BRC S2 E12 Redefining the Irish Spirits Experience with a Traditional Spin.

00:00:00
Hey, Dave. Nice to meet you. Great to meet you. We're here at your bar bar 1661. It's poochiene bar.

00:00:06
It's won a few awards. Tell us about the the start of the bar. How did you come up with the idea and what is the the purpose of the bar and what's the reason behind the name? Sure thing. So I'll do the name first.

00:00:20
Okay. Because that's the one that always confuses people. So we're here to celebrate Pochin. That's what we are. We're that with a flagship for Irish putchin.

00:00:26
Globally at this stage, I hope 1661 is the year they banned it. So until then, whiskey and Putchin very much ran side by side. It was just that people made putchin at home. And then the British brought in new tax laws and licensing laws that anybody who wanted to make Spirit had to declare what they made and pay the revenue. Since 1661.

00:00:46
Yeah. Conceptually why we're here, I guess if you want something done right, you got to do it yourself. I've been a bartender my whole life, always worked in hospitality, and I moved to London in 2011, and I opened a bar over there called Shabeen in 2012, early 2012. That was where I got into Pachin, and we were the first ones to kind of put a spotlight on the category and try bring it into contemporary cocktail culture. But I brought out my own brand, the brand you can see here, Bourne, I brought that out while I was in London and I was running the bar.

00:01:17
I was doing that. I got involved with a great incubator for Spirits to really get going, but I was having all these successes. I mean, they were small successes. Everything in putchin is small, but for me, they were major successes because I was new to having a brand. So in London, we were getting great listings, both retail on trade, great cocktail bars, using the spirit, people really embracing it.

00:01:37
And then in Ireland, I just couldn't give it know, and I knew a lot, a lot of bartenders in Ireland. Everybody was really slow to get behind the category. I think we got unlucky that the category started gathering momentum with a few producers just as the gin bubble really kicked off. So it was just this frustration that I was having great success internationally, but in our home country where it should sell, we couldn't give it away. So in 2017, I decided, you know what?

00:02:05
Maybe a brand is one part of the business. But I was so good at this when I had a bar that specialized in it, that maybe we should do a pop up bar in Dublin and see what the reaction know? I know the opportunity is there, but maybe the kind of medium or the platform to promote it was wrong. So came back and I did a six week pop up, and it was just so super successful. It created a whole load of hype around the category.

00:02:28
And people were talking about radio, television, we were in the Broadsheets, we were all over the internet. So it managed to create more hype in six weeks as a bar than I kind of had in six years as a brand in Know. So, yeah, it was just, look, decision made, I got to come home, I got to open a permanent bar. And that's where I teamed up with John Ralph, who owns, you know, and we said, like, John said to me, what type of bar do you want to open? I said, If I'm moving back from London, I'm only coming back to open the best cocktail bar in Ireland.

00:02:58
And I think Putchin needs know, it can't be spit and sawdust, it can't be a basement, dirty basement. It's got to be classy and it's got to really change people's perceptions. And I think in three and a half years, we've definitely done that. Fantastic. So which was the first award you won?

00:03:13
We won Best cocktail bar in Ireland. We won a load of awards in one night, so we'd actually in one night? One night. One big night. It was my birthday as well.

00:03:22
First of was, it was almost like the whole thing was made for me. It was funny, but we took a long time to get going here. It was six or eight months. First six months were tough. There was a few new openings and it's a rough part of town and it was risky for people to come up here.

00:03:39
So the night we won those awards, we won like, best cocktail bar, best new bar, best Bar Team, best Bartender, best something else. We got five. So it was a real seal of approval and while a lot of people had heard about the bar, the industry definitely embraced us from day one. But a lot of the Dublin drinkers had heard about the bar and that was enough of a seal of approval for them to go. Right, I'm going to go up and check this place out.

00:04:02
Yeah, cool. So tell me about your pouchin here. Can we taste a little bit of that? You can, of course. We broke out the special edition for you, Carrie.

00:04:09
This is an old one. There's not many of these knocking around, but these were in La Freud Casks. I don't think I'm supposed to say that, but they were in Islay Casks. That begins with an L and ends with an OIG. So we use I make this up with Ecklenville Distillery.

00:04:24
You said you're in Cologne. It's not far up the road on the Ards Peninsula as the crow flies. But Ecklenville are there since 2014, officially. I met them in 2013. They grow and malt all their own.

