Colin Ross: Building the Heritage of Your Brand at Kinsale Spirit
Speaker 1 (00:06)
So we’re here today on the programme with Colin Ross, managing director of the conceal spirit company. How you doing, Colin? Welcome along.
Speaker 2 (00:15)
Very good, Colin, thanks.
Speaker 1 (00:18)
Great. And business going well?
Speaker 2 (00:20)
It is, surprisingly, given the current environment. Things are tipping along nicely. We’ve lots of new things happening. It’s a lot of change at the moment for us, anyway, outside the current environment. But we’re hoping that’s just going to create a bit of a pause, I suppose, in our development, rather than put a stop to any particular plans we had. Brilliant.
Speaker 1 (00:42)
And I see you’re on the moon there.
Speaker 2 (00:44)
Yes, I’m transmitting directly from the moon. One of the things during my downtime, various documentaries and fictional things about the moon. Great.
Speaker 1 (00:58)
Excellent, Colin, tell us a bit about yourself and your background.
Speaker 2 (01:04)
Well, I’ve been involved in the drinks business particularly for a very long time, but hospitality as well. So we say, going right back to college, I was actually the Heineken rep in UCC. So when I was, I suppose, 20, I started in the business working with Heineken. And when I came out of college, I did a bcom management and marketing major. When I came out, I went straight in before I even graduated, excuse me, into the position of Buckler brand manager. At the time, we had non alcoholic beer in the company and what they call the third level project manager. So I then recruited sales reps around all the colleges in Ireland, the its and so on, when that was a politically correct thing to do. Nowadays, students don’t drink, we’re being led to believe, which is, of course, I’m.
Speaker 1 (01:57)
Not sure about that, Colin.
Speaker 2 (01:58)
Yeah, but I suppose. Look, there is. I mean, I understand the reasoning behind it. Like, you don’t want to be incentivizing people who are impressionable to consume over consume. So fair enough. It’s part to drink aware, so those kind of things don’t happen anymore. But at the time, it was a very busy time for particularly Heineken and Murphy’s. And then there were brands like Coors involved as well. But Heineken had slipped back to number two in the country, so there was a drive to get more, I suppose. Recruitment get. People know, people form their habits early and they like what they like and it’s harder to shift them off a drink they like. So that was what was behind it. So I worked in that. Then I went on to Heineken, brand manager in Ireland, and then I went into export. So I was expatriated to Holland. I worked in head office in the export department in Heineken, Amsterdam. Heineken export specifically. So that got me a feel for the travel, the global distribution. And then we actually took over our distributorship in Germany and we founded a new company based in Berlin. So I was in Amsterdam for two years, Berlin for two years.
Speaker 2 (03:08)
And then I decided maybe time to do something for myself. So I bought a bar restaurant in Cork Clancy’s and I set up a nightclub there and we established a catering business. And that was it for about 13 years. And in 2010, then I decided to lease that business out. I just got tired of it. It’s a very tough business. It’s underappreciated. The public think you’re. Yes, okay. I had a nice car and that’s one of my things. And I had a reasonable house, apartment, whatever. But you work damn hard for it. And I think people see publicans driving around in their mercedes and they charge them all with the same brush. It’s a tough business. And 13 years, it’s long enough in anything. And I’d never been in the job longer than two years. So I suppose I got a bit store crazy in the end. And the recession hit and it just got not to be fun. And I was looking at 35 od employees, all getting their mortgages paid. And mine was starting to stress and I was starting to struggle to pay all my commitments. So I decided in 2009 I’d exit that business.
Speaker 2 (04:17)
So I leased out the pub in 2010. It took about a year to do it. We spun off the catering business, which is still operating well. At the moment, it’s in the hibernation, but very profitably working away. Prestige Catering Limited, and that’s run by my business partner and longtime colleague, James Grimes. So he looks after our catering business and I did a variety of things. We set up a seafood development business, new product development called ESC Food, myself and James in 2013. So I kind of worked a bit part time in the catering from 2010 onwards, late 2010, then we started the new seafood business, end of 2012, early 2013. We worked at that for a few years. It still does a little bit of business, but it didn’t hit the heights we had hoped. And I’ve done a lot of consultancy in the drinks business, own label, worked for a vodka in the States, doing some brand consultancy, guidelines, stuff like that. So I’ve always been in and out of hospitality, drinks and so on. And then about 18 months ago, well, 16 months ago, I suppose the guys in Kinsale came to me.
