It’s not every year that we can report a new outlet for crop products that aims to provide added value to the grower and high value to the crop through exports.

In early December 2015, Waterford Distillery commenced distilling. It is distilling whiskey using barley produced by 46 Irish farmers with the intention of producing a very individual whiskey that will carry the unique characteristics of field, variety and location.

Waterford Distillery is the brainchild of Mark Reynier, who might best be described as a whiskey entrepreneur. Having been in the alcohol business in one way or another all of his life, he re-established Bruichladdich Distillery on the Isle of Islay off the coast of Scotland in 2000. There he distilled local barley grown on the island and used its unique characteristics to produce niche whiskys for high-end markets.

Provenance matters, Mark stated, but in the modern era, whiskey seems to be more about marketing than the provenance of its raw materials. Mark thinks this is totally wrong. Mark and his colleagues took the moral high ground on this issue in Bruichladdich and he is now embarking on a similar project to help capture the natural and diverse characteristics of Irish barley in the Waterford distillery.

“We will make the rules and set the standards to make a truly Irish product, which will be traceable back to the field of an individual grower,” he said.

That distillery in Bruichladdich was bought by Remy Cointreau in 2012 and in 2014, Mark and his colleagues purchased the site of the Guinness Brewery in Waterford. This had been built by Diageo in 2004 only to close in 2014. Converted during 2015 to a highly sophisticated distillery, it is this sophistication which offers the potential to do different things with the raw material.

“Basically, all we had to do was to add the copper stills and remove some of the pipework that we did not need,” Mark stated.

The site was purchased on 30 November 2014 and 12 months later, the first spirit came through the plant. By definition, this spirit must be casked for at least three years before it can be called whiskey. Mark told me that they intend to mature it in American oak casks for at least five years. A small amount will be placed in some European oak casks, as this adds a different flavour to the whiskey. The annual requirement is to put at 7,500 barrels per year to store the spirit.

Forty-one individual lots

The 46 growers are made up of 40 conventional plus six organic growers, making 41 lots of 100t. Each of these will feed a new brand with a potential of 250,000 cases of whiskey annually.

“The process is quality driven and not quantity driven,” Mark stated. “We hope to extract 405 litres of spirit per tonne of malt, but this may not happen. We only get one chance to influence quality and each week’s work must sit for five years before it can be truly judged. I’m only interested in quality – we want to be in the premium end of this whiskey market.”

Spirit from the Waterford Distillery will target the single malt whiskey market, delivering premium whiskey at a premium price.

“We are targeting the elite market where the connoisseur is our customer and quality is paramount. We want to put truly Irish whiskey on the map,” Mark commented.

“We may decide to sell small amounts of whiskey from individual farms by way of comparison – different soil types or regions for those interested in comparing and contrasting. We need our growers and all involved to feel part of the process and the grower with the best spirit will be awarded a small barrel of his/her own whiskey.”

The objective in the new distillery is to highlight the uniqueness of every region, grower and field to help generate a diversity of flavours and aromas. Purity and traceability are key, not just for provenance, but to utilise the unique characteristics of each batch. Certified seed is the starting point in this regard and four different varieties were used in 2015 – Irina, Optic, Sebastian and Taberna.

Organised by Boortmalt

The organisational changes introduced by Boortmalt in recent years have helped to make this happen. Purity and traceability are key. The 46 growers were selected from Boortmalt’s growers to represent 26 different soil types to help produce variability.

Starting with certified seed, each of the 40 growers is to supply 100t and the six organic growers also supply 100t of the same variety. Crops are managed by a Boortmalt agronomist, but after harvest, each lot is subsequently managed by Minch Malt Ltd, which looks after the storage, segregation and subsequent malting and delivery of each lot to the distillery. Minch Malt manages all of the niche malt markets.

Following harvest, each of the 41 seed lots is dried and then stored in an individual closed bunker in a store in Kilkenny, with the grower’s photo and crop details on each one. This is made possible with the help of the FarmFlo records system. Each lot is subsequently malted individually to produce roughly 85 to 90t of malt and this is then transferred to Waterford where each lot amounts to one week’s distilling. The 100t lot of organic barley is also malted by Boortmalt.

Traceability is key to the whole process. Certified seed is used to provide variety purity at the start, but all subsequent movement of grain, malt or spirit is accompanied by the unique barcode system used by Boortmalt to ensure full traceability. Growers are encouraged to visit the distillery when their grain is being distilled.

The brilliance of barley

“The only ingredients in our whiskeys are barley, water and yeast,” Mark stated. “Great whiskey is about the flavours and aromas derived from the process. Whiskey is regarded as the most complex spirit of all because it is made from barley.

These flavours are a bit of a mystery as no one knows what exactly they are. “There are at least 110 different flavour compounds in a single malt whiskey compared with only seven for cheese. The difficulty in identifying them means they cannot be produced artificially, which guarantees the uniqueness and authenticity of whiskey,” he said.

Mark hopes he will have up to 41 different individual single malt whiskeys going into barrels. If this happens, he will have a big number of variables with which to produce very unique bottled products and, combined, they will make his “profound” whiskey. “The challenge is to create variability and uniqueness.”

Mark said that the sophistication available in this distillery enables him to add even more variability to this process. “Barley brings huge flavour to whiskey,” he said “and Ireland is arguably the best place in Europe to grow it.”

To read the full Certified Seed Focus Supplement click here.