The story of the Micil spirits brand marries the oldest traditions of distilling on Ireland’s western shores with modern techniques and tastes – and travel retail is set to play a key role in its growing export business.
That was the message as The Moodie Davitt Report paid a recent visit to the Micil Distillery in Salthill, Galway, speaking to co-owners Pádraic O’Griallais and Ross Tobin.
It’s the shortest trip The Moodie Davitt Report is likely to make from its Irish bureau for a brand visit – Micil is located around four minutes’ walk from home for President Dermot Davitt.
The Micil story itself began life a little further away, in Connemara, on the shores of Galway Bay, where O’Griallais’ great-great-great grandfather Micil Mac Chearra began distilling illicit poitín in 1848. The brand, which was created in 2016, takes its name from Micil following an unbroken family tradition that reaches back over 170 years.
The Galway-based company, founded in 2016, has managed to connect those long-ago days with modern times. In 2020, amid the revival of whiskey-making in Ireland, Micil laid down Galway’s first legal whiskey in over a century, reviving distilling traditions of the past (see below).
The modern Micil began life through a poitín offer based around the recipe of generations past, before a premium gin caught the imagination of consumers in Ireland and overseas. This delivers strong repeat purchase where it is sold. With the poitín traditions representing a colourful back story, the brand story today revolves around the gin, whiskey and an Irish cream liqueur.
Micil expressions are available in ten international markets with the aim to reach around 40 in coming years. The brand is present in some key European markets, plus Australia, with plans to enter the US in 2024. Volumes overall are close to 8,000 nine-litre cases a year.
In travel retail the brand is well represented at airports in Ireland, with most sales through ARI in Dublin – half of these from gin.
The travel channel is very much on the growth agenda, says Pádraic O’Griallais, who visited the TFWA Cannes show last year to better understand the market. “We aim to break into and grow in travel retail in a sensible way,” he says, noting that the company is looking for the right agency and distribution partner to support its growth plans.
The next stage of the journey is to grow the fledgling whiskey brand, but in a way that expresses the traditions of Galway distilling. That means leaning on a heritage of peated whiskey that comes as a surprise to many.
“We are producing whiskey that is peated and reflects the ‘terroir’ of the county,” says O’Griallais. In addition, barley, oats, wheat and rye are sourced close to home, marrying family recipes with local ingredients to create mostly single malt and single pot still whiskeys.
Through their distinctive Galway background, the traditions of poitín and whiskey making overlap in the modern-day Micil brand.
The Micil team notes that Galway was unique for many years in that it had two famous distilling traditions – the great whiskey distilleries of Galway city and county, and the illicit poitín makers of Connemara.
Before the introduction of cask maturation the whiskey and the poitín were essentially the same spirit, separated only by the buying of a licence.
Each was distilled from malted barley and other grains, and both were known as fuisce in the Irish language still spoken in South Connemara. The word fuisce derives from the Gaelic uisce beatha, meaning ‘water of life’, later anglicised to become ‘whiskey’.
Galway was also the long-time main Irish port of trade with Spain, France and Portugal, meaning it was a key location for the import of wines. This offered Irish wine merchants the opportunity to use wine and sherry casks to store and age whiskey. Some of these casks came to Connemara where they were rebuilt in smaller sizes to store and transport the illicit spirit. Those rarely seen ‘quarter barrels’ are used to mature Micil whiskey today.
O’Griallais says that these barrels allow for accelerated maturation and intense flavour profiles as the wood influences the spirit.
O’Griallais says: “We lean on the old Latin-Irish traditions, the use of peat and the barrel heritage to make our whiskey. Next year we’ll have releases of our own Galway-distilled whiskeys, which will show the world what we can do locally. Plus we are moving along a project to open a new distillery, which will facilitate our growth.”
Assessing how a small, west of Ireland company can grow in export and travel retail, the partners say it is not easy in the face of much larger competitors, but note that telling an authentic story matters. A visit to the company’s Visitors’ Centre shows the range compellingly well, something that admittedly is less easy to do in the multi-category airport environment.
Of the opportunities in the channel, O’Griallais says: “We are already doing very well in travel retail in Ireland, with significant growth in 2023 due to promotional investment in our brand, expansion of our portfolio and the rebounding of numbers through Irish airports.
“On the back of that success we want to expand our presence into new travel retail markets and emulate what we’re doing well in Irish travel retail. Irish whiskey and Irish cream liqueur are under-indexed in many travel retail outlets and we want to fix that.” ✈