Speaker 2 (05:24)
So I have two partners in the business, Ernest Cantlin, who’s a publican in Cork and other businesses. But he has two well known pubs in the city centre, Electric and Soberlain, and another publican who’s the founder of the business, Tom O’Rearden, who is a very fancy cocktail gastropub in Cork called the Raven. And they were kind of running Kinsale spirit company, which was basically Kinsale gin at the time as a hobby. And they came to me and they said, look, we know your track record, we know you because you were in the licenced trade and we would have met at various things and been involved in committees and we’d like to get some. They were getting advice off me for a while because of my background and then they came along and said, look, would you like to become a partner with us in the business? And I said, look, fine, what’s on the table? I said lads, I’m not putting any money in until I see what’s going on and so on. They said no, we don’t want money, we want sweat equity, I suppose. And we became even partners, which was well worth the risk for me and it was, I suppose, worth the risk for them.
Speaker 2 (06:34)
So with that in mind then we did a big fundraise last year which was very successful and the plan was to raise enough money to become a whiskey producer, supplier, blender, call it what you want, but all of that. So distil whiskey and bottle whiskey, expand our gin, get into exports, establish a distillery, eventually a visitor centre. So all of those projects are now underway. So we’ve raised the money, we have all of our export certification ready for the states. So TTB licence, import licence, all of that’s done. Whiskey is being bottled in two weeks time. Gin is all being changed. So we now have an umbrella branding strategy across all our brands. Common elements, common bottles, some are black, some are clear. We bought our first still, which is sitting in a warehouse in Holland, but it’s bought. We have a location for the distillery. We’ve got the planning in because obviously we can’t instal the still until we get the planning. It’s on a lovely farm just outside the town of Kinsale, very near the very famous location of Charles Fort. If anybody knows, Kinsale exports are starting hopefully by July. We were planning to launch in the States, but that’s kind of a bit up in the air at the minute with the COVID crisis.
Speaker 2 (08:09)
So we’re probably going to send our first product. Well, we have sent product to the States R to the UK and Germany, but most likely the first significant market is going to be China. Because they’re kind of coming back out of it and we’ve been working on that in parallel. So there’s lots of things happening. It’s a very exciting time. We were lucky when we did our fundraise because I wouldn’t fancy trying to do it for the next six or eight months. No, we are doing another one in the next four or five months. But at least we have our kernel of capital working, capital secured. So we’ve been building our whiskey stocks all year and we have plenty availability of our blend because we’ve been working with contract partners until our actual production ourself is up and running and it’s going to take know minimum three and probably four years before any of our own whiskey is available. We’ve been working with Brian Watson, Great Northern Distillery, who’s got some fantastic product up there. And we’ve made our own blends. They’re unique to us with Brian and then we’re producing our gin with West Cork distillers.
Speaker 2 (09:18)
And again, that’s a unique 21 botanicals multi award winning. Particularly last year we had a great year with awards for Kinsale gin. So hopefully by, let’s say, December, but probably July, August, we’ll have exports for both whiskey and gin happening. And that’s one whiskey, one gin. And then we have another whiskey coming out probably towards the end of the year.
Speaker 1 (09:43)
Unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (09:45)
I have to say, you fitted an.
Speaker 1 (09:47)
Awful lot into a very short space of. Are you 104?
Speaker 2 (09:54)
Yeah. Well, I suppose the good thing when I started in Heineken, which was a great bedrock, I suppose, because I was. One of the things I was good at at the time, was liaising with different parts of the organisation. And what that did was the company recognised that and they saw that I was a good guy to get things moving along or progress things. And they promoted me a lot in my early years. And there’s a lot of me says, was I mad trying to go out on my own? Because I’d have had a very comfortable lifestyle with Heineken. But I suppose as a bug. My father was an entrepreneur, my grandfather was an entrepreneur. It’s kind of in the blood. And I suppose my initial years were extremely busy, up to 28, and then because I ran my own business and we had a nightclub, bar, catering, whatever, but I was always dipping my toes into other businesses, unsuccessfully in the main. But like, I dipped my toe into the furniture business and I dipped my toe into. I can’t even remember half of them. I ended up with the part owner of a hotel apartment complex and there’s like about ten apartments now.