00:04:37
Barley supercraft distillery. Not a small place either. They can do some really nice volume. But when I first met them, I was looking for a partner who believed what I believed. And I have no interest in just doing a generic spirit or a generic bar.

00:04:50
Everything I do, I want it to be to the best of our abilities. And these guys share that same ethos. So we use malted, barley grown and malted on site. We use a little bit of potato. And in this one we even use beet molasses.

00:05:02
Like sugar beet molasses? Yeah. And then ten week rest, which is the max you're allowed to do in pochin, in smoking LaFroy. Can say. I don't really smell the smoke on here.

00:05:10
Subtle, I'm sure. You'll feel it. You'll feel it? Yeah.

00:05:18
Oh, wow. It's like a roasted potato. There you go. Yeah. Really, really tasty, really creamy, really earthy.

00:05:26
Like a big buttery potato. Yeah. And then that subtle smoke. You definitely get the iodine. Go to a potato bar, you're in one.

00:05:33
Welcome.

00:05:36
There's not a lot of people use potato, even in America. People, when they hear pochin like the Irish are the worst offenders. People say, oh, it's potato, potato spirit. It really, really wasn't like we were making spirit in Ireland for at least 400 years. Some people say 1000 years before the potato even rocked up from South America.

00:05:54
So we were a barley grown nation. It was always grain and then potato through, that illegality. It was illegal for 336 years. So people had to get smart and they had to take some risks and they had to use what was available. And then you also had distillers who were just trying to be know there's a great brand, you know, Mickel uses the bog bean in his spirit.

00:06:16
That was his great great six times removed, 6th generation grandfather put this bog bean in it. But they would have done that back in the day as people wouldn't have been able to catch the flavor. And what is that? What's he done? What is a bog bean?

00:06:29
Bog bean, I mean, pork can tell you better. It's a wee reed that grows in a bog under the water. You pop it open, there's a couple of beans in the top of it. But that flavor, remember, all the bottles would have been blank. There was no branding on anything.

00:06:42
So to know it was Mickel's puchin, it would have had that familiar flavor and it meant nobody else could try to recreate it and mirror your successes. So what's the original recipe for original mean? Where does anyone know? Nobody knows. No.

00:06:56
Like most of the bad stuff in life, nobody ever wrote it down. We'd have a very different history if they wrote down the bad as well as the good. But yeah, look, it was definitely barley, it was definitely malted. It most likely would have been peded. A lot of smoke going around.

00:07:10
Obviously Irish whiskey took that out and put you in, followed suit. But the oldest one I have, when's that from 1840s, there was some bottles pulled out of a house in County Antrim. Oh, wow. Yeah. Stunning story.

00:07:21
Philan O'Connor will know more about that than me, but somebody gave me one of those. They only exist in the spirits industry, like those little one CL bottles. Why is there a ten mil glass bottle? It's because the liquid is that precious. You're only getting ten mil.

00:07:33
Exactly. But, yeah, it was pulled out of a wall of an old house. It was super, super heavily peded and was way more similar to something coming out of Ilay than I'd ever seen in illegal pochin in Ireland. But what an amazing view into the past that those bottles even showed up. Were they clear?

00:07:51
There was a little golden hue to it like that. It definitely wasn't whiskey colour, but it had that subtle straw. Straw color, yeah. And it was in the wall. It was in the wall.

00:07:59
It was in the wall. How many bottles were there? I think there was a dozen bottles or so and they really got split around and Rowanco had some. It was Rowanco gave to me, yeah. It's a stunning thing to have, because they did a lot of analysis on it to really try to find out what it was made from and what that match bill would have been.

00:08:17
And did it have a label on. It or was it nothing on it? Nothing on it, no. Were they renovating the house and they just found it? I think so.

00:08:25
It's a long time since I've even heard the story, but I think it was that somebody knocked down a drywall. People would have stashed put you in all the time. You weren't keeping it out in the open air. And if you had twelve bottles, you were probably selling it. You weren't buying twelve for yourself.

00:08:39
Maybe you were. Maybe I've done it many a times, so maybe it was it. That's funny. So tell me how you and John Ralph got put together in this project. We're really lucky with putchin in that I got to take some credit because I pushed it, but all the producers know each other.

00:08:57
I'd have all their numbers on my phone. I'd call them all fairly regular. I'd call a lot of them friends. And just because the category is so small and there's zero government support, there's zero big major companies involved. So we're all very small, craft, independent.

