Irish whiskey shorts

Beamed up

Beam has completed it's acquisition of Cooley Distillery. Onwards and upwards now. I'll be interested to see what happens with Cooley's many collaborations and private label bottlings. The other two distillers (Bushmills and Irish Distillers) have been far less approachable in this regard and now Cooley has deep enough pockets to ease out of the low end and low volume markets, if it chooses to.

When Bushmills was hived off from Irish Distillers in 2005 I expected some robust, global competition that would further energise the Irish whiskey category but Bushmills has been very withdrawn ever since. Perhaps Beam will square up to Jameson and we'll finally see some sparks fly.


Save the date

The date for Whisky Live Dublin has been announced: Saturday 26th May. I enjoyed it very much in 2011, particularly the masterclasses. If you are a member of the Irish Whiskey Society (IWS), don't buy a ticket yet, because there will likely be a special deal.

It's hardly worth mentioning the January society tasting, because it's all sold out. February's will be Whiskey & Chocolate (Thursday, 23rd Feb); booking for that should open towards the end of this month.

Speaking of the society, IWS president, Leo Phelan, was the special guest on episode 351 of WhiskyCast for a wide-ranging discussion of Irish whiskey history, development and future trends.


On the perfectly-shaped rocks

The Irish Whiskey Public House in Washington DC looks like a grand new spot for a whiskey and a plate of food. The bit that caught my eye on their website was this:

To maximize the delicacy and experience of each whiskey, the venue carries an ice machine shipped directly from Ireland that creates the perfectly shaped ice cube for opening up and revealing each whiskey’s full character.

Are we known for our world-class ice-shaping technology? And what shape is the perfect shape? Is it the cube with a deep indented base? I never really thought about it but those cubes do sit very well within the liquid. (I wouldn't use ice to reveal a whiskey's character though. Best stick with neat for that.)

Anyway, the bar opens with 50 different Irish whiskeys. In a photo I can see Redbreast 12yo & 15yo, Greenore 18yo, Locke's 8yo, all the Bushmills, all the Jamesons (except the Rarest Vintage, I think) and many more. A very respectable line-up, better than most Irish pubs.


Pub of the week

I dropped into The Palace Bar in Dublin to finally try their new house whiskey, a 9 year old single cask single malt, bottled at 46%. It's from Cooley and Cooley malt is just great at that age. I reckon they got a good cask here so it's worth €6.80 for a glass.

If you are visiting Ireland and fancy having one Irish whiskey in one traditional Irish pub, I suggest a shot of Palace Bar whiskey in The Palace Bar. If you want to further explore the whiskey landscape, the bar has a very wide selection of bottles. Ask for their whiskey menu.

Price-wise, The Palace is €4.40/€15 on the Jameson/Midleton index. (I'm trying this out; it needs a catchy name. J/M index?)


Some sounds with that?

Treat yourself to a glass of something from the shelf and spin up some nicely textured modern jazz from the Portico Quartet. This track will be on their new album due out later this month. The guy who looks like he's banging away on a couple of barbecues is actually playing the hang.

Concannon Irish Whiskey

I spent a couple of years in Silicon Valley once, oblivious to "California's first Irish-American winery" practically on my doorstep (or at least closer than Napa, which I did visit). It has taken the launch of a new Irish whiskey to finally clue me in to the Concannon Vineyard.

It's run by John Concannon, great-grandson of James Concannon, who emigrated from the Aran Islands in 1865 at the age of 18 and who, remarkably, established himself and a winery in California.

Yesterday, Concannon Irish Whiskey was launched at a party in San Francisco, involving 300 people and a "traditional Irish boxing match" (fighting and drinking - associations with Irishness in America I would be happy to lose, frankly).

It's a four year old Cooley blend and, ordinarily, such a young whiskey wouldn't attract much attention. But this one is special. According to Noel Sweeney in the video below, there is quite a high proportion of malt in this blend and some of that malt is finished in Concannon's own Petite Sirah red wine casks. In the finished whiskey, according to Noel, you get a berry flavour on top of the usual characteristics of honey, vanilla, etc.

(That video is a rather nice vignette of Cooley's operation. You can spot the cooper, John Neilly, master blender, Noel Sweeney and global brand ambassador, John Cashman. The casks on their sides behind Noel Sweeney look like wine casks; I wonder if they are Concannon's.)