Speaker 2 (11:18)
And a bottle shop in Tasmania at one stage actually was profitable. I doubled my money on that one. But these are the things you end up doing, particularly when you’re in the public eye, because in Cork. Cork is a small place and the pub I had was in the centre of Cork City and it’s still there and it’s just been. Well, unfortunately for the guys that bought it, they were doing a fantastic job and it had just reopened and they’ve been stunted a bit by this. But I’d say it’ll be one of the places that will come back well, particularly because it’s very big, so there’s plenty of room for social distancing and all of us, and they have table service already and all the things that you probably have to have, but because you’re in that kind of zone, a lot of people are in and out, a lot of estate agents, auctioneers, different business people, in and out of the place all day. It’s right next to the business part of Cork, the business district, we’ll say. So you get a lot of approaches about things and more often than not, they’re not worth your money.
Speaker 2 (12:20)
But that’s what happens.
Speaker 1 (12:22)
You sound like a man out there and hard to have a tendency to do things like that myself, to tell you the truth.
Speaker 2 (12:28)
I know, but you look, it’s easy to convince yourself of a good thing, but it’s very hard to stress test it properly, which is a big thing. I’ve learned by my mistakes, I suppose, is the way to put it. Brilliant.
Speaker 1 (12:43)
So tell me, what was the original inspiration behind Tom’s idea with the concealed spiral company?
Speaker 2 (12:50)
Yeah. Well, I suppose being a publican and Tom would have been involved. Tom now has the raven bar in Cork, which is a very cool gastro pub with very high end cocktails. Really nice place, really chilled out, nice place to go. But back in the day, Tom would have been involved in, I’d say, 15 different pubs at the same time. So he was part of a very big group. And because he’s, I suppose, the nature of the publican and the fact that he’s watching all this stuff coming in over the counter and going out over the counter all the time, he saw that, the gin thing really started to know, so he was kind of going, hang on a sec, now, I need to get in on this. So his sister, Tom has a diploma in food science, but his sister is actually a distiller. She’s a degree in distilling. So he got together with her, Cloda. And he said, why don’t we come up with a gin? So they actually ended up doing 63 different concoctions of gin. They bought one of those small, little mini stills. It’s like a little kettle, it’s copper with a little heater under it, and made a load of different gins and tested them out in the pub and said, try this, try that.
Speaker 2 (13:55)
What you think? I mean, they were all perfectly tasty products. They weren’t selling them, so it wasn’t like pochin or anything. They were just giving them out free samples, small samples, saying to people, what you think, what you think. Customers and customers came back and voted for conceal gin, as we have today. And then he went to Ernest, the other partner, and said, look, I need help with the marketing of this and give me a hand. And they went off and found a bottle and got a graphic designer and went down to West Cork, got it bottled. I suppose the true marketing, looking at the market, seeing where there’s a bit of a gap maybe, for a locally produced cork gin. And Kinsale has fantastic imagery around it. It’s a beautiful place. And Tom lives in Kinsale and has them for years. So does his sister, who was the know they were foraging around Kinsale for different botanicals for the gin. It all kind of knitted together and he said, there’s a story here. I have a product in a growing market. I mean, that’s what marketing is about. So that’s where it came from.
Speaker 1 (15:03)
Great story. And tell me, so, are you mainly selling here in Ireland or you mentioned exporting? Is there a bit of both?
Speaker 2 (15:10)
Well, at the moment, we’re, I suppose, principally selling as of today, with the current lockdown, we’re selling a lot in Musgrave and central, particularly in County Cork. We have a few on trade outlets in Dublin and a few off trade, but most of the on trade, all of the on trade are closed at the, you know, Limerick, Cork, County Cork. There are a number of, we’ll say, specialist gin bars around the country with stock, our product, but we’ve kind of focused on our own area, Munster south, excuse me, mainly cork. Some sales in London. We’ve done a deal with a very substantial group over there, but that’s all on pause between Brexit kind of stopped for a while and now Covid has stopped it again. But that will come. A couple of places in Germany, just kind of enthusiasts have the product, but the first product was actually supposed to be leaving for the states in the next couple of weeks. But unfortunately, the current COVID pandemic has kind of slowed that down. Now, I think it will happen within six months, but there’s no specific date when our distributor is going to be back up and running.
Speaker 2 (16:25)
And I suppose initially the plan was to launch in the on trade, although we have targeted 75 off trade accounts in our first launch area. And China, as I mentioned earlier, is definitely on the cards. We’ll be sending some product to China probably in July. Both gin and whiskey. So they’re the initial ones. Places like Ariantal of Dublin, duty free. Now, we do quite a bit of gin through them. The product is in the premium category, so in the normal off trade it’s around 39 euro. But, like, if you’re going duty free, for example, I think it’s 28 Cork and Dublin duty freeze. And it’s a lovely gift. It’s a very tasty bottle. It looks very well, so it’s a lovely gift. And kinsale conjures imagery and so on, so it is a very exportable product. It’s up to us not to mock it up, basically. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:27)
I was thinking there that you could take this anywhere, if you like. You could be all around the planet with this product, because conceal, as you say, is a very marketable place and very well known, especially for food. And.
