Brown-Forman Breaks Ground On Slane Castle

By Richard Thomas

Brown-Forman, the American corporation that owns Jack Daniel’s and Old Forester, followed up on their acquisition of Slane Castle whiskey in June by breaking ground on their new $50 million distillery on Wednesday, September 29.

Slane Castle, also an estate that hosts a major Irish summer music festival, was also a small Irish whiskey bottler, and one of many that was left out in the cold when the company that is now Beam Suntory bought the Cooley Distillery from the Teeling family. Cooley had heretofore been the leading supplier of stock whiskey to Ireland’s bottlers, but Beam preferred to focus Cooley’s stock on their own projects.

As a result, Slane Castle chose to pursue plans to develop their own distillery. When I met with a Slane Castle engineer in November 2014, the company was attempting to raise funds and pursue this intention privately, but several months later the brand was sold to Brown-Forman. For their part, the American drinks company wanted to get a foothold in the thriving Irish whiskey sector.

The new distillery will be cited in an 18th Century stable and other historic out-buildings on the estate, located 30 miles north of Ireland, and will be Brown-Forman’s first distillery venture located outside the United States. The brand is set for a relaunch using sourced whiskey in 2017, while the distillery itself is designed to have a potential output of 600,000 cases worth of spirit per year.