00:09:14
I think we're the next gen and doesn't have the huge barriers to entry that whiskey does. So for me, it's a bit more of an exciting crew or involved. And a lot of people, you can see that they're not doing it for financial reasons, they're doing it because they really see the opportunity of our national spirit and try push it out. Like, if I was a money guy, I would have sold gin back in the day. I would have sold Irish whiskey.

00:09:33
I've stuck with Put gin because I want to see this through. Most of the producers are like know. So me and John, he reached out to me after the success of the pop up, and I remember I'd gone traveling just after we closed it. Caught up with him in London maybe six or eight weeks after, and put our heads together. And he wanted to see what the plan was with this great platform that had been created.

00:09:54
And I said, yeah, a permanent bar, but I'm still in London, so maybe we'll do another pop up. Another pop up. And then we said, you know what. Let'S just do so he's he's a major investor then. Yeah, he was the first.

00:10:05
And him and Shane Long have another business partner who's an ex craft brewer. Well, he's still a craft brewer, actually. He just has a new one. But he started Franciscan well, down in Cork. US three would be the most active.

00:10:17
I run the day to day, but they're behind the scenes with me. Very cool. And then did John already have Mad March hair out when you guys started this? John had madmar's hair out. He did indeed.

00:10:30
He had that. He had a few other brands as well. But John like me, he just really believes that Pochin has its day. It really, really has its shot. So, yeah, John had manmart's hair.

00:10:40
He had a number of other brands as well. But I think he just really believes what I believe in, that Putchin's due its day in the know. It's such a tough nut to crack, but we know there's a lot a lot of pieces have to be put together to create one big pie. So if you think I have Born and he has Mama Chair, that's cool. We're craft spirits and we're in niche retailers and we're in niche bars appealing to 5% of drinkers.

00:11:05
This bar was definitely like, I don't think anything has done what this bar has done for Pochein. Winning the awards we won, winning Ireland's Best Bar, which we won this year. Nobody could ever argue with it again that Putchin has a shot. So, yeah, I think if you look at we've got to solve this giant puzzle for Putchin. And not every brand or medium, we have appeals to everybody.

00:11:31
So we did the two brands, which are Mama Chair and Bon. They're separate companies, but they appeal to a niche clientele. You're talking 5% of drinkers, craft liquor stores, craft bars, people who are into booze. This bar, this was probably the most successful thing that happened to Pache. Our house drink here, the Belfast coffee, it just took off when we opened.

00:11:54
We'll have to make you a Belfast coffee, but that is now being replicated all over Ireland. It's in the UK. We've seen it in France, I saw it in the Czech Republic. It's popped up in America in multiple cities. And we really see that as Pachein's Margarita moment.

00:12:09
That's a signature cocktail that I've done hundreds of cocktails with. Not just my own brand, all the know, but the ease of understanding it's. What is it? It's an Irish coffee, but instead of whiskey, we use Pachin. Instead of hot coffee, we use cold brew.

00:12:23
It looks the same. It tastes not too similar. One's hot, one's cold. Why is it named Belfast? Well, there's a few reasons.

00:12:31
One is my distillery, Ecklenville, it's just outside Know. So I see Bond's home city as Belfast. That's what started it. But I think really there was a few names thrown around and things like The Real Irish Coffee or Irish Coffee Number Two or Economara Coffee. And I feel know, when you come out of Ireland, they don't really mean a lot to other people.

00:12:54
Whereas a city like Belfast, it's globally known, it's a capital city, it might have some bad memories with it, that it's not always known for the right reasons. But for me, it has the Troubles. The Troubles. But we put them behind us, I hope. But for me, Belfast, it has the same grit in its teeth that the spirit like Pachein has the same notoriety.

00:13:14
It's a little bit rock and roll, it's a little bit edgy. So when doing the Pachein drink, belfast Coffee just rolled off the tongue in it. Tell me about your menu over there. That's the biggest, nicest menu I've ever seen. Thanks very much.

00:13:30
It says staunchly Irish and fiercely independent. Yeah. Like everything I do in this bar, I'm a bit of a control freak and a bit of a perfectionist. But like I said already, everything we try and do, we try to do it to the absolute best of our abilities. Okay, you have the island embossed in the back.

00:13:46
Yeah, it's beautiful. But what we wanted to do was we're still trying to prove to people how amazing a spirit putchin can be. So everything we're trying to do in this bar and how we present putchein is at the top of its game. So we spent a lot, a lot of time on this menu. It's actually based on historic dates from 1661 up until now.