Speaker 2 (17:42)
Yeah, it is. And it’s got, like, obviously down the line. We’d hope to have a visitor centre, if you know Kinsale. There’s a hotel called Hotel Kinsale and we’re between that and the rugby club on the same. To go to the hotel, you’re passing our front gate, I suppose a kilometre as the crow flies, maybe 1.5 to Charles Fort, Summer Cove, the Bullman. We’re in a great location for that kind of tourist trail as well. And Kinsale is the start of the Wild Atlantic way, which will be key in our story going forward. So there’s a lot of boxes ticked. There’s an awful lot of work to do. But, I mean, you do have to. The same way as you probably need a bit of luck, you do need to stack the deck as much as you can in your favour when you’re starting out. Otherwise it’s a very uphill battle. There are a lot of gins out there. There are a lot of whiskeys out there. Okay. Irish whiskey is in a good position. It’s protected globally. It’s a unique product. But that’s not to say that japanese whiskey isn’t fantastic, which it is, or, for that matter, loads of other whiskeys that are coming out like english whiskey is starting to make a name for itself.
Speaker 2 (19:06)
We obviously know Scotch is huge american whiskey, huge canadian. And there are a lot of markets that have been kind of dormant for a long time, like canadian whiskey that are starting to come back as well. And then you have all the taiwanese and indian and everyone is at it because it’s a very lucrative market. So there are plenty challenges.
Speaker 1 (19:28)
Absolutely. But in saying that, and I haven’t.
Speaker 2 (19:30)
Been to conceal since I was a.
Speaker 1 (19:31)
Child, I’d love to go as an adult, I think the story there that you have is unique. You said you’re the very start of the way to atlantic way and that mean you’re going to be up against a lot of big boys, big, large companies, massive competitors. But your story is that wee bit different, isn’t it?
Speaker 2 (19:51)
Absolutely. And when you have a look at, I mean, the likes of irish distillers, per Norica, they’re big players, but they’re quite benign. Like I would have dealt with in my past, particularly in the beer business with big players. And I won’t mention any particular ones, but big players who were very aggressive and they mean, okay, I was working for Heineken at the time. It’s not like we were a mini company or anything, but there was competition. Okay, like with like they were quite aggressive, but they were aggressive towards smaller brands too. Like where you like now you see microbreweries everywhere. In the old days, those taps wouldn’t survive a week on a lot of counters because the big boys would be in not necessarily saying take the tap off, but they’d put so many incentives in play that it wouldn’t be worth your while selling anyone else’s beer just the way it is. That’s the nature of business. And fortunately, the consumers have voted with their feet for more variety, which is fantastic. But when you look at the likes of Pernorica, they’re very benign, big players. So they’re always offering courses to people, help them distil.
Speaker 2 (21:03)
They’re very proactive in marketing whiskey in general, even though they do pick up 80% of what’s sold. So be it. But they’re happy enough. If you get like, we’re already feeding the scraps off the table, that’s fine. And they’re happy enough for us to take it because there’s nothing worse than getting tired of jemison and moving away from it because you can’t find anything else to drink. I mean, if someone is drinking a jemison when they go out and then they see tealing, which is a very decent competitor and great products and so on. But they might try tealing once or twice but they’ll probably go back to jemison as their regular variety keeps things alive. And when you look at the whole visitor centre thing, if we ever. Well, I mean, the plan would be to go down that road, but never say never. But that’s the plan. People leave Middleton distillery, where they go on a fantastic tour, they head for the wild atlantic way. They hit us onto clanacilti for a tour there. That’s a nice holiday or weekend or whatever. And whiskey tourism is a big deal. We had a million visitors last year in Ireland to distilleries.
Speaker 1 (22:18)
Brilliant. It sounds like something to be interested in, myself.
Speaker 2 (22:21)
Yeah. As you go around the country, then you have the place I’m mad to go to and the last time I went up it was closed, was Bushmills. And my plan is I want to stay in the Bushmills hotel, which I always go to for a drink or a coffee or something when I’m up that neck of the woods. And when I say always now, I’ve been there three times, but in all, in the last two years. But I love Bushman’s. It’s one of my favourite whiskeys and it’s just a beautiful facility. The old malt house and all that stuff there, all of that. There’s nothing stopping someone arriving to go to Middleton, maybe visit us, maybe visit clanacilti, maybe. Like if you go to Dublin, the liberties, there are four distilleries within a square and, you know, nip up to Belfast, Newton, jawbox, all of that, and then maybe go up to see the giants causeway and, you know, there’s a lot of that kind of mixed tourism happening. And particularly now with the way things are going, I’d say domestically as well, you’re going to get a lot more people travelling around Ireland like nobody is going anywhere, to Santa pans or any place.
