The inside story of how Mcconnell’s shoehorned their distillery into a Victorian cell block – with just millimetres to spare
As a pupil at St Malachy’s College in north Belfast in the 1980s, John Kelly, below right, enjoyed playing sport, but occasionally during games an overenthusiastic kick would send the ball sailing over a high wall into an adjoining property. Sometimes it would come flying back. Sometimes it didn’t. For on the other side of the wall was the notorious Crumlin Road Gaol, and in the troubled 1980s, what went in there usually took a long time to come out.
Forty years later, John is on the other side of that wall himself. “Some of my teachers probably thought I’d end up here,” he jokes. But, of course, the Crum hasn’t been a prison for nearly three decades, and John is there now as chief executive of a £12m whiskey distillery and visitor attraction housed in what used to be ‘A Wing’.
Mcconnell’s Distillery was unveiled in the former prison just a few weeks ago, and the combination is jaw-dropping – wrapping gleaming stills and pipework around antique cells and gangways, adding modern architectural flourishes to Victorian cornices, and somehow managing to be old and new all at the same time.
But it’s a project that nearly didn’t happen. After the last prisoner left in 1996, the building lay unused and derelict, mummified in a thick layer of pigeon droppings and riddled with dangerous asbestos. Although piecemeal restoration work sorted the asbestos problem and leaky roof, the scheme lurched through years of stop-start uncertainty, and it wasn’t until 2017, when US financier James Ammeen stepped in to source $20m from an array of small investors, that it looked like it might actually become a reality.
John came on board in 2021, after 22 years with Diageo and four with Carlow-based distillers, Walsh Whiskey. “There was still no planning permission in place whenever I left my previous job, so coming here was a risk,” he admits. “But I had to take it. I remember talking it over with my wife, who said if I didn’t do it, someone else would, and I’d always look back and think, ‘Why was that not me?’”
Planning permission did follow shortly afterwards. The Mcconnell’s brand had been launched in 2019 with whiskey made at the Great Northern Distillery in Dundalk, and work on converting the gaol finally started in earnest in August 2022 following the signing of a 125-year lease with the building’s owners, the Department of Infrastructure.
“Before work started, this place was cold, damp and broken in parts,” says John. “Some cell walls were still here, some were gone. There was a lot of manual labour involved. We couldn’t get dumper trucks on to the upper floor so brick had to be carried upstairs by hand. It was an incredible piece of construction and design by the contractors, Felix O’hare, and the architect, Ciaran Deazley.”
Master distiller Graeme Millar, left, joined the team in early 2023. Also from Diageo, he’d been producing Baileys and Captain Morgan spiced rum before a spell with Ech-linville Distillery on the Ards Peninsula.
Graeme wasn’t long into his new job when electricity cable excavations uncovered a tunnel.
“It wasn’t on any drawings for the prison, so work had to stop,” he recalls. “Then we found what looked like a tooth, and we had to get it Dna-tested in case it was human. Fortunately, it turned out to be bovine – probably from the canteen – which was a relief, because if it had been human, that would have meant more delay for the project while it was investigated.”
The underground passage connecting the gaol with the courthouse across the road is well known, but the tunnel the team discovered appears to be another passage leading to the Mater Hospital. “There were also a few prisoner tunnels attempted over the years,” says Graeme.
Above ground, some former cells were turned into a factory area for grain handling, with structural steel added to support the equipment. “The work was much more involved than we envisaged,” admits Graeme. “We were drilling into hard granite, there was steel mesh plastered into the walls, and we found about a foot and a half of reinforced concrete poured on top of the original vaulted ceilings.”
A key milestone came in May 2023 when the huge copper pot stills, built by Forsyth’s in Scotland, were lowered into the gaol through the roof. Glass, slates and timbers were removed to create a gap, but even so it was a tight fit. The stills had to slip snugly between slate-floored walkways that run the length of the wing, with just 40mm to spare on either side.
“We got lucky that day,” says John.
“There was no wind. If it had been breezy at all, we’d have had to postpone the entire operation.”
It took another two months of work to connect the stills. Then more months to hook up the fermentation and grain-handling equipment. Some of the washback tanks, where initial fermentation takes place, had to be painstakingly built up in sections because of the confined space.
“It was a very complex operation,” says Graeme. “There’s about 700 pumps and valves and instruments that come into play.”
To ensure they’d fit between the walkways, the pot stills had to be built to a unique configuration – and that design will have a bearing on the final character of the whiskey.
“The way we’ve set up our grain mill, how we do our fermentation, the flow rates on the still, the amount of cooling, the cut points on the final spirit – all these things will contribute to that signature flavour,” says Graeme.
The first spirit was run through the stills at the end of March. Within the next few weeks they plan to be distilling 24/7, producing 30,000 bottles-worth of whiskey per week. Then the spirit will go to warehouses in Co Down and spend several years in bourbon casks.
It’ll probably be 2029 before you can taste any of it. After all, just like the former residents of the gaol, whiskey has to serve its time too.