I haven't tried the new whiskey yet but someone who has reports:

I am happy to say that Concannon Whiskey is very nice! The Petite Sirah has given the whiskey a light berry finish that is amazing. I know for some people a wine finished whiskey is not their cup of tea. This is one that works very well.

It will go on sale in February. There is no plan yet to release it in Ireland. If I hear more, I'll update this post.

Inish Turk Beg

Update 13 Jan 2011

A commenter below who sounds familiar with the situation remarks:

The island of Inishturkbeg is in receivership, which just covers the hospitality business. The brand business, of which whiskey is the principal part, has always been run independently and is not in receivership. Plans continue for the development of whiskey, branded Inish Turk Beg (and Eternal Voyage is the follow up to Maiden Voyage as a product) and other iterations from Clew Bay, more generally.

Reassuring news!

---

The Sunday Times last weekend reported that receivers have been appointed to the company that owns Inish Turk Beg, an island off the west of Ireland. For the moment, it's business as usual but the receivers will want to generate cash for the creditors that appointed them so it's likely that the island will go on the block in the near future.

The entrepreneur who owned the island, Nadim Sadek, an Irish-Egyptian, spawned all sorts of ventures from his Inish Turk Beg base. The one that interests us here is whiskey.

Plenty of companies have tapped Cooley Distillery for whiskey they can label as their own. Inish Turk Beg could have done just that and left it there but, with admirable integrity, they put their own twist on the whiskey in various creative ways.

They ensured a good base to begin with: roughly 10-year old Cooley malt (very fine stuff indeed, in my opinion). They took thirteen expired ex-bourbon barrels, filled them with "poitín" for a year (Cooley new make spirit, I presume), emptied them and then left them to weather on the island (for how long, I don't know). The Cooley malt was then finished in these seasoned barrels (again, I don't know how long for). 

Another touch was to use rainwater, fresh off the Atlantic, to water down the cask-strength spirit to bottling strength of 44%. The final presentation was also unusual: a spherical, tilted, hand-blown bottle. 2,888 of these one-litre bottles were produced.

I've been calling this "Inish Turk Beg" whiskey ever since it was released in late 2010 but I've just realised it's actually called Maiden Voyage. The intention was to release a follow-up called Eternal Voyage but we haven't seen that yet.

With the attractive presentation and the various unique touches it should fly off the shelves. Maybe it does, for all I know, but I suspect the price gives buyers pause: €155 in Ireland. That's a lot for 10-year old Cooley malt. It's a lot for any Irish whiskey. While it's nice (though a little softer than I anticipated) it's more than I could spend on a whiskey for drinking. As I write, for example, I'm enjoying a Grand Crew 9yo Cooley malt that I absolutely love but only cost me €60. A 10-year old port finish Tyrconnell would set me back the same.

I hope this isn't the end of the story for Inish Turk Beg whiskey. I imagine that Nadim Sadek is the kind of guy who wouldn't have been happy until he had his own distillery on the island. I wish him luck in whatever he does next. I hope it involves whiskey.

Irish whiskey shorts

Let's try something fresh for 2012. There are lots of scraps of news and info about Irish whiskey that I think are interesting but that might never make it into a longer article. Instead of sitting on them - or worse, forgetting them - I'm just going to push them out there, in a big heap. With the optimism of all new year resolutions, this will happen regularly. Like clockwork! Here, then, is some stuff I noticed recently.

Around the blogs

A reflection on the year in whiskey would have seen off 2011 nicely but I never got around to it. Luckily, another blogger was not so slack and banged out his own review. From Boston, home of the Irish Whiskey Society America, this is Rich Nagle's summing up of 2011.

From the man known only as Irish Whiskey Chaser, came this very practical discussion of glassware. Choose your glass carefully and you won't waste a single aroma molecule of that expensive hooch. It's a bit late to mention it now, but seeing IWC's Christmas shopping guide has got me thinking about Powers John's Lane. Hang on a minute...

... and we're back, with a Powers, in a rather magnificent glass that I'm sure Mr Chaser would approve of.