Speaker 2 (23:31)
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (23:34)
Holidays at home. It’s going to be Donegal for us this year. No Spain, I think.
Speaker 2 (23:38)
Yeah, well, and if we got any sort of weather, I mean, beaches in Donegal, just like West Cork, has amazing beaches. Donegal has many other places. Galway. I went camping a couple of years ago with my daughter up to claddadouff near Clifton and Omi island and we stayed just on the beach and it’s spectacular. And it was raining one or two nights or whatever, but didn’t even matter. But it never rains in the pub, Colin.
Speaker 1 (24:10)
Never ends in the pub.
Speaker 2 (24:11)
Absolutely. But the locals are all worried about the rain. Like I always say, just wear a different jacket. I don’t know what you’re.
Speaker 1 (24:21)
Is provenance and sustainability important to your company?
Speaker 2 (24:25)
Provenance is very important, and that all folds back into the Kinsale story. And also the fact that we are intent on having our own distillery is part of that provenance story as well, because a lot of people are going, you’re buying it from great Northern, but we’re not making a secret of that. We’re not telling anybody. We’re called a Kinsale spirit company, we’re not called a Kinsale distillery company, we’re not pretending. We’re making our products. At the moment, we are specking our products, like all the botanicals that go into our gin are bought by us, spec by us, foraged by us. We forage four of them. For every distillation the bottles are bought, we’re buying all the parts, bringing them down to west cork distillers. They’re literally doing the distillation to our recipe, our ingredients, and putting it in our bottles, which we then ship away and so on. But we’re not pretending we’re doing it all. But for the full provenance argument, I think it’s important that we’re also distillers, that we’re not just bonders or blenders. And that’s why the whiskey story is important, even though the whiskey again, is being made to our specification.
Speaker 2 (25:34)
But it is being made in one of the largest contract distilleries in the country, great Northern. And we will start making our own whiskey, hopefully within a year, and we will eventually start selling some of that. But that whiskey may not be sold for years. I mean, we might just keep it for five or ten years or twelve years before we sell any of our own products, because our plan is always to have a consistent brand, sustainable brand image. So if we start making our whiskey, and some of it was made in great Northern, then there’s a bit made in of. You could end up with very much a hash of a product, which we don’t want to do. And in terms of sustainability, it’s very important. We’re establishing our distillery in Kinsale. There are a lot of sustainable initiatives in know. There’s certainly a drive to make kinsale plastic free, so we’re cognizant of that. We’ve bought a specific type of still that extremely energy efficient. So we’re very much on that and it would fit with our own ethos. We do plan on installing solar power on the distillery site for all of the ancillary activity and some of the water heating, because that’s boiling things up, is a big thing in the distillery and it does use a lot of energy, but you can certainly maintain a lot of temperature with solar.
Speaker 2 (27:05)
You can’t quite get it up to the heights. We’d like to maybe, but supplement any gas or whatever we need to use with solar. So there are a lot of plans. We’re also, because we’re on a farm, any spent grains and stuff will be used. There’s a very large chicken farm on the farm that we’re leasing our unit from, and a lot of the grain, spent grains will be used for chicken feed and stuff and fertiliser and other things, because we also hope to grow our own grain on the site. And we also hope to have a botanical tunnel where we’ll cultivate our own botanicals. So the things that we forage will be available all year round. Some things, obviously, we have to buy. So things like vanilla, which is extremely expensive, things like spearmint. But there are other things that we forage. Elderberries, for example. Perhaps we might cultivate them. There are other things. Lemon grass, we use lemon verbaina. There’s lots of, as I said, 21 botanicals, so it’d be nice to have some control over some of those.
Speaker 1 (28:18)
I think it’s fair to say, then, that your sustainable business, that has an interesting provenance. That was a brilliant answer. Again, I think you could build that into your story.
