Life moves at an easy pace in the small village of Moira in Co Down. The main road bustles gently throughout the day. Traffic jams are rare, but when they do occur you won’t find them in the town centre, but a few miles away on a quiet laneway. It leads to one of the best butchers around, the Meat Merchant, Peter Hannan.

“You’d want to have seen this place before Christmas,” says Peter. “People were three deep at the fridge for our Himalayan salt-aged beef, we couldn’t stock it fast enough.”

It’s not surprising. The Meat Merchant’s Glenarm Shorthorn and European Angus beef loins and ribs are aged in his very own salt chamber, built with bricks of salt that travelled to Ireland from Himalayan mines.

Great Taste

The meat is served in top restaurants in Ireland and Britain, even as far as Paris, the Algarve and Dubai. It’s broken records at the Great Taste Awards for two years running, winning seven three gold stars. In 2013 and 2014, it was listed within the top 50 foods in Britain and Ireland.

Out of over 10,000 products, that is some achievement. Given that Peter sells his steaks in his shop in Moira at the same price that he sells them wholesale, it’s no surprise that people arrive in their droves.

Peter talks animatedly about his meat. Up at 4am every morning, he speaks at a mile a minute.

“I was always fascinated with butchery,” he explains as we walk around the shop. “I was reared on the family farm in Celbridge, Co Kildare – right next door to your former editor Matt Dempsey. But even at a young age I was more interested in what happened after the farm, rather than the farm itself.”

Knife Skills

After school, Peter trained in Premier Meats in Sallins, but to really up his game he went to Chicago and worked in the meat packing industry in the early 1980s.

“I used be up with the first man in the morning and there with the last guy in the evening, to learn everything I could.”

Over the next few years, Peter was involved in running meat factories across the country and in Scotland with businessman Seamus Purcell, turning losses into significant profits.

“I was always looking for the next deal, the next investment. I even bought a farm in Co Clare at one stage, but the meat business always called me back. In 1989, I moved to the north and started buying meat from Irish factories and selling it to contacts I had built up in Britain.

“Meat quality was poor at the time, no one was maturing it or putting any real effort into the quality. This was my focus and over the years the business really started to grow. We now supply to over 300 hotels and restaurants, and we still have our first five customers that came on board with us way back in 1989.

Starting with Science

For a man that is a self-proclaimed deal junkie – he is always looking for a new project – one venture has certainly proved to be incredibly innovative.

“For years, myself and the team were fed up of coming across poor dry-aged beef. So we said: ‘Let’s see what we can do to change this’, and we started experimenting. You see, if you hang a piece of meat in a cold room and say its dry-ageing, it gets better for 12 or 14 days, then it plateaus and starts to deteriorate. Because you’re not controlling the elements, after 17 or 18 days it starts to rot – there is no nicer way of saying that.

“So, with the help of scientists, we set out to prolong that 14-day graph so that the meat would continue to get better without deteriorating and we thought salt could really answer many of the issues we faced. Now everyone here will say that I have an obsession with salt. I don’t know about that, but I have more than a passing interest,” laughs Peter. “We had to use the purest salt we could find and that just happened to be in the Himalayan salt mines – it contains 82 trace elements and minerals that no other salt has.”

The Salt Chamber

Building your own salt chamber to dry-age beef is no easy feat.

“Each brick that we wanted to use was 4.5kg in weight and we needed 6,000 of them. Not only that, but they had to be taken 1,200m out of the mine in a wheelbarrow and then to the port. On our first trip we had a very close call. [The mine] is on the border with Pakistan and three days after our salt left the port, 22 soldiers were shot. If we hadn’t gotten out the day we did, we still mightn’t have [the bricks] here.”

Time to backtrack here Peter, the first trip?

“Well, from the start chef and restaurateur Mark Hix was really driving us to develop the salt mine. So when it was all built, he arrived over just before he opened his famous Tramshed restaurant in London and he said to me: ‘How much can this salt chamber hold?’ I told him 320 loins of beef. His reply was: ‘I’ll take them all.’

“My next thought was: ‘We’ve built this thing far too small, we won’t even have one of these dry-aged salted steaks to sell in our shop.’ So when we built the second chamber, we built it six times bigger.”

And the taste is certainly worth it. Hannan’s beef is exceptionally tender, with a delicious aftertaste. But don’t just take our word for it. Speaking about the Meat Merchant’s Himalayan dry-aged ribs, the judges at the Great Taste Awards said: “Pure beef genius ... excellent length of complex flavours, melts in the mouth, moist and juicy. To die for.”

Spreading the Word

So while Mark Hix becomes more and more popular on the London food scene, so too does Peter’s beef. He also has a serious following from customers at the prestigious Fortnum & Mason, where sales of his beef increased by 550% in one year of business.

While the best of his beef is also found in some of the top restaurants in Northern Ireland, including Neven Maguire’s MacNean House and Restaurant in Blacklion, this year the focus will be on serving customers further south.

“I’ve been working with Pat McLoughlin of McLoughlin Craft Butchers in Dublin and we have big plans for 2015.

“I really do get enormous pleasure out of creating great food for people and as long as we’re keeping them happy, we’ll be supplying great meat.”

The Meat Merchant | 028-926-19790 | Visit www.themeatmerchant.com or email info@hannanmeats.com