00:14:08
Historic dates in Irish drinks. But we didn't want to write a history book or we didn't want to write, this is the Gospel of Irish Booze. So we just focused on dates that relate, that influence the staff and that actually excite our staff. So, obviously, back in 1661, we start with the Belfast Coffee, but there's a few lovely ones on. When pottsill whiskey was invented, foynes Airport, when it created the Irish Coffee, the first ever cocktail bar in Dublin, which we found out.

00:14:35
Amazing bit of history. No one's ever talked about it, but those little dates inspire the drink. And then our usual we work with all craft producers and pochin is the majority of the menu. Yeah, that's great. And today, is there a legal recipe that you have to have or a minimum aging or processing?

00:14:54
What is the legal tender for poaching. I'm normally the one to ask, but I'm so bored of that conversation that I don't get involved. There was actually a meeting this morning that I said I'd come to, first one in maybe six I'd come to, but I didn't bother. They've been talking about this recipe for ten years and the ones I remember is, okay, we can use grain, we can use potato, we can use molasses, we can use whey. For some reason, it's very broad and I can see why people have a problem with it.

00:15:22
But I was in the meetings ten years ago and now there's a whole movement to get it changed and updated. And for me, I'm like, the government is facilitating this, or some government body. I still don't know what they do. They're facilitating these meetings and I'm like, ten years into this industry, I've opened two bars, I've done three brands, little and Green. I'll tell you in about in a minute, because I didn't get to it.

00:15:42
I did the Belfast coffee, I've done so much for putchin, and then I have to go down to meet these failed politicians to talk about what we should do with the category. I'm like, but you're doing nothing and you've done nothing for ten years, and you guys can all fight about what you think it should be, or we can just crack on and sell the stuff and keep a positive light on it and talk about the future and not the past. So I get so frustrated with them. I don't understand politics, I don't think anybody does, but I just have to step out of those things and say, you know what, you guys just do your thing and if you change a rule and it affects my day, I'll just figure out a way around it. I'll just break it because I'm a potchein maker, not a whiskey maker.

00:16:20
So it's in our blood.

00:16:24
How about a Belfast coffee? I'll make you Belfast coffee. I've got to tell you about Little and Green as well. Yes, because that was that puzzle we're trying to solve. The brands are one thing, the bar appealing to everybody, but we've just done a really cool new brand, Little and Green, which is our cross street here, very American lingo.

00:16:40
We don't really speak like that in Ireland, but America is going to be a big play. So that's 1st Reel Entertainment or sorry, that's 1st Reel Entertainment. And that's 1st Reel Entertainment. So the cross street, Little and Green, it's Ortiges, which are obviously on fire now, but it's canned potchy and cocktails. So we're really trying to appeal to that younger demographic, that kind of 21 to 28 year olds.

00:16:59
This bar gets kind of 30 plus 30 to 50 is our age group. So how do we normalize this spirit? And how do we, when they do reach cocktail age and they reach an age where they want to go to bars like this? How do we stop them coming up to the bar saying, so what's Podching? Because again, ten years in, you're like, all right, I mean, I'll tell you if I have to, but yeah, the.

00:17:20
Thousandth time, can you just hand them the phone? Here's the video. Here's the video, watch the video, listen to the podcast and come back in. Yeah, but yeah, little and Green is super exciting. It's going stateside.

00:17:29
I think it'll make more of an impact than maybe any of the standalone brands can, because it's more mass appealable. But again, it's like trying to solve a huge, big puzzle, and we've only a couple of pieces on the board. So this is a secondary brand that you have? Or is this a secondary brand with John Ralph? So me and Intrepid spirits partnered up with two flavors at the minute.

00:17:50
One is made with Bond, one is made with Man March hair. Nice. Super fruity, super nice. 5% alcohol. They're super smashable, as we say over here.

00:17:57
They'd be one for a sunny day or a festival day at the and. Have they debuted here at all? They have debuted here. Okay. Yeah.

00:18:04
And how are the sales? Sales are good. Sales are really good. Yeah, they've been really happy. It's been really well received.

00:18:08
And the right people are drinking. It John's company. They run the day to day of the brand. But finally, I have a brand that I don't need to log in for the Instagram account, which I'm so happy about, but I see it and I see people who are the exact target audience we spoke about three years ago when we first started talking about doing it. They're way younger than come into this bar, and they're people I have never seen.