Speaker 2 (28:28)
Yeah, it’s part of it, but I suppose it’s a bit like spinning plates. If you want, you’ve got to decide how many you can spin at the same time and which ones of those that you definitely can’t afford to break. So we’ve got a certain marketing drive. We’re very much focused for our whiskeys around the battle of Kinsale 16 one. And there’s a lovely story there. So we’ve got a marketing drive towards that. We’ve got the whiskey gift business that I was talking about before that. We need to keep an eye on which leans into our premiumness, our giftability and all those kind of things. We’ve got our export story, we’ve got our wild atlantic way story. We’ve got our distillery visitor centre. There are lots of different strands, so it’s a matter of which one to push at what time. And I suppose, look, there’s some trial and error, there’s some knowledge from the past that we try not to repeat our mistakes from other businesses or whatever. So look, it’s very interesting time, there’s no doubt about that.
Speaker 1 (29:38)
And what success stories have you had to do, Colin?
Speaker 2 (29:41)
Well, as I mentioned just a minute ago, the whiskey gifting, albeit we only launched it at the weekend, but we had a great weekend on it, so that’s gone quite well. It’s a gifting website where you blend your own whiskey. We have a selection of different types of whiskeys up there and you can put them together and name it, and you get a customised label with your name or your father’s name or your mother’s name or whatever on it. So that’s nice, I suppose. Look, we won a world Gin award in 2018. We won five awards for the gin last year. Those are very significant. I suppose one thing about me and my own history and track record is I probably could make more money selling standard products. But I really need to have pride in my product and I need to know that it’s certainly up there as good as the best of them. So it’s very important that our products are good, premium tastes great, and that’s part of what we do with conceal gin and our new whiskey that’s coming out, as I said, around that battle of conceal idea. So our first whiskey is called Red Earl Irish whiskey, which is actually red.
Speaker 2 (30:55)
Yu O’Donnell is the character behind it. We chose Red Earl, even though historically that was a slightly different character. Well, a different character, but for reasons that will become apparent when we start to launch whiskey two and three. So we have the battle of concealed series. And again, it’s a really nice whiskey, triple casked, finished in Rioca. It’s a very fruity aftertaste, long finish. All of that’s very important and hopefully that will develop into some awards for the whiskey. The successes, securing a distributor and importer for the States. I know they’re kind of mild as of yet. Listings with major groups like Musgrave. That’s important. We did a gin event with Aldi last year just to popularise our brand. It was a two week event. They asked us to come back. We declined because we don’t want to be discounting. Not that we sold our product to Aldi at the regular price. They discounted it down to 25 euro a bottle, which from 39 is a very large discount. And it was a fantastic association and we love doing business with them, but we weren’t going to do it again because we wanted to be sure we didn’t end up standardising our brand when it’s a premium brand.
Speaker 2 (32:11)
So in terms of those kind of things. The successes are still a small bit intangible. We have our site, we haven’t got the planning yet. When we get the planning, I suppose that’s another milestone. And then to start work on the location will be another one and eventually the visitor centre and so on. So it’s still early days. Even though the company has been established for a couple of years, it’s still more or less a startup.
Speaker 1 (32:39)
You’re doing very well. And the sounds of that whiskey, oh my goodness, I’m going to have to get some. So it’s [email protected].
Speaker 2 (32:47)
I believe whiskeygift is a blending site, so our actual whiskey isn’t available there. Okay, so what we’ve done, in essence, is we’ve taken a selection of whiskeys from our contract distiller Great Northern. So I think it’s twelve we have up there. So there are triple malts, pot stills, grains, double malt. And on whiskey gift, you can go and basically decide you want to put all of the whiskeys into the bottle in 25 cl increments or whatever, or you can choose to do three or four. You can take a set and then the idea is you put the name on it. So let’s say columns whiskey or columns potion or whatever you want to call it. We give you the strength and then we ship it to that person. It might be for your grandfather or your brother or your mother or whatever. You can ship it as a gift or you can just buy a voucher for someone and then they can go on and do their own potion. So there’s lots of flexibility, but particularly now where people are struggling. Father’s Day coming up. What am I going to get somebody for Father’s Day?
Speaker 2 (33:50)
I can’t visit them. I can’t really buy anything at the moment. Well, maybe by then something else. Some other stores might be open, but you could just ship this to them and it’s a great gift and it’s just something. Look, they may drink it, they may not. It might sit on the mantelpiece forever. I know certainly from my days as a brand manager. We sponsored James Cullen, the rally driver back in the day, and we had the buckler car and he got a bottle of champagne and took all the labels off it and customised this with my name and all that. And I still have that bottle, never opened it. I’m sure it’s not drinkable, even though. But I kept that as a memento and it’s just one of those things. It’s lovely to have, obviously with whiskey gift, we’re hoping people will repeat purchase, but also somebody might decide, you know what, I’d prefer a bit more. We have a peated malt up there. I prefer a bit more peas in my whiskey and I can’t get anything I like. I’ll just buy it online.
