72 hours up? Is there any point in correcting it? If the influencer was big enough, the post will already have achieved millions of impressions in that time. And who is meant to contact them to tell them to edit the post? PR firms – who I assume do a lot of the influencer outreach/management stuff for drinks brands – won’t want to piss off the bigger accounts. It really smacks of self regulation, a system which has worked so well in the financial markets worldwide.
1. ‘It’s on you guys’.
If I could write rules for low-level whisky influencers it would be this – if you got it for free, say so. I just don’t think anyone can judge a product with absolute clarity and honesty when they didn’t pay for it. I look back on some whiskeys I have reviewed where I got the bottle for free and in retrospect I was too gentle on something that really didn’t deserve it. Why? I would say it was less about staying in with a brand and more about not wanting to be an ungrateful twat. Either way it was misguided. More recent reviews of free bottles have been a little less delicate about their failings, which really is as it should be.

Not paying for the whiskey you are reviewing is a crucial context and the one that applies to most of the whiskey folks that get labeled as influencers. It’s also important to just say thanks to whoever sent it to you, which is what I do when I get free stuff.

If you are being paid actual money to promote the whiskey than you need to clarify that you are, in fact, the same as a guy on the street wearing a sandwich board advertising a golf sale down a side street. We all gotta hustle but there’s a big difference between saying you like a product and literally working for the brand – although an obvious caveat here is that I don’t know of anyone who was paid to post anything about a whiskey, nor do I know anyone with a big enough following to even warrant that approach. Most of us are just happy dung beetles, just lovin’ life rolling our free balls of poop to a hole in the ground.
The Pathfinder

November 8th, 2022

The Cliffs of Moher as seen from the sea.

Why Ireland? Why would anyone want to holiday here? It’s overpriced, it’s wet, it’s miserable. The roads are in shite, the WiFi sucks, there’s nothing on TV. Why would anyone want to visit us at all? And yet, they do, in their hundreds of thousands, every year (bar pandemics). But among that vast throng, there is an increasing number who come here for a very specific purpose – whiskey. There are guided whiskey tours, but there is an increasing number of people who come here on self-guided trips; who will travel around the island visiting the distilleries and producers they want to. As Irish whiskey tourism is still in a relative infancy, we need to ask what works and what doesn’t for these visitors. So, taking the smallest sample possible – one person – ask is what I did.

According to a DNA test, North Carolina resident Hank Barnes is only 8% Irish, but he says it’s the 8% that matters most. His wife Connie, however, is firmly Irish American, with her family names being Doyle and O’Neill. The couple love Irish pubs (friends of theirs own one in Waxhaw NC named Mary O’Neills, if you’re ever in the area) and in 2014 they decided to holiday in Ireland. During that trip, Hank asked a bartender what whiskey he should drink, and was given a Redbreast. On his way home from that trip he bought five bottles of Irish whiskey from the Celtic Whiskey Shop. That was the start of a consuming passion.

As for what it was about Irish whiskey that appealed to him, it had less to do with flavour profiles and more to do with its status as a relative underdog: “I think what got me into Irish over others was that I like to be a contrarian (with boundaries). I don’t pick the well-known brands (for the most part); I look for things that are cool and different.”

The trips to Ireland have become an annual event for the couple, often with tickets to see an All-Ireland thrown in as they are both sports mad (they met playing volleyball and are avid fans of The Carolina Hurricanes). So while whiskey was a part of their trips to Ireland, it was not the sole motivation for them, as Hank explains: “While this trip was designed around whiskey, it was not a whiskey trip. My wife loves the people, but she is not a whiskey drinker (she’ll taste and sample but that is not her thing – Malibu Rum or Irish Cream is).”

While whiskey tilted the compass on this trip, they were also keen to take in the sights, as Hank explains: “I think it would be as interesting to highlight the other things you can do around distilleries. For our trip, we probably spent less than 10 hours of it focused solely on whiskey (not counting all our pub time). They were some of the best parts, but the Cliffs (Sliabh Liag, Moher, and Kilkee) might have been even better. We also met some interesting people and even had a sheep farmer back my car up about ¼ kilometre on a narrow road so he could get a truck and trailer full of sheep past – then we could continue our trip to a waterfall.”

Connie on Cliffs pic.twitter.com/rR1tRcb09f
— Hank Barnes (@Barnes_Hank) September 25, 2022

When planning on where to visit, social media played a role – during the pandemic Hank started sharing whiskeys, picking up more bottles, and tweeting about it all. He started chatting online with some brand owners, connections cemented with real world interactions at Whiskey Live Dublin in June. As a consultant with Gartner, Hank travels to Dublin often, so when a meeting in the capitol was scheduled for September, he planned his whiskey journey around that.

“I asked Connie, “You ready for another trip?” And it went from there. The start of planning was that we needed to visit Sliabh Liag, JJ Corry, and WD O’Connell (if the timing worked for them). We also wanted to go places we hadn’t been before. We also planned a few stops along the way to break up the driving. We had never been to Donegal (it was amazing) so that was the start. Sligo seemed like a good place for a night. We then went to Lahinch (after the Cliffs), a night (somewhat disappointing) in Shannon, and then Clonakilty. We added them to the list because I love their whiskey and their brewery collaborations.

“We also stopped in Kinsale for a few hours. I’m in the Blacks Brewery and Distillery Founders Club so that was a good idea. We ended in Dungarvan to see Daithí O’Connell and team before heading back to Dublin for a night or two before heading home.”

Friends, Cliffs. And Waterfalls…some of our memories on our last day pic.twitter.com/PlbdEDYgQ1
— Hank Barnes (@Barnes_Hank) September 24, 2022

Anyone familiar with a map of the Republic of Ireland will note that they pretty much hit all corners, from the far northwest to the deep southeast, with numerous hostelries in between – so how was the Irish whiskey representation in pubs and restaurants?

“Mixed. There are some places that are great – Darkey Kelly’s in Dublin, The Sky and The Ground in Wexford, Thomas Connolly in Sligo – but others were a mixed bag. Most of the pubs in smaller towns had a very limited selection and not many from their local distillers, merchants, or bonders. Hard to gauge awareness of staff, as I have too much awareness, but I was definitely (and hopefully not annoyingly) sharing that with others, trying to get them to try the local options.”

As for the idea of a whiskey tourism guide, one which covers all whiskey offerings, pubs, historical sites, distilleries, Hank says there is space for a single point of information for it all: “I think there is a spot for a more unified guide. You get some from Irish Whiskey Magazine (and their site) — Serghios reached out to me on Twitter and we ended up spending some time together talking whiskey; that was a great thing in Dublin. You get some info from Barry Chandler and the stuff he is doing around the Stories and Sips Club, which I am a member of. The Irish Whiskey Society of the USA has some too. But it is all over and you have to know and remember where to look.”

As for the idea of Ireland as a rip-off destination, it is an undeserved title, says Hank: “With the dollar versus the euro, no issues with prices. Lodging in Dublin was a challenge to find a reasonable place (it was worse for the work part of this trip), but we did.”

So what advice would Hank give to a whiskey fan coming here?

“First, make sure your trip is not all about whiskey. There is so much more to Ireland. But for the whiskey parts, go to some of the unexpected places. If you are hardcore, try to get to know the people behind it before you go. James at Sliabh Liag basically gave us a personal tour. The JJ Corry experience was minus Louise, but Caroline and Eric were fantastic. Daithí made time for me and we were his first visitors at his new place (and I stole a brief amount of time on his rowing machine so I could say I rowed in a rackhouse).

“Second, I’d recommend a car. You can explore so much more. We discovered Mahon Falls by accident when we had a little extra time.

“Third, what I really learned is how much work the whiskey business is. We see the end product and the external presentation (including standard tours). Those support the business, but aren’t the business. For our special visits, I left with a great appreciation and a concern that I had interrupted their work and made more work for them — hopefully we did not out stay our welcome. Keep that in mind as founders and teams are sharing their time with you.”

The experience of the Barnes may not be typical of every whiskey tourist who comes here, but therein lies the challenge for the Irish tourism board – how do you cater to people who look at a map with 42 points all across it and then randomly join them, criscrossing back and forth? How do you build a coherent package to whiskey lovers who want to explore Ireland as well as Irish whiskey? Do you highlight places of interest between all these producers, do you map whiskey pubs, what defines a whiskey pub? Ireland isn’t Campbelltown, Islay, or even Speyside – our whiskey producers all over the country (aside from four big guns in Dublin city – Pearse Lyons, Teeling, Roe & Co, and Dublin Liberties) and many don’t do tours per se, although many welcome fans like the Barnes. Perhaps a single unified guide isn’t needed, given that there is no single archetype for Irish whiskey lovers. But in the years ahead, if all goes according to plan and our glorious resurrection continues, we will need to think about how we map Ireland for whiskey lovers.
The Slow Cut

November 6th, 2022

A bust of Sir Henry Morton Stanley sits beneath a portrait of Daniel O’Connell.