00:18:32
Drinking put you in before. So it's a massive win for everybody, for the whole category. That's great. Okay, let's get drinking. Let's get drinking.

00:18:40
Let's get drinking. Okay. The Belfast Coffee, the House drink at 1661, something we are definitely famous for, bought, actually started as a Bond drink. I did this with a friend of mine for Bond number of years ago, but it was only when we took over this bar that it really kicked off. So, again, I said earlier that I think this can be our margarita moment for Pachin.

00:19:00
I really believe that because you can do all the cocktails you want, but if people can't understand and relate it to something else, it's very hard to introduce a new spirit. So everybody knows an Irish coffee. Everybody's had an Irish coffee. This is an Irish coffee. But instead of hot coffee, we use cold brew, and instead of whiskey, we obviously use put gin.

00:19:18
So for the sake of your listeners, I'll go in American measures, and we're going to start with half an ounce of rich sugar syrup. So that's your Demera. Yeah, we're going to use 2oz of cold brew coffee. Nice, strong cold brew coffee. We actually use a really traditional coffee being here.

00:19:39
We do a cold brew for our Irish coffee as well and bring it back up to temperature. But that's quite an artisanal local roastery. This is a lot more classic in style. Nice, rich, heavy, cold brew. And then we're just going to use 1oz of putchin.

00:19:52
So half an ounce, 1oz two ounce. Super simple recipe. We're going to ice up our mixing glass and we are going to give that a good stir.

00:20:08
So you've never had one? No. But you've heard of its legacy? I heard of it, like, two days ago. No, it really took off.

00:20:15
It's become a ritual with this bar, you know, that you're almost like when you come in, take your seats, can we get two Belfast coffee? And the menu, you know what you're having the second you walk in the door. You can savor it if you want, but normally it's a two or three hitter and you're good to go. Nice bit of dilution in there. And then just strain that out into an Irish coffee glass, leaving about a finger of room for double cream.

00:20:41
What do you guys call double cream again? Thickened cream, rich cream. Oh, probably whipped cream. Whipped cream, okay. You want to keep it a little bit runny and just so it floats really nice and you can drink through the cream is the aim.

00:20:53
And get out that lovely coffee underneath. There we go. And then, like all good Irish coffees, a grate of fresh nutmeg on top is the star of the show and voila, the Belfast coffee. Beautiful.

00:21:15
Hi, Rupert. How are you? I'm very well. You? Good.

00:21:18
So I have interviewed your cousin in the past, Jonathan Egan, and I'm here in Ireland at bar 1661, and I was told I must come see Rupert to find out more about the daily comings and goings of what goes on with Rupert's whiskey with Egan's whiskey. So I know that your cousin is based in the States. That's right. So I feel like you're going to have more hands on stories to tell. Well, hopefully, yeah.

00:21:44
All right, so let's start off with what's your whiskey journey like? What brought you to being part of this whiskey company? So I'm one of those slightly old souls who has been drinking Irish whiskey, I suspect long before is fashionable to do. So a lot of the drinks that you'll see in this bar back behind you, the Potsill whiskeys, are now enormously expensive. That wasn't always the case when they were the sort of drinks preferred in dusty old bars, drunk by dusty old men.

00:22:16
And I had always had a fascination in the drink and then subsequently the industry. And I was living in London and decided in the fullness of time with a young family and my wife is also from Dublin, that we wanted to come back home to Ireland. And I thought, well, what better thing to do than to try and try and kind of raise the Titanic that was Egan's Whiskey. My dad is from Tullamore, that's where he was raised. He left Tullamore, which is where Egans whiskey started.

00:22:47
He left there in his early twenty s. And Egans as a business went into voluntary liquidation in 1968. And it's one of those events that when my dad describes it really looks like he's going to cry when he talks about it, his heart looks broken. And I was sort of given an opportunity to map out myself a career for the next 20 or 30 or 40 years, however long I'm on this earth for. So I thought, well, better thing to do than to start this process.

00:23:18
And I went about trying to trademark the Egan's name, but then unbeknownst to me, my cousin Johnny had already started that process and we engaged in this sort know, Raoul and Munsden versus Captain Falcon Scott race at the South Pole. Although I didn't know it and he didn't know it. And then eventually it came to pass that I was in Tullamore on an Irish Whisky Society outing. We were visiting the new Tullamore Geo distillery and I called an IP lawyer, an intellectual property lawyer in Dublin. I said, look, I want you to do a bit of work on this for me if you could.