Speaker 1 (34:55)
It’s a brilliant idea, I have to say.
Speaker 2 (34:57)
I really like the idea. It’s nice.
Speaker 1 (34:58)
Did you get any government support for the business?
Speaker 2 (35:01)
We’re actually as part of it. Sorry, I was just going to say, my partner in the business, Ernest Kentelin, has done a lot of the work on whiskey gift, because I’ve been very busy with setting up the distillation of the whiskey, the bottling and the export and all that. So we divide the tasks out between us, which is the benefits of a partnership. Tom is very much involved in the distillery site then, and getting the planning and all, you know, we’re busy between us in terms of government support. Yeah, there is some have. Obviously, we’re clients of Borbia. We’ve applied to Enterprise Ireland, the local enterprise office, for support with the website, particularly for whiskey gift, which I think we’ve got a grant coming for that. We applied to Borbia for our Covid marketing fund and we got a grant for that the other day. So, small enough, but I think it’s the tip of the iceberg, depending on how much they make available. And at least we’re on the books, though, if you will. So there’s certainly some available. And by a pure piece of faith, it turns out that I happen to have taught the irish consulate general guitar in college, because I used to teach guitar, and he’s in New York now, and he’s offered us the state offices for our launch in the States.
Speaker 2 (36:26)
So that’s brilliant. And he turns out to be a good friend of a good friend of mine, which is how I actually met him. And I didn’t even know I recognised him after the fact. All right, but I didn’t know that. But when we met, he said, absolutely, whatever you need. And that stuff is always available. Sometimes you need to know what door to knock on. But I’ve certainly met. I’ve been at a number of functions in the London embassy and those kind of things, they’re always there to help and you can always ring someone looking for a bit of market research. So it’s there. Look, at the end of the day, we also obviously have our fundraise that I spoke about. Not all of it, but most of it was through the EIS scheme. Which essentially is revenue assistance, because, okay, people are getting a tax write off on their investment, but that’s key for businesses of our type, because it allows us raise decent money, it compensates people for risk and it gives them an appropriate return and that’s very important. Brilliant.
Speaker 1 (37:34)
So essence, there’s plenty of structured help and indeed unstructured in the form of epitism, if you like. That’s one thing that I love about Ireland. It’s a village, everyone knows everyone totally. It’s a great help.
Speaker 2 (37:47)
Yeah, Ireland is very like that. And I do find, I mean, having been in business for a long time, unfortunately, you can tell by the beard how know. I don’t always necessarily agree that the local community are always going to go to their way to help you when you’re a local competitor or whatever. Like, they won’t get. I’m not saying there’s any nastiness or anything, but people do certain amount of things for competitors and friends in the business and whatever locally, and that’s normal. But what I do think is exceptional about the Irish abroad in export markets, they are very helpful above and beyond the call. And I mean, it’s very easy to say to someone, oh, give you a ring anytime, I’ll help you, I’ll give you such a number, and nothing ever happens. And I mean, that happens regularly. You get that kind of lip service. It’s a very different case when you go to talk to people in export. I find people, I mean, way above what kind of cooperation you’d expect. A friend of a friend put me on to a guy in New York when I went over there the first time back in, I think it was October, when I started the whole kind of preparing potential customers for our launch.
Speaker 2 (39:02)
And I mean, there were guys sending me Excel spreadsheets of accounts I should visit. Just like these aren’t even guys in the trade. I mean, one of these guys was in it and he sent me contact numbers, names of. You should talk to this guy and, like a description of the various outlets, completely out of his, like, not in his work environment at all. He didn’t have access to any of this information, went off and researched it because he had 20 of his favourite irish american pubs that he liked to drink in, where he said it’d be great if your whiskey was in them. And I know the owner and this is his number and why don’t you? That sort of stuff. And that was like more than once it happened. I mean, I went to Rhode Island, a buddy of a buddy was there, picked me up, drove me around, even put me up the second time I went know and literally brought me to. We found our first distributor through him all on his own time.
Speaker 1 (39:53)
Amazing stuff.
Speaker 2 (39:54)
Yeah. And I find the paddies in export are fantastic.
Speaker 1 (40:01)
Much more so than the boys at home.
Speaker 2 (40:03)
Yeah, well look, I’m probably making too big a point to that, but I don’t get people sending me Excel spreadsheets doing business with at home. But I found it very impressive and a genuine sort of. When you’re ready, give us a show. We’ll definitely take that on. There’s a much more.