Sir Henry Morton Stanley had quite the life. Born into poverty in 1841, he became a journalist, explorer, soldier, author and politician, before dying at the relatively young age of 63. He is possibly best known for the utterance ‘Dr Livingstone I presume?’ at the climax of his search for the Scottish explorer David Livingstone, but there is another, darker event from his time in Africa that is less well known.

Stanley led the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, one of the last major European expeditions into the interior of Africa in the 19th Century. It became notorious for the deaths of so many of its members and the trail of disease left in its wake, but there was one especially grim event for which it is best known. An Irish naturist named James Sligo Jameson – scion of the whiskey empire; son of Andrew Jameson, and grandson of John Jameson – refused to believe cannibalism took place within the tribe they were staying with. He called their bluff by handing six handkerchiefs over to a member of the party who said they would arrange it. But it wasn’t a bluff.

What happened next became a significant scandal in Victorian society. The Emin Pasha expedition struggled onwards after the incident, but Jameson never made it home – he succumbed to blackwater fever and died in what is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1888 aged just 31. Little wonder that Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness was partly inspired by the Emin Pasha expedition, with its exploration of human cruelty, imperialism and what civilisation actually looks like.

I am standing in the tremendously civilised drawing room of Lakeview House in County Kerry, staring at a bust of Sir Henry Morton Stanley sat atop a sideboard. Maurice O’Connell, whose home it is, is explaining that the famous explorer was godparent to a forebear of his wife, Francesca. It seems like a fortuitous connection given that it is whiskey that brought me there. But this is a place, a family, with many stories to tell, although very few of them are as soaked in blood and whiskey.

Sir Maurice and Lady Francesca O’Connell outside Lakeview House.

Everyone who has been through the Irish education system knows the name of Daniel O’Connell. The Liberator, as O’Connell is known, and after which Maurice O’Connell’s whiskey is named, was a thorn in the side of the British establishment as he fought for Catholic emancipation (he also denounced slavery in the US and met with Frederick Douglass in Dublin) in the 1800s.

This isn’t the first time that Daniel O’Connell’s name has been linked to a drinks brand – his son Daniel Jr started a brewery and released O’Connell’s Ale, which The Liberator hoped would overtake Guinness, an ascendancy family who he despised, describing Arthur Guinness as a ‘miserable old apostate’. But Daniel Snr was not a pintman, which might explain his closeness to the Powers family, specifically Sir John Power of the famed John’s Lane Distillery (Power laid one of the foundation stones in Glasnevin Cemetery for the O’Connell Monument). In a curious counterpoint to Francesca O’Connell’s link to the European expeditions in what was then the Belgian Congo, Daniel O’Connell was held in such high esteem by the people of Belgium for his support of their drive for independence, that after they became independent of the Netherlands there was a movement to have O’Connell installed on the throne. Instead, the Belgian people installed Leopold, whose son, Leopold II laid claim to the African nation and whose grotesque abuses there were enabled by the likes of Sir Henry Morton Stanley.

Maurice O’Connell is a great great great grandnephew of Daniel O’Connell. There is a lengthy history of the family on the Wayward website which shows that when they weren’t fighting for equal rights for the Irish, the O’Connells were smuggling booze and defying various authorities. Wayward as they were, they still managed to land themselves a baronetship, meaning Maurice O’Connell’s full title is Sir Maurice James Donagh MacCarthy Patrick O’Connell, 7th Baronet, and hereditary Lord of the Manor of Ballycarbery Castle. It’s a weighty title but one he wears lightly – he is an aristocrat with a small a, and says the title has closed as many doors as it has opened for him.

Lakeview is just one of the ancestral homes of the O’Connell clan – they also resided in Ballycarbery Castle near Cahersiveen in the 1600s, before moving to Waterville. Derrynane House became the family seat and over the centuries was expanded significantly. It now resides in the hands of the Office of Public Works. Lakeview is, by comparison, a compact and bijou residence but its setting is equally spectacular. Passing through the bustling village of Fossa you would hardly know it is there, but at the end of a long tree-lined driveway the house sits beside Lough Leane, the largest of the Great Lakes Of Killarney. If you are looking for a hideaway, this would be the place (FYI – you can rent it at certain times of the year for €12,000 a week).

Lough Leane as seen from Lakeview House.

There is a lengthy profile in the Irish Independent of both the house and its owners which details some of the family’s more recent history: The eldest of six, Sir Maurice grew up in Lakeview and his parents farmed the 100 acres that make up the estate. Educated first in Kerry, Maurice then went to boarding school in Scotland (there is a faint Caledonian air in the accent still) before attending Ampleforth, one of the top private Catholic boarding schools in the UK. There his business acumen started to show itself as he was briefly suspended from school for running a clandestine taxi service ferrying school chums to and from the local pub.

After graduation, he focussed on property investment in the UK, displaying a keen eye for areas ripe for gentrification. As for the whiskey enterprise, he had been looking for a project to keep him busy when he was in Ireland (he also resides in the UK). A seed was planted when he purchased a pub mirror advertising O’Connell and O’Flynn Galway Bay Irish Distillery in an antique store 20 years ago. It later transpired that no such distillery ever existed – the brand was dreamed up by a firm that made pub mirrors for Irish bars. A cynic might say that hypothetical distilleries have been the foundations of many modern Irish whiskey success stories, but O’Connell wanted to build a brand with foundations that would withstand the test of time. This was about legacy as much as enterprise. In 2016 plans for a distillery were briefly considered – they had the barley, they had the story, but the estate was not big enough to create a solely single estate whiskey distillery. There would need to be more to the business.

There are two strands to Wayward thus far – 300-year-old stone buildings (a well-travelled great-uncle named them The Houses Of Contentment, a codeword for brothel in Asia) to the rear of Lakeview have been converted into whiskey warehouses with space for blending and bottling (one of the blenders he uses is John ‘five regions’ McDougall of Worts, Worms, and Washbacks fame). This is where The Liberator brand releases are born. Mature whiskeys are being aged, blended, and bottled here, and those have made up the releases thus far.

O’Connell explains the make-up of some of them: “The Port ‘n’ Peat is a blend similar to our core Liberator Small Batch Double Port (42% malt in tawny and 58% grain of which half was finished in ruby port casks) with the malt element increased with the addition of 5% peated malt (Great Northern Distillery’s very tasty 2016). We’d been playing with using the peat to highlight the port finish and 5% was the sweet spot where neither overpowered the other. The batches were essentially the same group of casks.”

As for their later Storehouse Special, the Malt x Moscatel: “This was a 56% cask strength six-year-old double distilled malt from Great Northern finished in really fresh moscatel sherry (not wine) casks for seven months. I got a bottle of the exceptional sherry last year and had to buy the casks.”

A cask maturing at Lakeview.

Alongside this, Lakeview Estate’s own barley has been harvested and distilled at Dr John Teeling’s Great Northern Distillery, casked and returned to Lakeview to mature. These will be specifically marketed as Lakeview whiskeys. There are plans for a boutique distillery within the Houses Of Contentment, but that will come down the road (2024 is the provisional ETA). For now the output consists of sourced matured stocks, while in the background are new-make pot still and malt that they commissioned from seven distilleries around Ireland, the contract distilling at GND of homegrown barley, and a lot of emphasis on the impact of terroir from both the sky and the ground.

I am a microclimate sceptic. I don’t tend to subscribe to the notion that a warehouse in Location A will produce a very different whiskey from a warehouse in Location B – unless those locations are wildly different points on the globe (eg, Kentucky versus Cork). Perhaps there is a difference in maturation between the warehouses of Bushmills and those of Midleton but I narrow the eyes when I hear claims of microclimates within provinces creating points of difference between whiskeys.

O’Connell is a staunch advocate of the microclimate, claiming as he does that the unique location of Lakeview offers a climate not enjoyed by other parts of Kerry (worth noting that as far back as 2012, Dingle also worked the microclimate angle when discussing maturation). However, if you were to make a claim of microclimate in any part of Ireland, the south west is where you would do it – with the highest mountain range in Ireland greeting the North Atlantic Drift, Kerry is a prime spot for pockets of unseasonably warm, humid weather (and enthusiastic levels of rainfall).

Sir Maurice breaks down the sample he sent me: “The Lakeview Single Estate Whiskey sample you have was distilled by Great Northern Distillery on 12th March 2019 to our 50/50 mashbill, using barley grown in our Hilly Field and harvested on 28/29 August 2018. The barley was delivered to Athgarrett Malt the next day and small batch malted in January. Some 23 casks were filled that first year, initially into first fill bourbons. After three months, most was transferred into NEOC casks [New Era Oak Cask is a proprietary cask type from ASC Cooperage in France] – Premier Cru Bordeaux casks that have been hand shaved and retoasted.

“They returned to our storehouse to rest. We felt the nose needed something so 10% was finished in an ex-peated malt cask for three months. We’ve been cutting this to bottling strength (46%) over six months compared to our usual six weeks but still shorter than the two-plus years in Cognac where the tradition originated. This will be released as a 250-bottle Coming of Age Release priced at €195.”