00:23:57
And he said, look, I'm going to stop you there because I'm already working for cousins. And I was know, and it was the sort of second event of another Egan having his heart broken in Tullamore. And my dad was just looking at me and he was kind of shaking his head and I thought, okay, well, what are we going to do? And he said, look, why don't you try and find out who these guys are? You never know their motives.

00:24:18
Did you never meet him before? I had never met him before. Oh wow, yeah, I'd never met him before. Now the story is getting interesting. So I thought, okay, well, what will we do?

00:24:25
And dad said, look, I'll reach out, we'll find out who this guy is, we'll make sure they're reasonable men and they can be communicated with and dealt with. So when we stood that up, we met me and my dad and John Egan, my third cousin, and John Ralph, one of his best friends and one of the founders as well of Egan's Whiskey. And we met and became pretty clear, Kerry pretty early that they seemed, know, really nice men to work with and their heart was in the right place for the brand, they wanted to do the right thing for it. Johnny was kind know, massively enthusiastic about the history of the Egans family and I thought, okay, well there's no point crying over spilt milk or spilt whiskey, let's just see if we can work something together. I had already started doing a diploma in Distilling from the Institute of Brewing Distilling.

00:25:20
So I met a guy called James Swann. I'm not sure if you've ever come across put I was put in contact with James Swan by a guy called Fionon O'Connor. Fionon has written this potsilla whiskey will. Be here later today. Oh, will he?

00:25:35
So Moynahan is a good friend of mine, and he put me in touch with James, with Jim, god love him. And he said, look, if you want to be serious about this industry and you want to do something, in the long term, you're going to have to bring something to the table. More than just kind of a story and association with a familial background. You're going to have to know your product and you're going to have to own it. And if I was you, I would go and do a diploma in Distilling, and that takes place in Scotland.

00:26:04
And if you can get on a course taught by a chap called Brian Eaton, you should definitely do that. So after a certain amount of research and convincing my wife that my time was best served living about a third of the year in Scotland, which was a challenge in and of itself. But when I passed that hurdle, I started on the, you know, three years later, sitting alongside a bunch of chemical engineers and process engineers from Diageo. For the most part, I received my diploma. And whilst that process was ongoing, I started working with Johnny.

00:26:40
And as a know, Egan's never had we never had our own distillery. So we used to take the best spirit, mature it, blend it and bottle it. And that was always the idea. We didn't want to pretend that we were something that we were not because that's dishonest. And it also isn't a particularly interesting story.

00:27:01
What we wanted to do, we wanted to recreate in as much as possible, given the modern constructs and constraints that we were under, exactly what Johnny's great great grandfather and my great great great grandfather used to. So the company was formed in 1852. P and H. Egan. Patrick and Kerry Egan.

00:27:20
I'm five generations down from Kerry, and Johnny, who you've met is five generations down from Patrick. And you guys never met before that? We never met, no. And now we communicate a few times a week.

00:27:39
Men don't make friends very easily in their 40s. If I haven't known a guy since I was, like, three and a half, quite frankly, he's unlikely to be a friend of mine. But that wasn't the experience that Johnny and I had. And I was telling you before that he and I are on our way out to Japan together in December to sell this really fascinating bottle of whiskey and really looking forward to spending more and more time with each other. And I'm going to go to Chicago and visit him in the new year.

00:28:06
So when you approached him and said, hey, I found out you're trying to do the same thing as I am and apparently we're related. What was his reaction?

00:28:15
He tried to do a good impression of a guy who hadn't done a little bit of digging on who I was. He had done some, yeah, he had done some. So he knew who I was, he knew who my dad was and his dad and my dad are cousins. Oh, yeah. They knew each other from growing up, but they hadn't seen each other in, I should think 20 or 30 years okay.

00:28:39
Since my dad left Tullamore. So, no, we didn't know each other well and now we know each other very well. And that's a nice story. And are you an Egan also? I'm an Egan.

00:28:51
So your last name is Egan? Correct. Nice. Okay. Yeah.

00:28:53
So my son has his eye on being the 7th generation involved in the Egan's whiskey business. But knowing what I do about how more skilled women are in tasting and blending, perhaps it'll be my daughter, but that remains to be seen. But for the time being it's six generations and Johnny represents one side and I represent the other. That's awesome. So how many expressions do you have out?

