The Whiskey That Started on a Solstice: How Boann Is Rebuilding Irish Single Pot Still

19 aug The Whiskey That Started on a Solstice: How Boann Is Rebuilding Irish Single Pot Still

On 21 December 2019, the winter solstice, Boann Distillery ran its very first distillation. A few kilometres away, at Newgrange, the sun was doing what it has done every solstice morning for five thousand years: creeping through a stone passage older than the pyramids to light up a chamber built for exactly that moment. Peter Cooney, the distillery’s Export Sales Director, doesn’t call it planning. “It felt like more than coincidence,” he says. “The solstices and equinoxes have always been woven into life here in the Boyne Valley, surrounded by some of Europe’s most remarkable Neolithic monuments. It was a moment of serendipity that became part of our identity.” Every summer and winter solstice since, Boann has marked it with a limited release and a celebration at the distillery. What began as a date on a calendar turned into the closest thing the brand has to a ritual. It’s a fitting start for a distillery whose whole pitch rests on a piece of whiskey history most drinkers have never heard of: Single Pot Still, once the most consumed whiskey style on earth, nearly wiped out by the twentieth century and now being pieced back together by a handful of Irish producers. Boann is one of the loudest voices in that revival, and Cooney has spent the past year explaining why to importers, sommeliers and buyers across ninety-odd export markets.

A family that sold everything to start again

Cooney and his siblings didn’t come to whiskey from nowhere. They grew up inside Gleeson Group, once Ireland’s largest beverage distributor and wine and spirits importer, alongside the family’s own production of natural mineral water, cider, beer, Irish cream liqueur and soft drinks. “You could say beverages were in our DNA,” Cooney says. “Growing up around so many different drinks sharpened our palates and taught us to appreciate balance, flavour and quality.” More useful than the palate, though, were the relationships. Decades spent buying and selling drinks put the family in the same room as some of the world’s best wine producers, ties that Boann now leans on for cask sourcing few new distilleries can match. Then, in 2013, with the Irish economy still reeling from the crash, the family sold Gleeson Group outright. “To be brutally honest, we sold Gleeson Group during the financial crash in 2013 as the wheels were coming off the Irish economy,” Cooney says. “It was a difficult decision, but we wanted the opportunity to build something new from the ground up.” Whiskey wasn’t a pivot into an adjacent category. It was a decision to start from zero, with one condition attached from day one: Boann would not be built for the Irish market alone. It would be built to export.

Adventurous mash bills, and a still floor with six accents

Ask Cooney what actually defines Boann’s house style and he skips the tasting-note language entirely. “Our house style has always been driven by two things: adventurous mash bills and exceptional casks,” he says. Dr. Fionnan O’Connor, the whiskey historian whose research helped rebuild interest in Pure Pot Still’s original recipes, pushed the distillery toward those older, riskier grain bills early on, giving the team both the history and the confidence to build on it. The production floor backs that up in a more literal way. Boann’s distillers come from the United States, France, Italy, Argentina, Russia and, as Cooney puts it, “of course, Cork.” Nobody at the stills learned the trade the same way twice. “Different perspectives create better whiskey,” he says, and it’s not a line he needed to dress up. A distillery built on reviving a nearly-lost Irish style, staffed by people who never grew up steeped in Irish whiskey orthodoxy, is its own quiet argument that tradition and outside thinking aren’t in conflict.

What Single Pot Still actually is, and why it needed saving

For readers who know Irish whiskey mainly through the big blended names, Cooney is direct about what sets Single Pot Still apart. “Single Pot Still is the quintessential style of Irish whiskey,” he says. “When Irish whiskey dominated the world stage, this was the whiskey people were drinking, although it was then known as Pure Pot Still.” The difference is in the grain bill: malted barley, unmalted barley, and often oats, wheat or rye, blended in varying proportions before it ever touches a still. “Those unmalted grains are the secret ingredient,” Cooney says, “creating the creamy texture, spice and oily mouthfeel that simply cannot be replicated in single malt, grain whiskey or blends.” Reviving it, in his telling, was never a nostalgia project. “It was about reclaiming one of Ireland’s greatest whiskey traditions and showing what it can become today.” Boann also ages past the legal three-year-and-a-day minimum, and Cooney is refreshingly blunt about why most of the industry doesn’t. “Time is money,” he says. “Large companies often need to turn inventory into cash as quickly as possible, which is why many entry-level whiskeys are bottled between three and four years of age.” But age, on its own, isn’t the argument he’s making. Boann’s PX Single Pot Still, bottled at just five to six years old, scored 99 points at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition, outscoring Redbreast 27 Year Old in the process. “To me, that proves age is only a number,” he says. “If every stage, from the field to fermentation, distillation, maturation and bottling, is executed properly, young whiskey can be extraordinary.”