Wince all you like at that price, but most of the upcoming releases are already spoken for by those who tried it at Whiskey Live Dublin back in June – so there are many out there who are willing to pay. O’Connell realises that this young whiskey is a work in progress: “I’m being careful to say that I don’t feel that this is the final product (my view is that some more time in the cask will make it the exceptional whiskey it can be) but we wanted to release some now to start a conversation about whether where a spirit is matured – ‘maturation terroir’ for want of a better phrase – affects ageing. It obviously does for extremes but I believe our Kerry microclimate does too and we’re putting this release out there to see if others agree that this tastes beyond its age and beyond other three-year-old pot still releases. “

“We’ve been measuring our temperature and humidity for the last four years and attached [above] is a graph for the last two showing we have a ‘maturation season’ (defined loosely as less than seven degrees celcius from which spirit interacts with wood) of 10.5 months versus six months in Speyside, for example, together with high humidity. In addition, the ‘four seasons in an hour’ Killarney weather, from the collision of Gulf Stream, mountains and lakes, equates to frequent changes in pressure governing spirit/wood interaction.”

Sir Maurice O’Connell with his new whiskey.

The bottle design was inspired by a bottle of D’Orsay perfume that had sat in Lakeview House for decades, and while it may not win favour with mixologists looking to slap it into a speed rail, it’s an elegant first release. The liquid feels older than its years, but smooth and flavoursome. Fresh notes of fennel bulb and light citrus make way for velvet aniseed, coffee, figs, and dark fruits. It’s good, new, fresh. We can argue about why that is – is it the slow cut, is it that Lakeview grows great barley, that GND make great whiskey, good wood, microclimate, or all of the above – but in the end it is meaningless because it passes the only test that really matters. It tastes good.

As for the Jameson connection to Sir Henry Morton Stanley, it doesn’t seem to bother the current custodians of the world’s biggest Irish whiskey brand, as they held a massive party in Lakeview’s Hilly Field recently. Perhaps the relationaship would change should Wayward whiskey start to cannibalise their market, but until then there is peace in the Kingdom.

Delighted to offer our barley planted Hilly Field as the #venue for this awesome event by our friends @jamesonwhiskey – their US guests were suitably #wowed by the vision of @NineyardsEvents the place and by #Kerry. #events #location #DMC #Killarney pic.twitter.com/KOAM91SUAt
— Wayward Irish Spirits (@wayward_irish) September 20, 2022

_{Blended and bottled on the Estate at 46% ABV, just 300 numbered bottles of the Lakeview Single Estate Irish Whiskey Coming of Age Release are available from Celtic Whiskey Dublin, James Fox Dublin, Carry Out Killarney and Irish Malts. RRP is €195 with a 40ml miniature bottle included.}
To Those Who Wait

May 20th, 2022
The dancefloor of Auntie Annie’s indie club in Belfast seems like an unlikely setting for the start of a Northern Irish distilling success story, but it was there in 2006 where David Armstrong and Fiona Boyd first locked eyes. David, an aerospace engineer, and Fiona, a property surveyor, connected immediately over their shared love for all things food and drink, but it was Fiona who dreamed of starting a distillery, as David explains: “The idea for the distillery belongs wholly to Fiona. Fiona had been reading about the lost distilleries of Ireland, I think it was the Townsend book, around the time her family took on Rademon Estate and at that time she had mentioned to her father about building a distillery. He immediately dismissed the idea, told her she was crazy and to keep doing what she knew.

“But Fiona, just like her father [Northern Ireland property developer Frank Boyd], knows her mind and some years later when we got married in 2011 we both knew we wanted to own and manage our own business. We are both so passionate about food and drink, the food scene on the island of Ireland and, locally for us in County Down, is world class. Ideally, we would have loved a vineyard in France but as we live in County Down and not Bordeaux, Fiona again suggested a distillery and I naively said yes.

“From 2011 to 2013 during every holiday and weekend we travelled the world doing distilling classes and visiting distilleries; we ordered our first still in January 2013, it arrived summer 2013, then we undertook recipe development whilst continuing in our day jobs, eventually we both left our jobs in 2014 and we launched Shortcross Gin in April 2014, so we celebrated eight years as a distillery this April.”

If that makes it all sound easy, it isn’t; while many distilleries built on the island of Ireland in the past decade use sourced stock as a revenue generator, Rademon opted not to.

“To be honest, if you asked me in 2014 to go out and source an Irish whiskey I don’t feel I would have been the right person to do it. We always believed that you need to learn your trade, this is important for me personally having served an apprenticeship, so we focused on learning how to make and understand our own whiskey in the first instance. We are at heart a craft distillery – we only sell what we produce, and that is an important ethos for us.”

Fortunate then that their gin was such a success, winning multiple awards and spreading out to sizable markets such as the US and Canada. The distillery even produced a special limited edition gin with a royal touch – Hillsborough Castle and Gardens Shortcross edition features rose petals handpicked from Queen Elizabeth II’s Granville Rose Garden at Hillsborough Castle – the queen’s official residence in Northern Ireland. Shortcross is also the official gin of Royal Down Racecourse (Fiona’s mother Rose is well known in equestrian circles as the co-owner of the legendary Hurricane Fly).

But their gins aren’t simply a money-spinnner for Rademon while they wait for the whiskey to mature.

“Gin has become a byword by the media as a means to an end for new distilleries, we would love to invite those people to come and work at the distillery for the day to see the effort that goes into creating Shortcross Gin. We love gin and to make a great gin you need to be passionate about it.

“The skills we have learnt from gin have been key to creating our whiskey, namely the ability to nose and taste flavours and put them all together.”

As the gin became a success in its own right, they started to look into making whiskey.

“In 2014 we were in the US and visiting distilleries when we had the realisation that to grow the distillery we would need to look at other categories. Now, one thing about both of us is that we believe you should only make what you love, and over the previous two years I had started to get into whiskey, particularly malt whiskey, following a tasting of Connemara Turf Mór at Belfast International Airport. That tasting blew my mind and I was determined that we should make malt whiskey and with that, some with plenty of smoke too. We began distilling whiskey in our 450-litre copper pot still in 2015 and filled our first casks in August 2015 and continue to do so today.”

The inaugural Rademon Estate Distillery whiskey was released late last year – Shortcross Irish Whiskey, a double-distilled, five-year-old single malt, matured fully in Grand Cru Classe Bordeaux Red Wine casks before being finished in chinquapin oak – the first time this cask combination was used in Irish whiskey. It takes a patient person to wait to the five-year mark when it could legally be sold at three, but David felt it was worth it (and there was the small matter of a global pandemic).

“If Covid hadn’t arrived, we would have done something in 2020 but having the space to let things mature a little longer has allowed us to craft a release we can really be proud of. Personally, we thought the five-year mark, well actually it’s almost six years, was a good point to release this. The balance was just there in the whiskey and we knew it was good, so Fiona and I knew it was the right time to go for it. You have to believe in yourself and the liquid, bringing together the joy of seven years’ hard work of getting to this huge moment in time of releasing your very own whiskey.”

Obviously there was a lot of excitement for whiskey lovers – this was a release that was a long time coming – and then it won Best New Irish Whiskey at the Irish Whiskey Awards last year.

“To win the award was mind blowing. I was also known to have shed a tear that evening, it was the culmination of seven years hard work to put our very own Shortcross whiskey out there, that I single handedly worked on from mashing in, fermenting, distilling and filling the casks. We entered the awards without anyone having tasted it or giving us a nod that we were on the right path. We were overwhelmed by the positive response and support we received following the award.”

But along with the giddy highs, there was the reaction to the price – stg£300 – in the whiskey community.

“There was a small collective of negativity on social media, that just did not give up and became so vitriolic. I don’t think you could ever please these people and that says more about them than it does about us. Our first ever release was a small, limited release of less than 700 bottles, 656 in total. Two casks. It was a momentous and historic moment, Shortcross was the first Irish whiskey to be wholly distilled and released by a new Irish whiskey distillery in Northern Ireland since the 1920s and the first new Irish whiskey to be released outside of the Old Bushmills Distillery since the closure of Old Comber and Coleraine distilleries. It breaks the chain of Bushmills-only releases and that is something really important in the rebirth of the industry in Northern Ireland.”

But while the first release was limited and had a pricetag to reflect that, their next release is both affordable, available, and intriguing, as David explains.

“We like to do things a little differently so our second release is something completely different – Shortcross Rye & Malt Irish Whiskey. This coincided with a couple of things that happened in 2017 and then ultimately ended up with us visiting rye whiskey distilleries in Maryland, which is the birthplace of American Rye whiskey.

“When we got back to the distillery we began to explore how we could create a rye-influenced Irish whiskey, after many iterations and failings along the way we found that the best way for what we wanted to achieve this was to use malted rye rather than raw rye to amplify the fruit notes and tame the spice.

“The whiskey starts life with a mash bill of 30% to 50% malted rye and the remainder malted barley. The wash is fermented for 140 to 160 hours, allowing time for a secondary fermentation to kick in. This helps create flavour from the very start of the process, through distillation and on to maturation. We then double distil the spirit on our 450L and 1,750L copper pot stills, with the 450L being one of the smallest stills used for whiskey on the island of Ireland.

