Firm to build distillery in Londonderry

At the end of the 19th century and well into the early 20th century, Londonderry was a world leader in whiskey production, and the Watts Distillery at Abbey Street was the largest distillery in Ireland.

Now local cream liqueur manufacturer Niche Drinks, formerly St. Brendan’s Irish Cream Liqueur Co, aims to revive that once proud tradition and are intent on building a new distillery in the town.

Niche Drinks have been manufacturing and exporting cream liqueurs from their site at the old Leckpatrick Dairy on Rossdowney Road for almost 30 years, but as Managing Director Ciaran Mulgrew pointed out, keeping the site up to modern day production standards is becoming more difficult.

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“Our current site has been in use as either a dairy or drinks manufacturing plant for over 50 years and while we continue to operate to the highest international standards, it gets harder to maintain the production facilities as each year goes by.

Consequently we have decided to seek Planning Approval for change of use of the existing site at Rossdowney Road, to supermarket use and to relocate Niche Drinks to a new custom built factory here in Derry.”

He went on to say, “ Our business has remained strong even in the current climate and we have to plan for the future. We want to increase our production capacity and to add new technologies into the business and that is why we are looking to build a distillery in the new factory.

“Derry was the leading light in Irish Whiskey production well into the early 20th century and we want to revive that tradition and create more indigenous manufacturing jobs.

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“It is good news for Derry, we have employed local people on the Rossdowney site for 50 years and we hope that a supermarket development on the site will create more jobs for local people.

“At the same time investing in a new state of the art drinks manufacturing plant in Derry will protect the current employees in Niche Drinks.

“This is a substantial investment for a small locally owned business like ours and we estimate that we will be investing £10m in the new build.

We are currently in discussion with Invest NI on available sites in the Campsie area. This will enable us to retain our existing well trained local workforce and we will add more new jobs with the distillery development”

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Niche Drinks currently manufactures Luxco’s St Brendan’s Irish Cream Liqueur, which is exported to the United States, Scandinavia, Russia and mainland Europe. The company also supply Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Aldi and ASDA in the UK and Ireland.

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