Speaker 1 (40:28)
And tell me, where do you see the irish drinks industry going the next three to five years?
Speaker 2 (40:34)
I suppose. Look, it’s very hard to be predicting too much at the minute, but I would hope that plans will get back on track by the end of 2021 and this COVID pandemic kind of causes it. We’ll say, let’s say a nine month delay in things rather than a complete decimation. Obviously we have to be very careful that governments do the right things so that there are plenty of stimuli and that economies reignite. But if you look at where we were, irish whiskey was certainly the big thing, growing at a remarkable rate globally. And the plan being to have 24 million cases of irish whiskey exported out of the country by 2030. Okay, it might be 2031 now. Hopefully that will still continue. There is a premiumness issue. People aren’t going to buy very expensive whiskeys if they’re unemployed and so on, so we need to be aware of that. That doesn’t cause a lot of changes, but I think whiskey being a unique product will allow us leverage other products like Arjun and I think all things being equal, if the right stimuli are put in place, we should be okay to achieve what was expected of the industry.
Speaker 2 (42:04)
It’s very hard to predict too much, but tourism is certainly going to be affected. So that kind of has an implication for our visitor centre and those kind of plans. So that’s why it’s a bit will we, won’t we. I mean, will it be 2022 before we even embark on that? Is there any point in the next twelve months? Because will people be coming? Will Americans, who would be a lot of the visitors, Europe, Europeans, will they be travelling to go to these visitor centres? Local custom isn’t enough, so that kind of stuff may be affected. But our main business plan, the visitor centre, is a bolt on. We plan to have a blending site in Cork city centre as well. That’s a bolt on, so where people can go and learn how to blend whiskey, but call the blending room. But that’s a little bit up in the air. But the core business, marketing, distilling, distributing, blending, all of that stuff will still continue. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s like a nine month hibernation. That’s what we’re hoping for. Brilliant.
Speaker 1 (43:15)
So your aim are literally to go to the.
Speaker 2 (43:20)
I mean, ultimately the plan is to build a business. There are three of us in it. We have EIS investors on board, I suppose. Look, realistically, we’re looking seven to ten year exit from the business. Maybe whiskey gift might be kept or maybe not. It depends on what comes to the table. But ultimately, to build strong enough brands that they’ll stand and maybe tap into a bigger company’s distribution network, maybe form a strategic partnership down the line with them and then perhaps sell up, we’ll see. We’re very excited. I love the business, but at the same time, I don’t see myself being 70 and running it either. I don’t think there’s necessarily a family thing that it’s going to be left to my daughter or whatever. I don’t think that’s the plan. I think it’s an exit down the line. So it’ll be interesting and I think, okay, hopefully the world has learned a few things by the last, what’s happened in the last few months, and there’ll be plenty of hindsight and things could have been done differently. And I’m sure we all have our own opinions on that. I know I have my own opinions on what could be done or shouldn’t be done or might be done.
Speaker 2 (44:45)
But look, let’s see. I’d say with any look, it’s nothing more than a pause, a blip. A big blip, but a blip.
Speaker 1 (44:58)
So tell me then lastly, Colin, where can the customers reach you? Here’s your chance to plug all the mean.
Speaker 2 (45:06)
Online is obviously a very easy way. So we have our kinsale spirit. Facebook, Instagram, kinsalespirit.com is our main website. Whiskey gift is another one. We will have our location in Kinsale down the line. We’re available online all the time, so that’s probably the easiest way. We’re available, as I said, in the likes of value, you know, celtic whiskey shop, places like that online. We do a lot of our online sales with Aaron Hampers, Aaron gift store. So they do our online shipping and everything. So we have a partner there because it just makes sense to do that. And we have a shop online as well, so you can actually buy at the moment, Kinsale gin on our website and you will be able to buy whiskey. And we have a lovely gift hamper as well. So the easiest thing for anyone looking for anything, as you know, nowadays, is just to google it. And Kinsale spirit, Kinsale Gin will find us and down the line then as soon as it’s launched. Irish whiskey.
Speaker 1 (46:17)
Brilliant. Well, Colin, that was absolutely fantastic and thank you very much for coming onto the show and we wish concealed spread company all the best for the future.
Speaker 2 (46:26)
Cheers. Thanks very much.
Want to discover more from our Amazing Food and Drink Summit? Check out Harry Kennedy from The Carlow Brewing Company discussing the benefits of exporting.