“For maturation we used a combination of first fill ex-bourbon casks and also virgin chinkapin oak casks, which create rich flavours of fudge, stem ginger and spice.

“It’s a great whiskey and one we are seriously proud of. We can’t wait now to see it in the wild and in the hands of whiskey drinkers.”

Thanks to the generosity of Rademon, a bottle of it is now in the hands of this whiskey drinker. So what to think: All of the above, nutmeg, spice, hints of mace and whispers of aniseed; heather and manuka honey. Sweet, smooth, spicy. For a first release it holds excellent promise, although that is probably damning it with faint praise. But it is an important whiskey, for all the historic and cultural reasons listed above.

There are distilleries all over the island of Ireland that get a lot of attention – some spend a fortune on PR, some are controversial, some are just loud. There are others who are quiet. This, for me, has been part of the intrigue with Rademon – a distillery that is just quietly working away, with no fuss. The fact they never released a sourced whiskey just adds to their mystique; no resurrected brand from the days of yore, no press releases spoofing on about heritage, just a distillery quietly making gin and whiskey – new, fresh, interesting. The fact they opted to release a rye and malt whiskey as their first widely available release shows a confidence – they also have a peated 50PPM whiskey so they don’t seem overly concerned with creating a potentially polarising product.

The rye and malt more than lives up to my expectations – it’s an interesting, easy drinker, but more importantly it is something new; this isn’t some murkily rebranded West Cork Distillers/Great Northern/Bushmills/Cooley whiskey that somehow, no matter the finish, always tastes more or less the same. This is a new sensation – a new Irish whiskey, a new Northern Irish whiskey, and one that was worth the wait.
- Rademon Estate Distillery’s Shortcross Rye & Malt Whiskey is available from their webshop – 46%, non-chill filtered and all natural colour, it is priced at stg£65.
Prologues and epilogues

March 29th, 2022

“We have always been storytellers” – Kevin Keenan, Glendalough Distillery co-founder.

Glendalough Distillery is one of the success stories of the Irish whiskey resurgence. Founded in 2011 by a group of friends, their prominence in the media came from a combination of being early adopters of an exciting new trend and some high profile investors. One could also say that the business’s proximity to the Dublin media bubble helped (along with the team’s own media savvy), but their brand and their story was always strong – little wonder, given that several of the founders worked in branding, marketing, and advertising for some heavy hitters like Tullamore DEW and Jameson (another two of the founders were data analysts for Davy Stockbrokers). But beyond the brand, and the narrative, I knew little of Glendalough, but here is what I do know:

Founded in 2011, they didn’t start distilling until 2013 when they made their first gin (which means they are far from being Ireland’s oldest craft distillery – Longueville House was making apple brandy in 1985). They distilled some whiskey in 2015 before the technical file outlawed bringing in the wash from elsewhere. Also, one factoid that always stayed with me was that all of the founders happened to have the same favourite monk.

I’ve never been clear about the rest of the Glendalough story, despite co-founder Brian Fagan getting in touch in 2018 to explain a bit about where they were in their journey. He told me that they bought a site on Glendalough Green in 2016 and were considering their options about what size and style of distillery to build there. He said that they would have planning in place by the end of that year, but that in the meantime they were ordering more Holstein stills and would be distilling whiskey from their current site (an industrial estate in Newtownmountkennedy) by autumn 2018. In January 2019 Fagan emailed to say their new stills were in situ and were waiting to be commissioned, and that he would give me an update on their plans that I could feature on my blog. I haven’t heard from him since, but then 2019 was something of a momentous year for the firm so maybe it slipped his mind.

Canadian drinks firm Mark Anthony Brands invested €5.5 million in Glendalough in 2016, and then, in 2019, they bought out the rest of the company, giving shareholders a €12 million euro windfall. Brian Fagan moved on and started another drinks firm into which rugby legend Brian O’Driscoll again ploughed some money, so when I was sent a bottle of the new Glendalough seven-year-old single malt finished in a Mizunara cask, I asked the PR firm for that long overdue update. Firstly, I asked where they were on the planned purpose-built whiskey distillery which had been a feature of their soundbites for more than a decade. This was their response:

“In line with the continued growth in our gin and whiskey portfolio, our ambition remains to develop a new brand home for Glendalough. Plans are progressing well.”

Eagle-eyed readers will note the word distillery does not feature there. And while plans for whatever a ‘brand home’ constitutes may be progressing well, a quick search on the Wicklow County Council planning website shows there have been no plans submitted by Glendalough Distillery or Mark Anthony Brands for either a distillery, or a brand home, or anything, ever.

I also asked them about their distillations of whiskey in the past, and what amount they were distilling now – ie, casks per week – and what age the oldest stock they have of their own whiskey. This was the response:

“We set up whiskey stills a number of years ago, and have ambitious plans for our own liquid. Watch this space…but it takes time and we are patient.”

Again, a swerve. Setting up whiskey stills and distilling whiskey are not the same thing. From that response I can only assume they never actually got around to distilling whiskey after their initial attempts in 2015. Even the BBC Good Food website seems confused about Glendalough, saying in February of this year that their distillery was still being commissioned.

I also asked what percentage of the whiskey sold under the Glendalough Distillery brand worldwide was actually distilled in Glendalough distillery, and if there was a plan to phase out sourced stock, and if so, when would that happen. This was their response:

“While we continue to distil our award winning gins in Wicklow directly, our Single Malts, Single Grain and Single Pot Still are currently distilled elsewhere in Ireland to Glendalough’s specification. We are happy to be transparent about that and this is stated on our back labels. As mentioned above, we have our own whiskey liquid in the works. We plan to continue to source stocks while waiting on our own whiskey, distilled in Glendalough Distillery in the future. Between now and then, we will continue our relentless search to find the world’s best, rarest, most flavoursome oak to age and finish our whiskeys.”

Frankly, I am no wiser as to what the Glendalough brand is – indie bottler? NDP? ‘Brand’? Their pot still release from a couple of years back was meant to be the start of a transition to their own stock – the reason it’s not single pot still is they hoped to blend their own with it over time. I’m going to assume that transition never happened.

As for their claim about how the sourcing of their whiskey is clearly stated on the labels, this is what they were talking about:

Squint hard, gentle reader, and you will see that it does indeed say ‘produced for Glendalough Distillery’ in there among the jumble of info that nobody ever reads. But another thing I noticed about the bottle is that it no longer has Glendalough Distillery embossed on the glass.

A screenshot of the Glendalough whiskey webshop showing the new bottle without the words Glendalough Distillery printed on the glass.

Perhaps this is a sign that they are preparing to transition from aspirational whiskey distillers to a simple whiskey brand. Nothing wrong with that, and I’m not saying the founders are the boys who cried distillery but it does feel like a can was kicked far past the point of reason. I can tolerate whiskey being sold under the brand of a planned distillery, but only for so long. There comes a point where I expect you to piss or get off the pot still, and that point was several years ago.

As for the whiskey within – I had a bottle of the old Glendalough seven a few years back and it was a cracker – very similar to the cask strength Whistler Blue Note. But this Mizunara finished one is a completely different animal – I’m going to assume a different distillery was the source for this. It’s good, odd, not sure I’d be racing out to get myself any other whiskey anointed by the famously awkward Mizunara wood, but it’s a pleasant diversion. A similar price point to the Athru I reviewed recently and I would favour that over this, despite my preference for age statements over NAS. The packaging here is beautiful, but as I said at the start, the branding was always solid – although the Gandalf-esque image of St Kevin is, in fact, crap. A shame really, given that he was their favourite monk.
The Augurs Of Spring

February 25th, 2022

Many years ago, someone in the whiskey business told me that Green Spot sold well with women. I brought it up with one of the production team in Midleton, and they explained that this was a result of the flavour profile. Then I brought it up with one of their marketing team, and their explanation was more straightforward: It sells well with women because it looks like a bottle of wine. You may well bristle at both opinions, or you may believe that it is a grim truism – many products, including food and drink, are marketed to people based on gender. (You may also correctly note that I used this story many times to illustrate the same point). Whiskey was solely aimed at men for decades, so the conundrum the industry has been battling for the last 20 years is how to shift that focus.

Back in 2019, the then CEO of Chivas Brothers Jean Christophe Coutures gave an interview to MarketWatch about how more women were drinking whiskey. Coutures, in reference to the Glenlivet Founder’s Reserve and its success with women, had this to say:

“It has a more approachable taste, a smooth, creamy sweetness with delicate flavors that doesn’t have the same edge often found in whiskey. We’ve also made the packaging easier to understand and priced it at entry level. More women keep returning.”

At the time I found it hard to believe, so I contacted one of the journalists who wrote the piece to make sure the quote was correct. He confirmed that it was. Giving Coutures the benefit of the doubt, English is not his first language. Perhaps he was trying to say that the success of Founder’s Reserve was not that it was dumbed down for women, but that it was dumbed down for everyone. Whiskies like Founder’s Reserve (affordable NAS single malts) are probably everyone’s first port of call when moving beyond blends, and that applies to both men and women. But Coutures’s comments were still a god-awful clanger.

