Three weeks into 27-year-old Pat Cooney’s career as a drinks wholesaler, a visit from the Guinness sales rep brought him back down to earth: “The local Guinness agent came around and said ‘Pat, look it’s really interesting to see you coming into the business and I wish you all the best, but there’s an awful lot of wholesalers.’ At the time there were 105 wholesalers and Gleeson was 105^th.”

By that time Cooney had trained as an accountant in London and tried his hand as a management consultant in Ireland. “But most people would tell you they needed a management consultant like they needed a hole in the head. It was very early days of management consulting,” said Cooney.

Cooney and his brother Nicky had bought a small wholesaler called Gleeson in the small village of Borrisoleigh in Co Tipperary for £75,000. It employed about 10 people with a very small turnover.

Undeterred by the Guinness man, and despite intense competition, Cooney grew Gleeson, and his experience in acquisitions came in handy as he started to buy other drinks companies and invest in other areas such as water. The firm eventually employed 75 people and had a turnover of €300 million.

“We started making cider and we began to buy other wholesalers and eventually, by 2010, we were the biggest at everything that we did. We were the biggest wine importer,” said Cooney.

Then, the recession hit, and Cooney’s Gleeson Group lost 20 per cent of its turnover. Cooney realised his business relied too much on the Irish economy and he needed to think about what his next move would be.

Cooney sold the Gleeson Group drinks distribution business to Bulmers owner C&C in 2012. The deal was valued at €58 million. Cooney held onto two businesses: a cream liqueur facility (RA Merrys and Co) and cider (Adams Cider Company).

“My kids thought I was too young to retire and my wife didn’t want me home around the place.”

Pat Cooney

“When the recession came in 2010, by 2012 it was apparent to me that all of our business in Ireland was in the domestic economy. So, we were the biggest wholesaler, we were the biggest wine importer, we were the second or third biggest soft drinks manufacturer. But with all of that we were still in the domestic economy,” said Cooney.

As a whiskey drinker and a learned businessman, he decided to set up Boann, his own distillery in Drogheda. He put €20 million into the project, basing it in an old car showroom. Cooney is the managing director of Boann.

The distillery is already making its second brand of whiskey which will be eponymous and available in three years. Cooney states Boann is set to make its own apple brandy. 

Although he is past the average retirement age and been in business for 50 years, Cooney is not afraid to change how he does business. One way Cooney is keeping ahead of curve is by offering whiskey investments in exchange for bitcoin. 

“We will probably be the first distiller in Ireland to take bitcoin in exchange for a whiskey investment. We’re working on the mechanics of that, because it’s not just as simple as advertising that we can take Bitcoin. But we would like bitcoin to be one of our currencies,” said Cooney.

Other people in the industry are going down a similar route to Cooney in the distilling business and looking at how to incorporate new digital technology. Others in the whiskey business are now using non-fungible tokens (NFTs). 

Kinsale Spirit Company is the latest Irish company to hop on the non-fungible token (NFT) bandwagon as the drinks business is auctioning a digital representation of a 20-year-old whiskey cask. Paddy McKillen Snr’s €50 million Monasterevin Whiskey Distillery, which is backed by Bono, is also tokenising whiskey casks with blockchain technology. 

Too young to retire  

After he sold Gleeson Group, Cooney could have comfortably retired in his sixties. But in 2015, he decided to pursue another venture.

“My kids thought I was too young to retire and my wife didn’t want me home around the place,” jokes the now 73-year-old about his reasoning for setting up Boann.  

Cooney’s family make up much of the top team working at Boann with four out of five of his children working at the distillery. Peter is the export manager, Patrick works on ecommerce, James is the accountant and Sally-Anne does the marketing and PR. Celestine is a fashion stylist in London. The firm employs 17 people.

“Business is seldom far away. Whether it’s Christmas dinner or whether it’s over the barbecue because we’re all in it, business is pretty central to the conversation because it’s pretty central to our lives,” said Cooney.

