Cooley Distillery – Irish whiskey revival

Overview

When John Teeling fired up Cooley in 1987, it was the first new independent distillery in Ireland in more than a century. He had converted a decommissioned state-owned plant at Riverstown, on the Cooley Peninsula in north County Louth, and set it against the grain of Irish whiskey at the time: where the big houses insisted on triple distillation and no peat, Cooley went double-distilled and, in Connemara’s case, openly peated. It’s now owned by Suntory Global Spirits and runs as a working production plant.

That last point matters if you’re planning a visit. The distillery itself is an industrial site and doesn’t open its doors for tours. But a short walk away, the Cooley Whiskey Visitor Centre runs tastings and tours by appointment, more on which below.

The revival

By the early 1970s Irish whiskey had all but collapsed, from thousands of distilleries down to a handful. Teeling, who had written about the industry’s decline, set out to reverse it. He took over a government-owned facility at Riverstown that had been built to turn potatoes into industrial alcohol, and within a couple of years had refitted it with column stills for grain whiskey and copper pot stills for malt. Today the plant runs two pot stills alongside three column stills, and the first new spirit ran off them in 1989.

Cooley brought peated whiskey back to Ireland after decades without it, and picked up the awards to match: more than 300 medals over the years, including European Distiller of the Year in 2008 and 2009, the IWSC’s Distillery of the Year in 2008, and Malt Advocate’s Distillery of the Year in 2010. Beam Inc bought the distillery for US$95 million (about €71 million) at the end of 2011, and Suntory in turn bought Beam in 2014. The Teeling family went on to open their own distilleries in Dublin and Dundalk, but Cooley is still the plant that restarted the whole story.

Visiting: Martin’s Bar and Kilbeggan

There’s a common misconception that there’s nowhere to visit at Cooley. There is, just not the working distillery. About 100 metres from the gates, at Martin’s Bar in Riverstown, the Cooley Whiskey Visitor Centre runs tours and tastings of the Cooley range. It has to be booked in advance, and it keeps the pub’s hours: Monday to Friday from 1pm, weekends from noon, both until late.

If you want a full working-distillery tour rather than a tasting, the brand points you to its sister site, the Kilbeggan Distillery in County Westmeath, about ninety minutes’ drive south-west. Kilbeggan has been licensed since 1757, and its tour takes in a genuinely old working distillery along with tastings of the whiskeys made at Cooley.

The whiskeys

Cooley’s range is unusually varied, partly because it revived several dormant brands:

• Connemara – one of the few peated Irish single malts, double-distilled for a fuller, smokier body. Variants run to the heavily peated Turf Mór and cask-strength bottlings.
• The Tyrconnell – a single malt brought back in 1988 after decades dormant, matured in bourbon, sherry and port casks.
• Kilbeggan – the blended whiskey, plus a single grain expression once sold as Greenore.
• 2 Gingers – an approachable blend launched in 2011.

Over the years there have also been one-offs, including a single pot still poitín and a US-market single malt called Michael Collins. Some experimental lines have been retired, but the core range is what redefined modern Irish whiskey.

The Cooley Peninsula

The distillery sits on the Cooley Peninsula, a rugged strip of north Louth between Carlingford Lough and Dundalk Bay. In the old tales this is Cúailnge, home of the Brown Bull and the setting for the Táin Bó Cúailnge, and the landscape is scattered with Neolithic tombs and Iron Age forts. A short drive brings you to the Proleek Dolmen, a portal tomb whose capstone is reckoned to weigh over 30 tonnes. Walkers can take on the Cooley Mountains and Slieve Foy for views across the border into Northern Ireland, and the Cooley Peninsula Scenic Route links the coast, the villages and the back lanes. From Greenore, just south of Carlingford, a ferry runs across to County Down.

Practical information

Book the Martin’s Bar tasting ahead if you want to try the Cooley whiskeys near where they’re made; otherwise the R173 loop past the gates makes a fine drive on the way to the medieval streets of Carlingford.