Kinnitty distillery is aimed at tourist market

Around 20 new part-time jobs will be created if the owners of Kinnity Castle Hotel are given the green light for a craft distillery and visitors centre.

According to the planning application submitted by the owners of the hotel, Teroboc Operations Limited, the craft distillery and visitors centre would be located in the coach house and stable outbuildings. The application includes details for a distillery process, bottling and storage areas, a tasting area and bar and craft workshops.

In a cover letter submitted with the application, architects Kenny Lyons Associates said that the proposed development “is a small scale craft distillery to provide an added tourist offering to the Kinnity Castle Hotel”.

“The distillery will provide very limited production volumes of whiskey and will mostly contain demonstration equipment, storage barrels and bottling and labelling facilities.
If the project is given the go-ahead by Offaly County Council, the hotel expects that while it will not affect its capacity levels, its occupancy levels will increase “as it will attract a lot more tour groups so our midweek and off season times of the year should become busier”.

The hotel says that it expects to hire 20 staff on a part time basis when the distillery opens. The decision due date for the application is November 27.
Irish-American publican Colin Breen and other Irish and American investors purchased Kinnity Castle Hotel in 2015. The hotel has 37 bedrooms and can sleep 77 residents. It hosts approximately 40 weddings a year. It currently has 67 employees, 59 of which are part time.

Distilleries are one of the fasted growing sectors in the Irish tourism industry with the number of visitors expected to surpass 1m for the first time this year. In 2018, 923,000 people visited Irish distilleries, up 13.4% on the year before.