From Twitter

Cooley sold over 250 bottles of its new Poitín in December in just two outlets (the Celtic Whiskey Shop and Dublin airport). So tweeted John Cashman. Impressive! Novelty must be a factor here. Poitín is a fabled drink in Ireland but not much drunk these days so we have to figure out all over again how to drink it, or even if we like it. I want to know how many people buy a second bottle, to see if the category has any legs.

I now know...

... that Redbreast 12yo is 77% first fill bourbon and 23% first fill sherry casks. That snippet is from Tim F's description of the launch of Irish Distillers (IDL) single pot still collection earlier in the year. It's worth reading all of it (including part 2) but those percentages leapt out at me. For some reason, IDL is as cagey about its recipes as Coca Cola. I'm not sure why because, even if you know the makeup of a whiskey, you can't recreate it without the same stills, casks, warehouses, etc. So they might as well be open about it. Whiskey nuts love that kind of detail.

... Redbreast and IDLs other "specialist" whiskeys are bottled at The House of Donohoe in Waterford City. That comes from IDL's own Single Pot Still site which had a very festive picture before Christmas of a Robin Redbreast beside its namesake whiskey, taken at said bottling facility.

... that there will be six new pot stills at Midleton after the distillery expansion. I'm very curious about this. They currently have four pot stills and intend to produce exactly the same spirit on the new line (essentially doubling capacity for Jameson production), so what are the other two pot stills for? If you know, please drop me a line or comment below.

Other news

It was reported in December that William Grant (the new owners of Tullamore Dew) have been making serious enquiries in Tullamore about setting up a new distillery. I've always thought that would make sense. They have a bottling plant in Clonmel already but there is no particular reason to site the distillery nearby. IDL distils in Cork and bottles in Dublin and Antrim (and Waterford, I now know) so separating these functions can't be a big deal.

I hope it happens. The big question is the pots. The original stills from the old Tullamore Dew distillery are now at Cooley's (ie Beam's) Kilbeggan distillery. I doubt they are for sale, since they are the same pattern as the long lost Kilbeggan originals. But Grants could have them remade to the same size and shape. If Beam fire up the Kilbeggan stills, could there be two distilleries making spirit in identical stills? We'll see.

I'd like to finish with a song

This Powers John's Lane is going down a treat. How about we spin up a few tracks? Something Polish, I think, for no particular reason. Here's Poland's entry from the 1995 Eurovision Song Contest. It deserves to be remembered.

And if that piques your interest, here's what the Poles were listening to behind the iron curtain (many thanks to Dr John Kearns for the recommendations):

John Teeling comments on sale

Update 21 Dec 2011: Ronan Morris kindly pointed me towards a new video interview with John Teeling, conducted by Clontarf.ie (the place, not the whiskey). Worth a look.

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The Sunday Business Post carries some revealing comments from John Teeling, founder and chairman of Cooley Distillery, regarding the acquisition by Beam. The most interesting points:

• Sales of Cooley whiskey are up 50% this year, a trend that will see the warehouses run dry by 2014.
• To cope with the forecast growth, an investment of €50m over the next 5 years is required. This drove the decision to sell now.
• There were approaches from five potential buyers in the last year (including from William Grant, noted here last May). Cooley favoured Beam, with whom they have been in talks for four years.
• Teeling believes Beam's top priority is building the Kilbeggan brand in the US.

Some numbers were disclosed too: Cooley buys a ton of maize for €300 and converts it to 1,200 bottles of whiskey which fetch €6,000 in export sales. That implies Cooley sells a bottle of whiskey for €5 at the factory gate.

The mention of maize indicates a grain-heavy blend - let's say for a supermarket's own label - that might sell for €15 or €16 in the UK. That's the high-volume, low-margin end of the business. What is fascinating about the whiskey trade is that there is also a low-volume, high-margin end based on the very same spirit. Leave it in the cask for a few more years, after all, and you can flog it for €95 a bottle (Kilbeggan 18yo, Irish retail price) or even for €250 a pop (Connemara Bog Oak).

It's a really neat business challenge, how to edge the average margin up without driving down volume. That would be the task of the branding and marketing alchemists, I presume. I think Cooley have already nailed the branding. Marketing, however, scales with budget and the Beam deal will help there.

