Episode 255: McConnell's Irish Whisky and Belfast Distillery with Graeme Millar Show Notes
McConnell’s Irish Whisky with Master Distiller Graeme Millar
It has been a little while since the podcast made its way to Ireland, and this week we’re heading north to Belfast for a name that, fitting a wedding, is both very old and very new.
McConnell’s traces its history to 1776, long before the family built its own distillery in Belfast in the late 1800s and long before Irish whisky went through the collapse that eventually took most of Belfast’s distilling industry with it. Something else happened that year, but for the life of me I can’t remember. Production stopped in 1938, the last bottles disappeared years later, and McConnell’s effectively went quiet for the better part of a century.
Now it’s back, and most importantly, it’s back in Belfast.
I’d been following the project for a few years as the new distillery took shape inside Crumlin Road Gaol, but meeting CEO John Kelly at Bar Convent Brooklyn finally gave me the opportunity to set this episode up. For the production side of the story, I’m joined by Master Distiller Graeme Millar, who came to McConnell’s after years at Echlinville and is now responsible for the whisky being made in Belfast that will eventually find its way into McConnell’s bottles.
An Old Name Without Pretending It’s the Old Whisky
There’s always a temptation when an old brand comes back to make the history a little neater than it really is. McConnell’s has avoided most of that.
There are surviving bottles of the original whisky, along with bits and pieces of the historical record, but there isn’t a definitive old recipe that the current team can simply dust off and reproduce. Even if there were, a bottle that has been sitting around for the better part of a century isn’t necessarily going to tell you exactly what McConnell’s tasted like when it left Belfast. There is a bottle at a nearby bar, but Graeme supposedly hasn’t taken a nip yet.
His view is much more useful: make the best McConnell’s they can now rather than reverse-engineer a ghost.
The current five-year-old is a malt-and-grain blend with a higher malt component than a lot of mainstream Irish blends, aged in first-fill ex-bourbon casks with McConnell’s controlling the maturation. It’s also the bottle that surprised me most out of the current core lineup. I liked the Sherry and Cognac finishes, and the 20-year-old Old Cromac I tasted at BCB is playing in an entirely different category, but the regular five-year-old may still be my favorite of the three core releases.
For now, both the malt and grain whisky are sourced from Great Northern. In the future, McConnell’s will continue sourcing the grain while gradually bringing in malt made at its own Belfast distillery. The first of that spirit is already aging, with 2029 the earliest point where it should begin entering the blend.
The new make is already showing bright fruit, citrus, malt and some flinty edges, and as the younger casks develop he’s finding more sweetness and spice coming forward. By the time that whisky enters McConnell’s, the bottle is going to change. Graeme knows it, the rest of the team knows it, and rather than pretending consumers won’t notice, they’re already thinking about how to tell that story.
His suggestion that everyone simply stock up on the current release and then buy the 2029 version for comparison is, admittedly, a very distiller-friendly solution.
Letting the Cask Add Something
The Sherry Cask started on a fairly small scale and ended up becoming part of the core range because people responded so strongly to it. Graeme inherited a whisky that was initially very heavily sherried and gradually pulled it toward something a little more integrated, while still keeping enough Oloroso influence to make the finish unmistakable.
He’s also particular about the barrels. For this release he wants actual bodega-used Oloroso hogsheads, generally first or second fill, rather than simply taking whatever seasoned sherry cask is available. He tried the latter and didn’t like the result for this whisky.
The hogsheads bring the expected dark fruit and chocolate, but also leather, tobacco and a slightly rustic character that makes the finish much more interesting than adding a layer of sweetness. There isn’t a rigid finishing schedule, either. Six months might work for one cask, nine for another. The important part is catching it when the cask is contributing without covering up what was already there.
That becomes even more important with Old Cromac, the limited premium collection named for McConnell’s historic Belfast distillery. I tasted the 20-year-old at BCB, and it’s a very different proposition from the core range: tiny quantities of older whisky, carefully selected finishing casks, and enough age that overworking the liquid would be a particularly expensive way to ruin something good.
Graeme talks about finishing in almost the opposite way from the “more is more” approach. A cask should add something. It shouldn’t be there to fix bad whisky, and it shouldn’t take over simply because somebody paid a lot for the barrel.
Making Whisky in a Victorian Prison
Of course, you can’t really talk about the new McConnell’s without talking about where they built it.
The distillery sits inside A Wing of Crumlin Road Gaol, a Victorian prison built in 1846 and still operating until 1996. It’s the type of building where preservation rules make perfect sense right up until you’re the person tasked with getting a modern brewhouse and three Forsyths pot stills inside it.
They couldn’t simply reshape the building around the equipment; the equipment had to fit the building.
The one-tonne lauter tun went between the original slate walkways with only a few centimeters to spare. The stills were too large to bring in conventionally, so the team opened the roof and lowered them into A Wing from above.
It’s a beautifully absurd way to build a distillery, but the physical limits of the prison also helped determine the scale. McConnell’s can make roughly half a million liters of pure alcohol annually, enough to be a serious production facility without becoming an enormous industrial plant. Graeme sees that size as a sweet spot, large enough to produce meaningful volume while still giving him the control he wants over fermentation, cut points, distillation rate and ultimately the character of the spirit.
What I found more interesting, though, was how Graeme talks about the building once you get beyond the engineering.
Crumlin Road has a difficult history, and not a distant one. It held political prisoners during the Troubles. People were interned there. Seventeen executions took place there. Former inmates are still alive and have come back to visit the distillery.
McConnell’s could very easily turn the prison into a marketing gimmick. They don’t.
There are no cute prison cocktails and no attempt to make incarceration part of the fun. The cell doors and worn slate walkways remain, but they now sit beside the stills, glass meeting rooms, a bar, events and music. Graeme talks about former inmates returning and pointing out the cells where they once lived, then seeing what the space has become.
There’s plenty of history available without decorating it.
One thread I wish we’d had more time for is Eleanor McConnell, who took over the family business after her husband died, raised their children and grew the company before her sons John and James eventually assumed control. Years later, the same A Wing where McConnell’s now makes whisky became the women’s wing of Crumlin Road, including holding suffragettes during the fight for voting rights.
By the end of the conversation, what I kept coming back to was how much of McConnell’s future is still literally sitting in barrels. The revived brand is already established. The five-year-old has its profile, the Sherry and Cognac finishes have expanded the range, Old Cromac gives Graeme somewhere to work with older stocks, and the new distillery has brought whisky production back into Belfast itself.
But the biggest change hasn’t reached the bottle yet. Graeme’s own malt is still aging. In a few years it begins changing McConnell’s. Years after that, there can be Belfast-made single malt carrying the name. Twenty years from now, somebody may pull a cask from the warehouse that Graeme distilled in 2026 and hand him a glass of his own work.
That was his answer, really, when I asked about legacy.
The history is useful. Belfast is important. Bringing an old name home is a great story.
But the whisky still has to be good.
Everything else gets a lot easier from there.
McConnell’s Irish Whisky
Website: McConnell’s Irish Whisky
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LinkedIn: Belfast Distillery Company - McConnell’s Irish Whisky
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