So the question now is – how do you encourage diversity among whiskey consumers? I have no idea. I’ll leave that to the marketeers. But events the one held this week at Powerscourt Distillery are a good start. I’ll let the press release take it from here:

The ancient Irish feast of Imbolc (Spring) was celebrated in style at The Powerscourt Distillery on Friday 18th February. The first day of Imbolc coincides with Brigid’s Day, and the celebration at the Powerscourt Distillery used the occasion to celebrate the connections between Brigid and her associations with Brewing/Farming/Dairying/Nature and Hospitality.

Guests were welcomed with a cocktail called Brigid’s Cloak. Named after the legendary cloak laid down by Brigid as she claimed lands from the King of Leinster, it was based on the classic Manhattan. Reflecting Brigid’s reputation as an Irish woman ahead of her time, it was made using Fercullen Irish Whiskey and Irish ingredients made by female producers, with vermouth from Valentia Island Vermouth and bitters from Beara Bitters.

Following a drinks reception, Caroline Gardiner, Head of Marketing at Powerscourt Distillery, introduced the two panel discussions chaired by broadcaster Suzanne Campbell and curated by the Food and Beverage Specialist at the Distillery, Santina Kennedy.

The first panel incorporated guests with associations with Imbolc and Brigid to highlight and celebrate the occasion. Imbolc literally means ‘in belly’ meaning in the ewe’s belly – signifying springtime/lactating ewes/ spring lambs – so it was appropriate that the first panellist was Hanna Finlay from Ballyhubbock farm in West Wicklow, producer of sheep’s dairy ice cream and cheese. Storm Eunice prevented Hanna from driving over the Wicklow Gap to join the panel in person, but she was able to participate in the lively conversation via video link.

Hanna was joined by Judith Boyle, Brewer and Beer Lecturer at TU Dublin who shared funny anecdotes about growing up in Kildare – the home of St Brigid as well as her experience as a female brewer; Rosanna Goswell from Tuath Glass who gave a fascinating insight into her Irish Whiskey Glass , which was named after Tuath De Dannan – the family of the Goddess Brigid.

Also on the panel was Brigid O’Hora – the sommelier who brought insights into modern Irish Wine appreciation gleaned from her online wine training platform – Brideys Wine Chats . Being a ‘Brigid’ from Co Kildare who is the mother of triplets there was no shortage of associations with the Patron Saint of fertility!

The panel was completed with Alex Slazenger, Head Gardener at Powerscourt Estate who captivated the audience with the history and legacy of the gardens at Powerscourt and his plans to continue his grandparents pioneering work to create a sustainable garden of outstanding beauty.

The second panel discussed the ‘Taste of Place’ . Powerscourt Distillery celebrates its location throughout its offering – from the water from Powerscourt Waterfall that is used to make its whiskey, to the barley in the surrounding fields to the use of local produce in its cocktails and food pairing tours and tastings.

To celebrate this idea of Irish terroir, panellists included Orla Snook O’Carrroll of Valentia Island Vermouth, Ireland’s first vermouth which is made using botanicals from Kerry; Orla was joined by Celina Stephenson of Wicklow Way Wines. Their Móinéir wine is made using only Irish berry fruit, capturing the taste of Irish summer. The idea of capturing a taste of place was explained by Geraldine Kavanagh , professional forager for Glendalough Gin, who kept the audience really entertained as she described trying to explain her occupation to a bank manager. She brought a handmade willow basket of foraged treasures from the Wicklow mountains, describing how she used the botanicals to be distilled into seasonal gins. Olly Nolan, the beekeeper behind Olly’s Honey described how the honey from the hives at the distillery captures the taste of Powerscourt, from the wild hedgerows around the estate and the variety of flowers in the world renowned gardens. This panel was completed by Mary O’Sullivan who described setting up her Bitters during the pandemic. A botanist who grew up on an organic farm in Co Kerry, Mary really evoked a sense of capturing the magic of flowers and plants to achieve a taste of a place.

Guests were then treated to a Powerscourt Distillery Whiskey and Food Pairing experience. Head of Whiskey John Cashman enthralled the audience with his introduction to Irish whiskey and detailed guided tastings. Santina Kennedy, who organised the event, led the guided food pairings . Using her research into Irish Food History taken as part of her MA in Gastronomy and Food Studies, she has developed a unique whiskey and food pairing experience. She uses only high quality Irish food produce whose taste, texture and story mirrors the various expressions of Fercullen Irish Whiskey. Under Santina’s guidance The Powerscourt Distillery champions locally produced high quality Irish food as part of the overall offering.

A cake by Kate O’Hora of @thecake_table captured the essence of Imbolc and Brigid, with delicate spring flowers and a flowing edible cloak.

Powerscourt Distillery’s Imbolc celebration will become an annual event, with a bigger and even more exciting day being planned for 2023.

Press release endeth – unsurprisingly there was no mention of the recent, startling departure of their master distiller Noel Sweeney, or the departure not long before that of backer and MD Alex Peirce. These are strange times for Powerscourt Distillery – former C&C CEO Maurice Pratt joined the board before Christmas, presumably to steady the ship, but without Perice – whose family are involved in Isle of Arran Distillery and Lagg Distillery – and Cooley legend Sweeney, their identity – to my mind at least – has taken a setback. Events like their Imbolc gathering are good because it is uncommon – a female focussed hosted by a whiskey distillery. Hopefully others will follow their lead.

Some photos from the event:
Let Thy Widows Trust In Me

October 31st, 2021

Theodosia Wingfield lived a sad, short life. Born in Wicklow in 1800, her people were gentleman landowners, and were part of a small community of families of means in the area who all shared a deep piety. After her beloved cousin Francis Theodosia Bligh died at the age of 25, Theodosia married her widower – Richard Wingfield, 5th Viscount Powerscourt, thus becoming the Viscountess Powerscourt. He died a year later. Their only child, a daughter, died in infancy. A month after her husband’s death, Theodosia wrote: “I do not suppose there could be a stronger lesson on the vanity of everything earthly, than to look at me last year, and this. The prospects of happiness I seemed to set out with! And now, where are they?”

But her faith was only strengthened by all the tragedy – in 1829 she hosted the first of the Powerscourt Conferences, when the faithful gathered to discuss prophecy, specifically, the return of the Lord. The conferences were not of the mind that His return would be a thing of peace, love, and understanding – this was not to be the groovy Christ of the New Testament. The conferences deduced that Jesus was coming, and that right soon, to smite a world riddled with sin. There was to be an apocalypse and only the pious would survive. On New Year’s Eve, 1836, Theodosia died, and was buried at Powerscourt.

Powerscourt, like many of the great houses, began as a medieval castle, but in 1730 German-born architect Richard Castle oversaw its redesign as a 68-room mansion in the Palladian style. In 1961 the Slazenger family – they of sports brand fame – bought the property and its lands from the 9th Viscount Powerscourt. In 1974, as the house was undergoing a major refurbishment, a fire broke out and destroyed much of the top floors and the roof. In 1996 it reopened in the form we see today. In more recent years it became a fully fledged lifestyle emporium and tourist trap, hosting more than 300,000 visitors a year.

I wonder how Theodosia would feel about her home, the site of all those deep discussions about a holy apocalypse and the smiting of the wicked, being turned into a shopping centre, albeit a very upmarket one. Within the main part of the house there are various emporiums selling hand-crafted candles and woolen goods, local art, and artisanal foodstuffs. I imagine that if some part of her still resides there, that she drifts through the scented beeswax candles and ethical smoked salmon with her mouth locked wide in an unheard scream, wishing she could take a physical form so she could cast them all out. Perhaps this was the apocalypse she envisioned, albeit in a hyper-localised, slightly ironic form. But the great houses were made great by their lands, and those lands are no more, so needs must. Aristocrat or peasant, in this economy, you gotta shake it to make it.

Powerscourt Distillery is solid. It is backed by the people behind Isle Of Arran and Lagg distilleries, Mentec mogul Mike Peirce and his son Alex, and boasts one of the legends of Irish whiskey as master distiller – Cooley still-jockey Noel Sweeney. The only bump in the road for them was their branding. Early in their development they received correspondence from Irish Distillers Limited suggesting that there might be confusion over a Powerscourt branded whiskey and IDL’s own Powers. Bemused as I am about Big Whiskey worrying about any confusion over labels in a landscape beset with deranged claims about provenance, I can see their point. Powers and Powerscourt are close and unless you have a fair degree of local knowledge it would be hard to say with certainty that these are two completely different entities. This isn’t a uniquely Irish situation – in 1994 Knockdhu distillery rebranded its whisky as anCnoc to avoid confusion with the produce of Knockando distillery. But that such an iconic Irish brand as Powerscourt had to lose give up its claim to its own name is incredibly depressing. However, small mercies have seen them allowed at least to continue with Powerscourt Distillery as the overarching brand, and Fercullen as the primary identity. There is a lengthy explanation of the meaning behind Fercullen but I won’t go into it here because, to be blunt, it isn’t very interesting. Powerscourt is where the stories are. The place has a pet cemetery for Christ’s sake. That should be the branding for a series of single casks in itself.