Jim Beam buys Cooley

I was waiting for a flight in London Gatwick airport yesterday when I read the news of Jim Beam's purchase of Cooley Distillery. I mentioned it to the guy in the World of Whiskies shop there and his immediate reaction was "Cooley? But that's Ireland's only independent distillery!" Cooley have long relished pointing out that the competing distilleries in Ireland are foreign-owned (by Pernod Ricard and Diageo) but in so doing they created a hostage to fortune. One can't hide a twinge of sadness that this independent beacon of world-class Irish industry has fallen.

The deal is worth €73m and probably looks right based on the modest returns Cooley has been making recently (€2.5m profit in 2010). But it seems a bargain to me, given the the assets Cooley have painstakingly built up, namely two working distilleries (at Riverstown and Kilbeggan) and the warehouses full of maturing spirit. Cooley's difficulty has never been making a great product though, it has been in extracting the maximum value from those assets by getting their own brands in front of customers around the world. The Chairman's statement from the 2010 annual report lays out the problem:

While the long term objective of Cooley is to develop brands, route to market and rotation on shelves pose major obstacles. World spirits is dominated by two giant companies with a second tier of major multinationals. These companies dominate distribution channels and have advertising and promotion budgets hundreds of times greater than Cooley's total sales.

(The worst aspect of this deal for me is that we won't get such detailed and insightful annual reports again.)

Although Cooley has great whiskeys that it sells under its own brands (Connemara, Tyrconnell, Kilbeggan, etc), fully 50% of its sales are making whiskey for others, either under private labels or retailer own brands. These are usually cheap, young whiskeys. The business has kept Cooley afloat but it means a lot of whiskey leaves the distillery before it has reached the peak of its value. Ominously, the annual report warns that cheap Scotch has put even this market segment at risk in the last couple of years.

So Cooley has no choice but to look to its own brands, and that means a global distribution partner. So, who is Beam? Their portfolio includes 10 of the world's top 100 premium spirits brands and covers rum, tequila, vodka, cognac and other categories besides whiskey. Of course we are most interested in what it brings to the whiskey table and here the line-up includes Jim Beam and Maker's Mark bourbons, Canadian Club whisky, Teacher's Scotch whisky, and Laphroaig Scotch whiskey.

The Beam portfolio

Their knowledge of the US market is an obvious strength, and the mindshare among whiskey drinkers achieved by Laphroaig bodes well for Cooley's premium offerings. There is certainly a lot of potential upside with this deal for Cooley and for Irish whiskey. And, besides the loss of independent status, not much downside.

I have a feeling this will not be the end of the story though. With $2.7bn in sales in 2010, Beam dwarfs Cooley, but it's still a relatively small drinks multinational (Diageo's sales, for example, were about $20bn in the same year). Thus it must itself be a takeover target. If either Diageo or Pernod Ricard swallow it up, that would likely put Cooley back in play, to satisfy competition rules in Ireland.

Whatever happens, 2012 is already looking like a lively year for Irish whiskey. And there is a good chance we'll see at least one new independent Irish whiskey producer to claim that mantle from Cooley anyway.

I'd like to wish everyone at Cooley the best of success with this latest chapter of their adventure.

Irish coffee truffles

It's about that time of year when we carefully select our Christmas whiskey, to be enjoyed after sundown on the big day itself. But we shouldn't forget those who seem reluctant to embrace the unalloyed joy of the amber liquid in its pure form. For some, the good stuff must be smuggled past their defences, cloaked in other flavours and textures, in discreetly named packages that gloss over the alcoholic contribution.

As my contribution to this holiday subterfuge, I offer the Irish Coffee Truffle...

Ingredients (for about 18 truffles)

• 170g quality dark chocolate (70%)
• 150 mls Avonmore Cream
• 2-3 teaspoons ground instant coffee made into a paste with boiled water (or an espresso, if you prefer)
• 30 mls Kilbeggan Irish whiskey
• Milled white chocolate, finely chopped almonds or chocolate vermicelli to coat

Method

• Bring the cream to the boil
• Break chocolate into pieces
• Add to the cream and whisk for a while until completely melted
• Continue to whisk for a short while
• Whisk in the coffee and whiskey
• Pour into a shallow container and cool completely in fridge or freezer
• When set, make into walnut-sized balls and roll in any or all of the coatings

Happy Christmas!