Trio successfully bottle the spirit of West Cork
Created and manufactured in Union Hall in west Cork, the brown spirit uses local spring water and a proprietary maturation method painstakingly researched by local friends, John O’Connell, along with cousins, Denis and Gerard McCarthy.
“None of us had any experience of distilling, fermenting or spirit making of any sort,” said Mr O’Connell. “The idea of making our own spirit actually came to the three of us back in 2005 when we were rigging up a home-beer making kit, and we thought there might be a market out there for a special spirit made right here in the heart of west Cork.” With the McCarthy cousins finding their chosen careers as fishermen slowly dwindling due to poor catches and rising diesel costs, and John O’Connell recently returned home from working for the Kerry Group in Britain, the three childhood friends grasped the nettle of a new venture into the unknown. “We put all of our savings on the line and certainly met many pitfalls over the six years it took finally to realise our dream,” he says.