All of the releases thus far are sourced, obviously enough, since they only started production in 2019. I’m going to assume the source was Cooley, given that this is where their master distiller made his name and that it’s entirely possible he left there with a few casks rolling around in the back of the van. They have quite the selection of whiskey on the market already – core 18 and 14 year old single malts, a ten year old single grain and a blend. In the limited editions they have a 16YO SM, two Five Elements – the 20YO SM I was sent and an 18YO SM – and the Estate Series ‘Mill House’ single grain with an Amarone cask finish. So they’re not short of supply.

I was gifted a sample of the 20YO SM Five Elements 2021. This is made up of 16-year-old bourbon barrel matured malt whiskey which has been finished for four years in a variety of Oloroso sherry, Pedro Ximenez, Marsala and Muscatel casks, before marrying with together with 20-year-old bourbon matured single malt. Bottled at 46% ABV, non-chill filled, Fercullen Five Elements 20-year-old Limited Edition is available online at www.PowerscourtDistillery.com and at selected off-licences around the country. RRP for this edition, limited to 1,500 bottles, is €220.

Official tasting notes

Nose: Malt, citrus, boiled sweets, vanilla and honey with a twist of lemon, ripe fruits, plums, raisins, cinnamon, tropical fruits, pineapple, mango, banana, oak and a hint of nuttiness.

Taste: Layer upon layer of smooth silky sweet malt, Orange, fruit cocktail, chocolate, Christmas cake, tropical fruit and red grape skins. Waves of complexity and taste.

Finish: Long lasting sweetness from ripe fruits and cream with a velvet texture almost mouth-watering to finish. Long lasting sweetness from ripe fruits and cream produce a velvety texture and mouth-watering finish.

Is it any good? Yes it is, and so it should be at that price. Perhaps this is justified by the limited nature of the release, but to be honest I wouldn’t expect a bargain-bucket pricetag on a whiskey with the name of one of the great houses of Ireland attached to it. Theodosia might be screaming through the halls in the dark watches of the night, but at least there are spirits flowing in Powerscourt once more.

Click here to read more about Theodosia or here to read my take on Powerscourt Distillery after the launch back in 2018.
The Workhorse

September 27th, 2021
Daithí O’Connell is in the rare position of being an Irish person who aspires to ending up in a workhouse. As one of the few bona fide independent bottlers here, his business is not only thriving, but is expanding – and now he wants to give his brand a physical home, in a historic building once used to accommodate the destitute during Ireland’s hardest years.

Two years on since we last spoke, much has happened – his Bill Phil peated whiskey sourced from Great Northern is in its fifth iteration, and he has pivoted from being an aspiring Irish whiskey bottler to announcing his intention to bottle five Scotch whiskies – one from each of the so-called whisky regions, starting with a 10-year-old Bruichladdich Lochindaal.

“The Caledonian series has four more regions to see a bottle and complete the initial set, before we can start being able to bottle Scotch ad hoc,” he told me via email.

“I have my eyes on all major whisky regions plus some other spirits and wines I would like to add which compliment our business model and tie the story together.”

And just as Gordon and Macphail and Cadenhead have a physical presence you can visit, O’Connell wants a home for his brand.

“Our new headquarters will be at The Workhouse in Kilmacthomas, Co. Waterford, and I’m delighted to say we have a 25-year lease agreed. We will be the single largest tenant on the site with over 25,000 square feet of space plus ancillary parking and access. We will develop the site over three phases and will start phase one in September with equipment landing in October and November.”

Specifying that tourism is not his priority – despite its ideal location along the Waterford Greenway – maturation, blending and bottling will all be brought in house. But tourism will surely be a component, as aside from the benefit of having all that history and heritage on-site, O’Connell will also be neighbours with Aidan Mehigan’s Gortinore Distillery when it gets up and running, making this one of the few places outside of Dublin where two significant whiskey attractions will be within walking distance of each other.

But whiskey is a challenging business, and despite his extensive background in the corporate world, I asked him what three things he has learned since getting into the category.
1. “While whiskey maturation might be a slow process the business itself is a lot more fast paced and demanding than I imagined in these early days.
1. “My position controlling as much of the process as you can is essential, I guessed it would be but I now know it is for fact.
1. “Route to market is paramount.”
But on that last note, he appears to be doing well: “We just launched in Germany, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg and will be launching in South Africa and the US in October. It’s going to be a busy time for us with those and the new brand home so I decided we should do some contract distilling also after we just harvested our first crop of barley.”

He is also one of a group of smaller producers who came together as a kind of indie Irish Whiskey Association, under the name The Irish Whiskey Guild. I asked him what they hoped to achieve: “We will represent our members on items our members request to be represented on. We are currently preparing a submission for the DAFM on the Irish whiskey technical file. We will also be working with Bord Bia on items. There is opportunity for commercial cooperation also so all this will happen over time. We are all volunteers who run our own businesses so things move a little slower.

“I can’t speak for other members of the guild as to why they do or don’t join the IWA. We do have some members who are in both and we see no issue as to why the two can’t work side by side. I do know that IBEC membership fees are off putting for some.

“Our common goal is the betterment of the Irish whiskey industry. The benefits are that we are essentially a self help group for small producers. We have very different issues than the bigger players and can help each other out by transfer of knowledge and cooperation. We can also lobby for change and have our voice heard as a unified group.

“We pay a flat €100 per annum membership sub that is to be used for administrative costs. There are two membership levels. Full and associate. Associates-are allowed sit in on meetings, part take in events etc and express opinions however they have no voting rights. Each full member has a single vote.

“Full membership is based on your status as a whiskey producer. Have a distillery that definitely distills whiskey or have whiskey in market plus your own bond or a bonded tenancy in place. Each membership application is taken on a case by case basis.”

O’Connell is refreshingly honest about the business he is in and how capital thirsty it is: When I asked what the biggest obstacle to getting into the industry was, he was blunt:

“Money is essential. Double what you think you need and then double it again.”

So just like when pouring a dram, it’s always best to make it a double.
Death Is Not The End

September 21st, 2021

Not far from where I live there is a big, old house. Built in the late 1800s, it is a crumbling gothic pile that was once the seat of local nobles. I have no idea when the last of their line left it, or how, but from the time my family moved to the area in the 1970s, the house was known to be cursed. Locals in what was then a hyper-Catholic rural area said that a previous owner hanged himself from one of the trees that lined the avenue into the property, and that was what damned it.

I was scared of it when I was a child – it sits on a steep hill and I used to sprint up the road to get away from the entrance as fast as I could. In the bad winter of 2010, my father’s car went into a tailspin on the hill outside the house and his car smashed into a bridge. A few feet more it would have ended up in the Dungourney river and he would most likely have died. He said once, half joking, that the house was to blame.

I was only in the property once, when my mother went to visit the woman of the house, who at the time was dying of cancer. I remember an old, dusty bedroom with thick air, a gaunt woman sat up in bed, and a little girl playing a piano in the corner of the room. The girl and I were sent off to play. She brought me down to show me the decrepit fountain outside – dozens of froglets had spawned, but the water level was too low for them to get out, and they just moved about in a swarm in the shallow, stale water, trying to escape.

The mother died shortly after. The family then moved to a renovated barn next door. Not long after that, the father died. The kids, two boys and a girl, moved away to be raised by relatives. The girl burned to death in a freak accident in her 20s. I heard one of the sons drowned but never had it confirmed. The other brother, I don’t know where he is.

The house sat idle for years, silent and empty, waiting. Eventually it sold, and with great fanfare it was renovated by the people who bought it and is now a B&B. Sometimes I get tourists calling to my home looking for it and I often feel like the hillbilly gas station attendant in a horror film, and wonder if I should warn them about what they are heading into. It’s cursed, I would whisper, and they would ignore me and some horror would befall them.

Of course, the real reason I want to tell them is because I like telling the story of the cursed house. I told my kids, with all the grand flourishes above, and they also now think the place is haunted. Everyone likes a scary story. They bring the promise that there is something else; that death is not the end, that we persist, rather than burn out, and be forgotten. And besides, I am always here for something a little darker. I’d go full goth in my attire if it wasn’t such a stupid look for a guy pushing 50. Nobody wants to dress like Danzig when they’re doing the big shop in Lidl.

To cater for the needs of emo seniors like me, Bushmills released The Sexton. It is a very slick, very stylish bottle; hexagonal to represent the columns of the Giant’s Causeway, all bedecked with images of skulls and ye olde fonts in gold and black. As affordable NAS single malts go, this is a remarkably beautiful bottle. I’m not sure about the website’s tagline of ‘You have a single life, drink a single malt’, but it’s not my place to tell them their copywriter needs to spend a little less time in the sun.

The Sexton has two brand narratives; for the casual fan, there is the overall steampunk, Victoriana, eldritch aesthetic. Brand ambassadors can waffle on about how sextons were the people who tended to the graveyards in the days of yore, spin some yarn like I did above.