Boann was initially set up after US importers expressed interest in adding Irish whiskey to Merry’s liqueur. Cooney realised the growing interest in Irish whiskey and knew that through his other brands like Merry’s and Adam’s Cider, he had already built a relationship with importers around the world.

Merry’s employs 60 people in Clonmel. Despite stagnant growth up until 2019/2020, the business grew by 30 per cent last year in the US, selling 10 million of 16 million bottles in the states. Their Irish Honey Whistler earned Best Irish Honey and World’s Best Honey at the 2021 World Liqueur Awards. It’s made with Boyne valley honey, harvested by Cooney’s wife Marie.

“Merry’s, which was the only export company that we had, was exporting 100 per cent of its production and the world looked like a very big place with an awful lot of opportunities,” adds Cooney about his motivation for setting up Boann.

Boann launched its first whiskey brand, Whistler, a pot-still whiskey, in 2020 and is now in 35 States in the US via the Prestige Beverage Group. It sold 25,000 cases in 2020 and is aiming for 45,000 cases in 2021. By the end of 2021, the business is forecasting over 40 per cent growth in the US and revenue of €3 million, which is up from €1.7 million in 2020. 

“I think pot-still is really the future for Irish whiskey. And it enables us to be innovative and bring a whole new way of thinking about what Irish whiskey can be in the future.”

Pat Cooney

Accounts for Harvest Gathering Holdings, a firm behind the Cooneys’ distilling and brewing business, show the company generated turnover of almost €13 million in its 2019 financial year, and a pre-tax profit of €355,000.

The name Whistler comes from Cooney’s own hobby as a whistler. One night, in a grotto in the back garden of his house, Cooney sat outside with his son James and began to whistle. This is where the inspiration for the name came from.

“I whistled all my life. And when I was a young fella, everybody whistled and whatever happened down through the years, nobody whistles anymore,” said Cooney.

Since its launch, Boann did a deal with Australia’s largest off-licence chain, Dan Murphy’s, which is owned by Woolworths Limited, with 226 stores across the country. The firm also signed a contract with Russia’s fourth-largest wholesaler, Ladoga. This made sense as Russia has overtaken Ireland as the second-largest market for Irish whiskey. It works with distributors in the US and is looking to enter the market in Pakistan and Slovenia as well. Boann has also partnered with Kammer Kirsch, an importer in Germany, which is the second-largest whiskey market in the EU. 

A pot still man

Pot-still whiskey is quickly becoming popular again in the Irish whiskey market after many distilleries concentrated on making malt whiskey for years. Boann is one of the distilleries focusing on pot-still, due to Cooney’s own love for the drink.

“Strangely enough, in the last couple of years, there has been huge interest in pot-still as it’s seen as a quintessential Irish whiskey,” said Cooney.

Pot-still is made from unmalted grains and was a favourite among Irish whiskey makers when England imposed a malt tax in 1785 on the sale of malted grains. Although it is quickly becoming a new favourite again in Ireland, it is something that has roots in Irish history, whereas malt whiskey is very much a Scottish drink.

“I think pot-still is really the future for Irish whiskey. And it enables us to be innovative and bring a whole new way of thinking about what Irish whiskey can be in the future,” said Cooney.

Boann recently became the first distillery in Ireland to win the New Make Spirit award at the World Whiskies Awards with its single pot-still. It also won six categories in the Irish section of the same awards.

“Irish whiskey is growing quite fast around the world, it’s growing about 15 per cent per annum. And even last year with Covid and everything, it still managed to grow by five or six per cent.”

Pat Cooney

The whiskey was created through collaboration with whiskey historian Fionnan O’Connor who travelled all over Ireland recovering old mashbills [grain bill are the materials that brewers use to produce the wort that they then ferment into alcohol] from distilleries that have since long gone out of business. Some of these mashbills date back to the 1800s.