00:29:18
Right.

00:29:22
Know, we have different sort of sections of, you know, starting them from the least expensive. We have a vintage grain, which is basically an eight year old single grain. There's very few single grain categories in anything apart from Irish whiskey. We have a no age statement, single molt. Then it starts to get really interesting.

00:29:43
So we have well, the first one was Centenary, which was a limited edition release put out a couple of years ago to commemorate the hundred years passing of Kerry, my great great great grandfather. And that is a grain malt blend finished in EXO Cognac casks, French limousine casks. It's a fantastic whiskey. You get this big bang of French oak off it and it's really well balanced. And then there's the Legacy series as well.

00:30:18
Go on to that in a second. But we have a whiskey out called Fortitude, which is not experimental, but there are very few Irish single malts that are matured exclusively in sherry casks. This is one of them. It tends to be something that a whiskey would live its last six months or twelve months in. So it's definitely for lovers of sherry.

00:30:41
If you don't like sherry to whiskeys, this is not going to be your go to pour. I think it's fantastic. The one that we're really happy with is Endeavor. So that's just out now and that's four different casks. So virgin American oak, bourbon, what are the other two?

00:31:03
Kind of escapes me right now, but that's going to be a great whiskey and that's really popular. There's sherry in that as well. And then we move away from those onto the more expensive ones. We have Legacy one, two, three and four. And there's kind of an interesting story behind those because they are older single malt whiskeys, and they're very difficult to get your hands on those.

00:31:28
So Legacy One, which was a 2015 single malt that was just ex bourbon that sold out in kind of 20 minutes the following year, we had Legacy Two, and that was an embanls cask, which is a French fortified wine cask. That cask well, there was several of those casks. We let one of them go for another few years longer and it is now turned 20 years old. Wow. It turns 20 years old on October 31.

00:31:57
So still a few days away. And that will be the whiskey that we bottle and bring with Johnny and I to Japan. So that is to commemorate 170 years since PNH. Egans was incorporated in 1852. 170 bottles at a relatively goy price of ¥170,000 a bottle.

00:32:21
Wow. And that's all sold. The Japanese have really embraced the product, are really attracted by the familial connection with the story. And Johnny and I are on our way out to meet some of our key accounts and key contacts in Tokyo and Sapporo. That's great.

00:32:40
Yeah. And then we have legacy three and legacy four.

00:32:46
So they are the more expensive ends. But those casks but we own them. As of several years ago, we wouldn't wouldn't be able to afford to buy them. I think we could sell them at a higher price, but we're happy to do the right thing. That's great.

00:33:11
Now you have your distilling degree. Do you plan to do any of your own distilling or are you guys just going to be bonded? Bonded? No, I don't think there's a plan to do any of our own distilling. It's not what our company used to.

00:33:27
We spend a lot of time sitting down and being very clear as to where we want the story to go and what we want the limit to be. And we always return to the same thing, and that is that we want to do what our forefathers did. We don't want to pretend that we're doing more and we certainly don't want to do less. We want to be right at that frontier. And for us, that is the bonding business.

00:33:52
Bonding, blending and bottling. And that's exactly what we do. And do you do the blending.

00:34:00
You know, good fun. Our whiskeys come from Great Northern, I should say that a really lovely man and a great supporter of Egan's Whiskey. Their head distiller brian Watts. Very tragically. Brian was a lovely man and really enjoyed going up there and going into his kind of his adult equivalent of a Willy Wonka chocolate factory.

00:34:27
And it just had this huge bench with 40 different whiskeys on it. And Brian was a great guy to spend time with. And I always used to find it sort of frustrating trying to get a hold of them over email it's because I realized when you went up there, they gave you so much of your time and they seemed to kind of encourage that, and he'll be sorely missed. And I really enjoy the blending side of it. If I'm going to have a full day of blending, I make sure that I don't drive up, that.

00:34:59
We think about our transport home, and we just kind of embrace the day that's in it. And it feels very like something that would have been done 100 and 5170 years ago, and there's a lovely historical echo that comes from that. And I don't want to confuse the story or muddy the waters with starting to distill it's. It's a different skill, and it's one that I'm very happy that I feel. I would have an idea about what knobs to turn if I was put in a distillery, but not something that features in my history, so I don't want it to feature in my future.

00:35:44
Well, that's fantastic. Thank you so much. That's my pleasure. Thank you. Thank.