Niche Drinks To Return Distilling to Derry County, Ireland

By Richard Thomas

Niche Drinks, the independent drinks company based in Derry County, Ireland, is set to introduce a new whiskey brand prior to breaking ground on what will become Derry’s first whiskey distillery in decades, according to the Derry Journal.

Construction on the new distillery is set to begin in Campsie in summer 2015, with hopes of producing the first new make whiskey in winter 2016. For now, the company is blending and bottling whiskey in its existing bottling plant for its Quiet Man brand. This follows the tried and true path, used in both Ireland and the U.S., of building up a brand name by bottling before starting production. Even so, the bottling of Quiet Man in Campsie marks the first whiskey produced in the area since the Watts Distillery closed 1921.

Niche Drinks joins a growing list of companies who either have opened or have plans to open new distilleries in Ireland. Whiskey-making in Ireland had shrunk to only two distilleries by the 1980s, when John Teeling remodeled the Cooley Distillery. He followed on that twenty years later by reviving the historic Kilbeggan distillery, and since then a handful of new distilleries have begun operation. If all the new projects achieve fruition on schedule, Ireland should have close to 20 distilleries producing whiskey by the end of 2016.