If they are speaking to drinks nerds, they can change lanes and give them the unromantic, unadorned facts of The Sexton – a youngish four-year-old single malt from Bushmills aged exclusively in Oloroso sherry casks from the Antonio Paez Lobato family in Jerez, it retails for a reasonable 35-40 euro. It fills a gap – it’s not Black Bush, nor is it the ten (which you can pick up for a similar price) but it is a stepping stone for those who perhaps are drawn to its visual appeal.

Bushmills obviously put a lot of weight behind this brand as they appointed Alex Thomas as master blender to the brand (Helen Mulholland is the master blender of Bushmills). Thomas previously worked in a lumber merchants for ten years before taking a role as distilling coordinator at Bushmills, followed by five years as maturation manager before her current role. I don’t understand the strategy of giving one brand within a distillery’s family its own blender but perhaps there are plans to expand the range. It’s an enjoyable whiskey that comes with a lot of recommendations about cocktails; it is accessible and very affordable, and rapidly became the top selling Irish single malt in America after its launch in 2017. After sponsoring a nighttime photography competition and releasing a podcast of grim retellings of bedtime stories, The Sexton also recently doubled down on its commitment to all things dark by becoming the official drink of The Walking Dead.

There is a buzz about Bushmills in the last couple of years that is hard to ignore – massive expansions, a huge grain plant, super premium and super mature releases as well as The Sexton or the expansion of their broad array of blends. Their parent firm also bought out the rest of their contract with a Famous Irish Sportsperson, thus placing themselves a little bit further out from his blast radius. All this shows that in Becle, Bushmills appears to have found an owner that is willing to invest in it as others failed to do, and that the giant of Antrim is finally stirring. All it took was the right owner – after all, there is no such thing as curses.
Bad Timing

September 15th, 2021
I did not like La La Land when it came out. It felt like everyone else did, which in itself might have given me unrealistic expectations about how life-changing it might be. Perhaps my nonplussed reaction to it came from the fact that I don’t watch a huge amount of musicals (does anyone any more?). Whatever the reason, I thought it was poor. Nice songs, good cast, let down by meandering plotline and a sense of smug self-satisfaction.

Fast forward to 2020, during one of those rambling scrolls through Netflix I stumbled across it again and thought, well let’s give this a go. It’s relatively PG, so I can stick it on when the kids are about. Why not watch it again on the off chance I missed what everyone else saw, just like I did with Magic Eye paintings, moving statues, and that blue/gold dress? Long story short, La La Land is amazing. Since that second viewing I have watched it again, and again, and again, and loved it more each time. The film didn’t change, but I and the world around me did; I came to it the second time round with no expectations, with a more open mind, and besides, I was now in lockdown and the primary colours and big musical numbers of La La Land was just the escapism I needed. I’m sure there is an irony in the fact that a film about good things happening with bad timing became my top film of the last 12 months, but there you go.

Ardbeg Ten was the first peated whisky I tried. Someone I knew had a bottle and it was clear they were not into it, so they offered it to me. I gave it a try and was struck immediately at how different it was to all the other whiskies I had tried (I almost refused to accept it was whisky, checking the label to make sure, like a drunk in a movie who sees a UFO or talking dog and then throws a bottle over his shoulder). An acrid, smokey tang, it was a thunder bolt for my senses. I genuinely wasn’t ready for peat, especially not at that level of intensity. I was only starting my journey into whisky and frankly this came a little soon. It’s like suddenly being told oh, you like Guns ‘n’ Roses, well how about you try some Pig Destroyer? Like boiling a frog, you gotta do it gradual.

But I still took the bottle away with me (the owner was delighted to see the back of it). I nibbled away at the bottle over the intervening years and while you couldn’t say it changed, I did. Like Alan Patridge’s sudden revelation that, actually, he likes wine, despite all those things he said earlier – I actually really like peat, despite my initial recoil. It’s not the centre of my universe but peat is one of the facets of whisky that is accessible for a casual fan like me. I can taste something and say, yeah, this is peated. I couldn’t tell you cask type, age, mashbill, or anything else, but smoke is one of those things that triggers the primitive parts of our brain – Smoke! Danger! Fire! Warmth! We can all identify smoke. I could be nosing forever to try and guess a single other detail about a whisky, but peat will always make itself known. It is a broad and beautiful brushstroke in any whisky, and, in my experience, I have yet to taste a whisky where I thought wow, they should really dial down the peat here.

I still have that bottle of the ten sat in a press somewhere. I never got around to finishing it, but I have milled through three bottles of Uigideal, which is an absolute gem that I recommend to anyone. Aside from that I don’t know much about Ardbeg, aside from the usual Hunger Games of their committee releases, when Whisky Twitter goes into meltdown in its attempts to secure a bottle. I’m here for the everyman, on-the-shelf-in-the-offie drams, I don’t need to hassle or the drama of trying to get the rare exclusives. I don’t want to have to find the mythical isle of Tortuga, Torbay will do just fine.

So while I like to sound the fanfare for the common dram, I am also comfortable with the odd freebie, which is why I was happy to celebrate Ardbeg Day this year by taking delivery of a free bottle of the ten from my new best friends at The Hive. I assume they are a PR firm and not an invading alien species who think with one mind and whose sole aim is to destroy humanity, but even if they are flesh eating creatures from another galaxy, free booze, amiright?

So on to some stats lifted straight from the Ardbeg website –
- Ardbeg uses malt peated to a level of 50ppm at the maltings in the village of Port Ellen. It is then milled in Ardbeg’s rare Boby malt mill, installed in 1921.
- Water comes from Loch Uigeadail, via Loch Airigh Nam Beist, via Charlie’s Dam at the distillery, and into the mash house.
- The washbacks at Ardbeg are made of Oregon pine. Fermentation time is longer than other distilleries because of the high phenolic content of the original malt.
- Ardbeg distils twice.
- On the Lyne arm of the spirit still at Ardbeg there is a piece of apparatus called a purifier. As the boiling continues in the spirit still, the heavier impure alcohols reach the top of the still (the initial light alcohols are sweet and fruity). Some of the heavier compounds are captured in the purifier and fed back down into the main pot of the still. As the boiling process continues, the heavier phenolics come through, this occurs from about halfway through the spirit run. The purifier gives a little extra reflux, so we have two distillations and a little bit more. The purifier is unique on Islay and balance is the key.
- The vast amount of whisky matures in ex-Bourbon oak. In maturation only 1st and 2nd fill casks are used. Their new 1st fill Bourbon casks come from suppliers in the US. Other casks come from Speyside Cooperage, and Craigellachie.
- Primarily barrels have been used in the past, but now there is a substantial mix between barrels (for Ardbeg Ten Years Old,) Sherry Butts (some of which are used for Ardbeg Uigeadail), and new French Oak Barrels for Ardbeg Corryvreckan. And these are their three core expressions.
- Because Ardbeg sits very close to the sea, the whisky receives a certain salty, iodine character while it matures.
I included that last factoid despite my best judgement as, if I’m honest, I am extremely cynical about maturation location as a factor in flavour. If it’s stuck in a pine forest will it faintly taste of pine? Midleton’s Dungourney warehouse complex is surrounded by pine woods, and I will chortle if they ever claim it gives a pine-fresh Toilet Duck-esque flavour to the whiskey.

So Ardbeg Ten – a dank bass note of a dram, in a bottle with a label that looks like a biker insignia, and tastes like arson. So from that first smokey taste years ago, what do I reckon now?

Nose: Cordite, treacle, liquorice.

Palate: Smoke! Fire! Etc! Fenugreek, caramel, dark chocolate, aniseed.

Finish: Demerara sugar, mint, toffee.

Is Ardbeg Ten the best intro to peat you can have? I would say not – I’d steer any newcomer to one of the more subtle peated drams (always love a Benromach) before this hefty unit. Ardbeg is unashamedly peated, and while I respect that, and while I found my way back to peat over time, not everyone will give it that second chance. But everyone and everything changes – the idea that we spend our lives in some kind of epicurean stasis is a sad one indeed, so here’s to second chances.
The year of living dangerously

October 13th, 2020

Whoever decided to launch one of the best-known luxury brands in the Irish whiskey category on budget day must have quite the sense of humour. We are still in the midst of a pandemic, the economy is in the process of being intubated by the State, and while this budget day may not have been the bloodbath that those in 2009-2015 were, it is the beginning of an all-too familiar process of rebalancing. Perhaps there was a spring in the steps of the marketing team at Irish Distillers because they sensed in advance that taxation on spirits would remain static – it was the least the State could do after almost every distiller in Ireland turned their stills over to the creation of hand sanitiser before the summer, when it was impossible to come by.

Cigarettes up 50 cent, making a box of 20 €14, but alcohol untouched.

It would have been unthinkable for publicans (and probably the population) for the Government to increase the cost of a pint or a bottle of wine at this time. #Budget2021
— Hugh O'Connell (@oconnellhugh) October 13, 2020

But it still takes gumption to launch a 180 bottle of hooch when hundreds of thousands of people are out of work. Still, this was a luxury brand launched in the 1980s, when there were also hundreds of thousands out of work – although it cost a little less then:

A page in the Cork Examiner after the launch of MVR in 1984.