Not afraid of competition

Having once been 105th out of 105 wholesalers in Ireland, competition is not something that bothers Cooney. In fact, he seems to embrace the growing competition in the distillery business in Ireland. Up to 2013, there were only four distilleries in Ireland. Now there are 18. 

“The potential for Irish whiskey is enormous. Irish whiskey is growing quite fast around the world, it’s growing about 15 per cent per annum. And even last year with Covid and everything, it still managed to grow by five or six per cent,” said Cooney. 

Although the US has been a strong market for Boann, they are now looking to China for opportunities due to the sheer size of the market there.

“If you look at the market, and I know people are always talking about China, but China is getting pretty exciting when it comes to whiskey. China is the biggest consumer of alcohol in the world, obviously because of all the people there. But only one per cent of that alcohol is whiskey. And of that one per cent, Irish whiskey is an infinitesimal part. So the potential is enormous. It is also the beginning of huge interest in Irish whiskey,” said Cooney. 

It is a difficult business to run though, according to Cooney. It’s capital-intensive to set up a distillery and build up your stock, especially as you have to let whiskey mature in a cask for at least three years before you can use it. Selling your brand abroad is also a difficult piece of the distilling business, said Cooney.

“We have the advantage insofar as we started Merry’s which is exporting its cream liqueur to 30 different markets,” said Cooney. 

*****

Like many of its competitors, Boann has a cask programme where whiskey enthusiasts can purchase a range of casks.

People are buying casks for an anniversary or a grandchild who’ll be able to drink the whiskey then when they reach the legal drinking age. Others want to buy a cask to put their name on the label and give it out as gifts or for promotion purposes. Boann provides casks for these types of whiskey enthusiasts but also for whiskey investors. As part of the cask programme, there is an offering that allows someone to buy a minimum of six casks, be it of bourbon or of sherry, and let it mature so they can sell it. 

 “Increasingly people are seeing whiskey and Irish whiskey as an investment asset in its own right. There’s this new term floating around because money makes so little sitting in the bank, that what you need to be investing in is Swag. It stands for silver, wine, art, and gold,” explains Cooney.

“We did wine but wine is not so longer seen as the ideal investment vehicle, because as it gets older, after a certain point it actually deteriorates. Whereas whiskey doesn’t deteriorate. So whiskey is increasingly being seen as an alternative asset class. And people rather than putting their money in the bank and getting nothing for it are looking for other places to invest the money.

“Like vintage cars, like art, like Irish whiskey. Some people here are actually spending hundreds of thousands of euro investing in Irish whiskey,” said Cooney.

Boann has 12 different types of whiskey casks in which their whiskey is matured. These include bourbon, sherry, rum and PX. Cooney hopes to sell 500 casks a year. The price of a cask ranges from €3,000 to €10,000.

“If we sell more that’s great and we probably will sell more because we’ve actually sold almost 500 casks to date,” said Cooney.

Deferred plans

The pandemic has meant the vast majority of people and businesses have had to put plans to one side. Boann is no different. 

One project for Boann that has had to be deferred due to Covid-19 is the opening of its visitor centre. The distillery has partnered with Fáilte Ireland to make the distillery part of a tourist attraction with Boyne Valley that will launch on May 21. The visitor centre is approximately 30,000-50,000 sq. ft and will take €1.5 million to build. 

Many distilleries that are opening up with visitor centres have been able to avail of the EII tax scheme. Yet, Cooney will not be using the scheme for Boann’s visitor centre. 

“The EIIS scheme has been a disappointment to us because we don’t qualify for it,” said Cooney. The company does not qualify because part of the company, Merry’s, has been trading for longer than seven years which disqualifies Boann,” said Cooney.

“It’s nearly tailor made for the distilling industry because you’re getting funding for five years or three years or four years, and that’s the time it takes to make whiskey. It would be one of those tax incentives that would be really useful to us,” he adds. 

A part from this snag, Boann’s business looks set to continue its success.