Tullamore Dew up for sale

The Sunday Business Post reported yesterday that C&C has put its spirits division up for sale. That interests us because C&C owns the Tullamore Dew brand, number two in global sales of Irish whiskey (after Jameson, of course). The newspaper puts a value of €200m on the deal.

C&C has done well enough out of spirits. The division has remained consistently profitable while the rest of the company lurched from boom to bust in recent years. But it has definitely suffered from a lack of focus. Although the Tullamore Dew brand is strong, C&C failed to exploit that. In the last couple of years, two new Dews suddenly appeared - one a 10-year old blend, the other a 10-year old single malt. As if that was not confusing enough, the two whiskeys are made in different distilleries (Midleton and Cooley).

C&C has a great cider product (Magners / Bulmers) that it has been pouring its energies into, along with a more recent sideline in beer to compensate for the seasonal nature of cider sales. No doubt they can use the money from flogging the spirits division to continue the push into long drinks.

The interesting question is: who will buy the whiskey business? Pernod Ricard makes Tullamore Dew on C&C's behalf so taking the brand in house would give them a bigger return on something they are making anyway. But they already have a global Irish whiskey brand in Jameson and have shown no particular interest in building their other brands (Powers and Paddy, in particular) to compete with it.

Diageo owns Bushmills which is due to go head-to-head with Jameson in the next few years as maturing stocks are built up. Would they want another whiskey that is made by their rival? Would they move its manufacture to the Bushmills distillery, a distillery that only makes single malt?

It would be great if Cooley could find the money to pick up Tullamore Dew. They own the stills from the old Tullamore distillery and the sales volume of Tullamore Dew would allow them to fire those stills up again. But that's a hefty investment for a company that made a gross profit of only €3.3m in 2008.

I'll be watching this story very closely...

Kilbeggan's Coffey still

I wrote recently about the new whiskeys planned from Kilbeggan distillery. That, however, is not the whole story. Visitors to Kilbeggan will not fail to notice the three big pot stills that squat silently in the open air. You can see two of them in this photo:

They are not in use, and there is no plan to fire them up, sadly. If you want to see them restored to operation, put the squeeze on Cooley's Louth distillery by buying more of their whiskey. Only then will they be able to justify bringing this dormant capacity at Kilbeggan online.

Anyway, take another look at the photo. See the copper columns in the background? These are the distillation and rectification columns of a Coffey still. This is the other way of making whiskey. It's a continuous process, unlike the batch process required when using pot stills.

These columns came from the old B. Daly distillery in Tullamore, whose distilling assets Cooley bought. The big news is that Cooley has firm plans to get them running again.

Cooley already has a column still in Louth pumping out grain spirit. The raw material there is about 90% maize, 10% malted barley. The Kilbeggan grain spirit will be all barley, with a high percentage of malt. I assume some will be blended with Kilbeggan's pot still-produced whiskey but I'd put money on a new standalone grain whiskey to complement the existing Greenore, if the results are at all palatable.

Cooley has investigated the history of this Coffey still. Nothing is certain, but it was likely made by John Dore & Co in London in 1910. Destined for India, the still was commandeered by the British government for making fuel during World War I. Things get a little hazy at this point. The still might have spent the inter-war years in Czechoslovakia but by 1940 or 1941 it had fetched up in Tullamore.

It's not known for sure if it was used there. In fact its presence was kept rather quiet, perhaps because of the stigma attached to the use of the non-traditional Coffey still in Ireland.

It's quite a historical piece of industrial equipment because John Dore & Co is the direct successor to Aeneas Coffey's original company. John Dore worked for Coffey & Sons and took over operations in 1872. Happily, John Dore & Co is still in business and has cast its eye over the Kilbeggan stills. They found the original Indian order for the still in their records. The company will make replacements for some copper parts pilfered after Tullamore closed.