The cask room he calls his happy place

If there’s one part of the job Cooney lights up talking about, it’s casks. “This is my happy place because sourcing casks is one of my favourite parts of the job,” he says. “I have a lifelong weakness for sweet and fortified wines, and fortunately those casks happen to work beautifully with Irish whiskey.” Years of relationships with wineries and cooperages have given Boann access to material most competitors simply can’t buy on the open market: Rivesaltes and Maury casks, rare vintage Madeira, Marsala, and more. “Today I genuinely believe we have one of the most diverse maturation warehouses in the whiskey world,” he says. “Every cask tells its own story before it ever reaches our whiskey.” It’s also a deliberate break from the two cask types that dominate Irish whiskey shelves. “We didn’t choose PX, Madeira and Marsala because they looked good on a label, we chose them because they create remarkable whiskey,” Cooney says. “Bourbon is wonderful, but for me it can sometimes become predictable, and plenty of distilleries already produce bourbon-led Irish whiskey. We wanted Boann to have its own signature.” He’s not shy about the underlying philosophy either: “If you’re not pushing boundaries, you’re simply following everyone else.”

A category with real headwinds, and a US strategy built on patience

Irish whiskey’s export numbers dipped in 2025, and Cooney doesn’t pretend the category is immune to the wider market. “Whiskey moves in cycles, and this isn’t the first headwind Irish whiskey has faced,” he says. “The category enjoyed phenomenal growth for more than two decades, but that pace was never going to continue indefinitely.” COVID’s lingering effects and geopolitical instability have both played a part, and the US, still the industry’s most important single market, has been especially soft. Boann’s exposure there is smaller than most assume. “The United States has been particularly disappointing recently, although it represents around 25% of our business rather than the majority, which has protected us,” Cooney says. “From the outset we invested heavily in emerging markets, and today that diversification is proving invaluable.” Boann’s sister brand, The Whistler, launched in the US more than a decade ago and grew steadily before tariffs and market uncertainty slowed things down. Boann itself only arrived there a year ago. “We’re playing the long game,” Cooney says. “Building a premium whiskey brand from scratch is never easy, and doing it during a turbulent market is even harder. Success in the US demands patience, investment and people on the ground. There are no shortcuts.” He’s also clear that the tariff situation isn’t a blip that resolves itself. “Scotch whisky currently enjoys a zero tariff while Irish whiskey faces a 10% tariff, immediately putting us at a competitive disadvantage,” he says. “Much of the progress Irish whiskey made over the past decade has been eroded.” The recent collapse of one of America’s largest spirits distributors has made things worse, and smaller brands are the ones absorbing most of the shock.

Where the growth actually is

Beyond the US, Cooney names the markets Boann is betting on without much hesitation: Latin America, Africa, Japan, and eventually India. “These are exactly the kinds of markets that excite us,” he says of the fast-growing regions outside the US. “Nigeria and Japan have become strategically important, and we’re investing with a long-term mindset.” India has been slower going, complicated by a trademark dispute that sent Boann back to the drawing board there, but Cooney hasn’t written it off. “The opportunity is simply too big to ignore,” he says. “The key is finding the right partner. I’ve always believed you’re only as good as your importer, and they need to have honour and integrity.” Latin America gets a similar mix of optimism and realism. “Latin America remains incredibly complex, with regulation and bureaucracy slowing progress, but we’ve been patiently building those relationships for over a decade,” he says. “India could become the next great prize for Irish whiskey, but it will reward patience rather than speed.”

Lunch, disagreements, and the next generation

Boann is still very much a family operation, with Cooney’s siblings running sales, marketing and finance alongside him and their father still at the helm as founder. Asked where father and siblings actually disagree, Cooney doesn’t dodge it. “We prefer to call them healthy debates, and there are plenty of them,” he says. “The important thing is that we always find common ground. We usually eat lunch together every day, so we’re constantly discussing the business, challenging each other’s thinking and making sure everyone is informed.” That daily friction, he says, has only made the business steadier. “We’ve weathered some incredibly difficult times together, and those moments have only strengthened the business and the family. It’s certainly never boring.” There’s a longer horizon behind the day-to-day arguments, too. “What’s particularly exciting now is that we’re filling casks our children may one day bottle,” he says. “That’s a very special thought.”

It’s a neat closing image for what Cooney sees as Boann’s real project, one that goes beyond any single release or export market. “We honour tradition by making whiskey the way our ancestors once did, with authentic Single Pot Still mash bills, but we pair that heritage with some of the most advanced distilling technology in the world,” he says. “That combination allows us to respect history while constantly pushing the boundaries of quality and flavour.” His ambition for the category, stated plainly, is a big one: “I genuinely believe Single Pot Still has the potential to become what Single Malt became for Scotland: Ireland’s defining whiskey style.”

This article was created in collaboration with De Monnik Dranken, importer of Boann Whiskey for The Netherlands.