The background to Midleton Very Rare is: In the dark days of the 1980s, we needed a luxury brand. The Scots had many, so we launched MVR in 1984. It is not very rare. It is ubiquitous. Also, it’s a blend. But it really isn’t aimed at the diehard whiskey nerd – as an annual release, in my experience it is bought as a gift for someone to mark an anniversary, wedding, birth, becoming president of the golf club…you get the idea. This is not something the tragic pot still fetishist is going to queue overnight to get their clammy, webbed flippers on. But it is important – as I pointed out the last time I reviewed it, it has aura, and it has taken decades to build that up.

Just seven short years ago Brian Nation became master distiller of Midleton Distillery, taking over from his predecessor Barry Crockett, who launched MVR all those years before. Then, in June this year came the bombshell news that Nation was moving on, to take up the role of master distiller with O’Shaughnessy Distilling Company. Apparently his role was much more than that – he would be central to the build of their new distillery, and was a chance to make his stamp on a new brand, new products, and a new world. I’d never presume to know what it was that tempted him, but the freedom of it must have been part of the appeal – in Midleton he must have spent much of his time ensuring consistency and while his experiments in the microdistillery gave him some creative wriggle room, running a massive operation like Midleton must be hard. Add to that the PR work of a master distiller – international travel becomes a lot less glamorous when you do it all the time, especially if you have young kids. So I can see why he would make the move. I suspect that he will do great things in the US.

So MVR 2020 is his swansong. I’ll let the press release take it from here:

Chosen from the most outstanding quality single pot still and single grain Irish whiskeys laid down over the past four decades in Midleton, Co Cork, Midleton Very Rare 2020 showcases an expression of whiskeys aged from 13 to 35 years in lightly charred ex-bourbon American oak barrels. This year, Brian Nation selected a higher pot still inclusion when compared to previous vintages, while also increasing the use of refill barrels amongst his choice of casks.

Bottled at 40% ABV, Midleton Very Rare 2020 is available online and in Ireland now, and will hit shelves in the UK, USA, Global Travel Retail, Australia, Germany and Canada in the coming months at the RRP of €180.

In a break from tradition and in response to consumer demand for the annual vintage to be made available earlier in the year in question, newly appointed Master Distiller Kevin O’Gorman will reveal Midleton Very Rare 2021 in spring next year, honouring a rare changing of the guard at the iconic Midleton Distillery.

Confirmation, if you needed it, that this is one whiskey where the year it was released rather than the year it was distilled is the important factor for consumers.

Some tasting notes; it’s a bit early in the week to start necking whiskey, so these are the official IDL notes and are thus possibly slightly more coherent than my own:

Aroma

Initial top notes of cane sugar and vanilla intertwined with pepper and nutmeg spices, complimented by sweet orchard fruits and white chocolate fudge all layered over polished antique wood notes, showcasing an intriguing balance between spirit and wood thanks to the complex interaction from the many years spent in the finest oak casks.

Taste

Initial burst of tangy fruit sweetness of orange peel and sweet pear creating a succulent texture while the pot still spices build overtime adding a mild prickle of chilli oil. The presence of the charred oak remains constant in the background adding balance to the fruits and spices.

Finish

Satisfyingly long finish with the fruits slowly fading, allowing the oak and spices to linger until the very end.

In short, it is nice. Of course the supreme irony of MVR 2020 is not the launch day coinciding with a budget, but rather why would anyone want to commemorate this disaster of a year?
All that glitters

October 4th, 2020

Judge Roy Beans and I have grown old and sophisticated together. Tried the Dingle Gold, looking forward to their own. pic.twitter.com/9LN5KbYn1A
— Bill Linnane (@Bill_Linnane) October 5, 2014

Do you remember Dingle Gold? It was a sourced blend, and it wasn’t very good, even by the humdrum standards of the most unchallenging blends. Of course, you wouldn’t expect too much given how it crashed into existence.

The year was 2010 and the Porterhouse Group were going to be the only Irish firm at the Shanghai World Expo. Known as the ‘economic olympics’ the expo would be their springboard into the Asian market – so they invested €1.35 million and 18 months of hard into securing a space for their pop-up pub, which would showcase their craft beers to some 70 million visitors during the expo’s six-month duration. But it wasn’t just going to be about craft beer. Oliver Hughes – the visionary founder of the Porterhouse who died suddenly in 2016 – was already planning a distillery here in Ireland. To show just how confusing whiskey is to the average person, here’s this from an Irish Times piece on the Expo in 2010:

Porterhouse recently started distilling its own whisky at a still in Dingle [they actually hadn’t started distilling until 2012], the first new one in 220 years. That whiskey won’t be ready in time for Expo, but the group has commissioned a range of 8-year-old and 12-year-old whiskeys from Cooley especially for the Expo.

I sincerely doubt the blend components in Dingle Gold were that old, as it was a fiery number.

Oliver Hughes’s son Elliott, now MD of the Porterhouse Group, told me how it came into being when I interviewed him and then Dingle Master Distiller Peter Mosley in 2017: “We were doing a bar out in Shanghai at the time for the World Expo. So we built a proper full scale bar over there and this was supposed to be the best thing ever and the turnover was meant to be 400 million and all this kind of nonsense, and we had this whiskey built for over there and it did not go very well. It’s one of those non-mentioned things. It [the expo] wasn’t nearly as busy as they said it would be and the Chinese don’t drink as much beer as we anticipated. It was managed poorly.”

Mosley continued: “I don’t think the Chinese had as much disposable income as we thought. So the Dingle Gold was never intended to sell in Ireland. I just got a phonecall from Oliver saying ‘there’s a load of whiskey on the quays, can you organise it to go somewhere?’ and it sat in storage for months before we did anything about shipping it. We weren’t ready for it, we didn’t have any sale structure or staff, I think Mary [Ferriter, Dingle Distillery manager] here sold most of it.”

Elliot: “And we sold lots of it through our own bars in Irish coffees. But in hindsight if we were to do it again i think we certainly wouldn’t. I think we were new to the market, we made a decision and it probably wasn’t the right decision, but at that time nobody was doing anything in Irish whiskey. Oliver was all about the ideas, Liam Lahart [Oliver’s cousin and co-founder] would then have to find out how we would pay for it.”

Mosley: “And I would have to figure out how we were going to do it.”

Elliot: “So a different way of operating completely.”

Mosley: “So Elliott is the ideas guy now.”

He certainly is: Since that interview three years ago, Dingle’s head distiller Michael Walsh moved to Boann Distillery as master distiller, and Dingle managed something of a coup by luring Graham Coull away from Glen Moray in beautiful Speyside to the beautiful arse end of Ireland. Obviously whiskey is a long game, so it will be some time until we get to sample Coull’s creations, but there are positive noises:

3 weeks, 100 barrels. 20 – 25 ppm. Hopefully release something early after maturing in 30 litre casks #thewhiskeychaps
— Dingle Graham (@Graham__Coull) July 2, 2020

Now comes their fifth batch of single malt, and an expanded reach – one of the primary complaints about Dingle is how hard it can be to come by their bottles; little wonder given that they only fill four casks a day. I’ll let the press release take it from here:

The Batch 5 will make history as the biggest release to date, a total of 36,500 bottles. Five hundred of those will be bottled at cask strength (59.3% abv) as a tribute to the 500 Founding Fathers (and mothers), the

people who backed the distillery at its foundation by each investing in a cask of the first spirit to come from Dingle’s stills.

The Batch 5 launch represents a considerable increase in volume, meaning that on this occasion 9,000 bottles can go to the United States, the remaining 27,500 being destined for Ireland, the rest of Europe, Asia and Australasia.

For Master Distiller Graham Coull, who joined Dingle in October 2019, this is his second batch release. He believes that the use of Madeira casks in this whiskey adds a subtle complexity.

“The Madeira influence adds a great depth of flavour and a kind of backbone to this remarkable whiskey while not masking the subtle spice from the Bourbon casks or sweet tone from the Pedro Ximenez ones”, he says.

In Ireland, the Batch 5 Single Malt will retail at €70; the Batch 5 Cask Strength at €150, will be available exclusively online from irishmalts.ie, and rationed to one bottle per customer.

Full disclosure – while I love what Dingle represents as the first green shoot in a national resurgence of whiskey distilling, I haven’t been wild about the few samples I had. I always thought there was just too much fire and heat in them. I can’t blame it all on youth either – the three to four year old Great Northern whiskeys that I have tried are excellent and show that youth can be smooth and rich. But this Dingle is a decent dram at what is not an outlandish price. A lot of toffee sweetness on the nose, custard on the palate and a decent length of finish, with pleasant astringency. A solid, smashable dram – would be interesting to try the CS and see where it takes you.

Looking back over the Dingle story, you can see how things change – in their prospectus they outlined a range of drinks, many of which never materialised. I think that was part of the charm – the sense of chaos that comes with something smashing barriers and making history. They did what they could to survive.

I still have my bottle of Dingle Gold, signed by Oliver, and I treasure it. It’s not worth anything, but its power is symbolic. Dingle Gold wasn’t amazing, but it was the start of something that was and is.