Boatyard Distillery, Fermanagh: sweet smell of home just the tonic for gin maker

His Boatyard Double gin is produced at Tully Bay on the shores of Lough Erne and one of its main ingredients is sweet gale (bog myrtle), the smell of which brings him back to his youth when he spent each summer clamping turf in the family bog at Coa.

His love of Fermanagh is evident in every part of his business journey, including the final product.

“Fermanagh is really important to us and that’s something we want to shout about,” Joe told The Impartial Reporter.

There were times during the year-long process of securing planning permission when he thought: “We could be up and running now if we were based somewhere else.” 

The young entrepreneur who was desperate to establish a business in Fermanagh expected “more encouragement.” He explained: “Normally everyone wants to leave Fermanagh but I was going against that trend. The bureaucracy was a hard thing to swallow. But this is my home. I was brought up on the farm at Coa so Fermanagh is a special place to me and I didn’t want to lose sight of that.”

Joe and his wife Katherine looked at a number of potential sites for the distillery and they “fell in love” with Tully Bay.

His journey towards gin manufacture began at Fermanagh College where he studied Hospitality and Catering and worked in Oscar’s Restaurant.

Joe then moved to Edinburgh to work in the five star Balmoral Hotel, where his involvement in the Michelin star restaurant piqued his interest in wine. The next four years were spent studying a Wine and Spirit Education Trust diploma, followed by a move to the Scotch Malt Whiskey Society. Ten years were then spent fulfilling various roles in Moët Hennessy’s Glenmorangie unit. 

During that time Joe met Darren Rook who had a plan to open the first whiskey distillery in London in over 100 years. Joe came on board as Chief Operating Officer of the London Distillery Company where he learned “what’s involved in running a distillery and the pitfalls of a start-up business, how you can improve etc.”

He continued: “But I always had the intention of coming back home and starting my own distillery. The idea started in 2013 and eventually it played out. Through working with Darren at the London Distillery I realised I could do it and I could make a success of it.”

The Boatyard Distillery team currently consists of Joe as Chief Executive Officer, a distiller and a marketing consultant.

Joe self funded the venture and received £37,000 from Invest NI. He is pleased that Bank of Ireland seems “very enthusiastic” about the business. Looking ahead, he is now actively trying to raise money through private investors by selling equity. “That will fund the next phase of the business which is whiskey and potato vodka,” he explains.

Boatyard Distillery has sold 5,000 bottles in three months. Boatyard gin is currently distributed across the Republic of Ireland by the Celtic Whiskey Shop and O’Brien’s off licence chain. It is signed with Prohibition which distributes across Northern Ireland and is on sale at Belfast International Airport and Dublin Airport.

“We have recently signed with Fortnum and Mason in London and have teamed with Merchant House cocktail bar owned by Lisbellaw man Nathan Brown,” Joe reported. Indeed, Merchant House, which was crowned the best Independent Gin Bar in 2016, has commissioned a cocktail especially for Boatyard Gin called ‘Samson and Goliath’.

Joe commented: “Things are going amazing. It’s great to able to get over the legal challenges which were huge. We have a revenue stream and a product that sits really well on the shelf in some of the best bars in the world. We have an opportunity to export globally in the coming months.”
Prior to staring distillation, six months were spent “investing in the quality of the liquid and the branding.”

Joe knew the taste he wanted to achieve. “It had to be juniper forward – a lot of gins coming out now are bringing in other flavours that are more predominant and it loses that ethos of what it’s about,” Joe explained.

“We also wanted a sense of Fermanagh. So I brought a botanist from Kew Gardens and we spent three days touring around Fermanagh on bicycles to pick botanicals.”

After cycling to Lough Navar, around Tully Bay and at his father Michael’s farm at Coa, they discovered sweet gale in the bog. “It was staring me in the face! This is the smell, that I didn’t know at the time, which I smelt when I was growing up because we spent a lot of time in the bog clamping turf,” said Joe.

After 50 distillations carried out by his brother-in-law Dennis Perrett, by August 2016, Boatyard gin was ready for production.

“The first part of our gin making process involves organic malted wheat being brewed and fermented for five days with Champagne yeast which gives us a lovely creamy mouth feel, before being distilled to 96 per cent abv in preparation for the next stage with our botanicals,” explained Joe. 
The final botanical line up is formed of organic juniper, sweet gale, unwaxed lemon peel, coriander, grains of paradise, orris, angelica and liquorice. 

In a bid to set Boatyard Distillery apart from its competitors, Joe has opted for full transparency and uses organic ingredients as a stamp of quality.

“We put the full ingredients on the bottle. To me that says that there’s more than just the ingredients – you need a level of skill.

"We use organic ingredients, not because we are hippies, but to guarantee a source of quality. I wanted to bring in the sense of craft without having ‘hand-crafted’ or whatever the new buzz words are written on the bottle. The only way we could do that is by being totally transparent about what we are doing and how we are doing it.”

A lot of time and effort was also put into the bottle and the label. “The whole design process was a real family affair,” explained Joe, who firmly believes: “The label sells your first bottle but the liquid sells anything thereafter.”

He found the bottle in France and hired United Creatives to complete the design process. “I wanted to bring traditional techniques into the label that you don’t really get in the drinks industry. Our designer gets our label printed on an old 1960s Hidelberg printing press in Wales which gives it real character and definition,” said Joe. 

After rifling around in his father’s old receipts, Joe settled on the type-font used on the receipt from his father’s first tractor purchase in 1962. His sister wrote the paragraph which appears on the side of the bottle. “My family and my wife’s family have all got involved – everything in the design has been vetoed by them because it is about my background on the farm and trying to make things go full circle,” he said. Their efforts paid off because, in December, Boatyard Distillery won a Global Spirits Design Masters in recognition of its unique branding. That award put the company “on the same pedestal as huge multi national drinks brands such as William Grant which owns Hendriks and Tullamore Dew.” Joe said: “It was great to even be in the same ballpark as those brands after just a few months.”

Currently communing between Twickenham and Fermanagh, Joe plans to be exporting to the United States and France by the end of 2017. After that he hopes to introduce whiskey, potato vodka and possibly rum to his offering.“We need to be vocal and encourage businesses back west to Fermanagh. It’s great to encourage businesses over here, especially creative industries.”