Double or quits
Boatyard Distillery founder Joe McGirr is a Fermanagh man through and through
News just in! Boatyard Distillery’s gin and vodka are the only Irish brands to feature in the prestigious Drinks International Brands Report this year. Boatyard’s Double Gin has been crowned the number 2 trending gin brand in the world while Boatyard’s Vodka has emerged as a newcomer on the bestselling vodka brands list for 2025. This was a very nice start to 2025 for Joe McGirr and his team.
Boatyard was established in 2016 and it has been a bit of a whirlwind for the brand ever since. The distillery is situated on the beautiful banks of Lough Erne, County Fermanagh and is the county’s first legal distillery since 1890. The distillery takes its name from the disused Boatyard that it was built on. A unique element of the distillery is that visitors can arrive by boat or car and many choose the former in the summer months. It’s hard to imagine anything more enchanting.
Joe grew up in nearby Enniskillen on a dairy farm but farming life wasn’t to be for him; not because of his disinterest but more due to his place in the family. He was the youngest of five siblings and the eldest, his brother, was always destined to take over the farm so Joe knew from an early age that he would be pursuing a different path. At just 18 he moved to Scotland with an already keen interest in hospitality.
“I moved away from home quite early, and moved to Edinburgh to study hospitality management and worked in a 5-star hotel called the Balmoral and they had a really good training programme. I also studied wine for four years and completed the WSET diploma while there,” he says of his early career.
He subsequently got a job in the Scotch Malt Whisky Society arm of the Glenmorangie Company which is owned by global brand LVMH, and spent a full decade working as a restaurant manager and eventually chairing tasting and nosing panels. “That role was really interesting and a bit geeky,” he jokes. “It was very sensory-based. We were doing six samples twice a day and we would rate the whiskys so it was really interesting. But then I found gin and fell in love with the gin martini. I’d come from a world of high-strength whiskys and my palate was leading the way. I became passionate about it and felt that I could really make something with it and by that point I was keen to get back here to set up my own distillery.”
Dream becomes reality
“I knew at that point that the world didn’t need another gin but I felt I had something that would be really very special,” says Joe McGirr
In 2013 the dream started to materialise into reality. He was fortunate enough to find the disused Boatyard close to his home. In 2016, after three years of complicated planning, it finally opened and Boatyard produced its first gin, a surreal moment for Joe.
So how does an individual fund a large project like this, we wondered? “Initially we didn’t have anyone funding us,” explains Joe. “Not many doors opened at the start and I took out a fair chunk of personal credit. We then got backed by Invest Northern Ireland and they have been extremely supportive of our business from the off. They gave us a leg up and then we found some private investors who we managed to engage with, in particular a company called Clarendon Fund Managers in Belfast.”
The gin market is a pretty busy space so you would imagine that making your mark is difficult but Joe was confident in his goal. “I knew at that point that the world didn’t need another gin but I felt I had something that would be really very special. As a purist, I wanted to make a gin that I would want to drink. We did 53 distillations or iterations on recipe development to get to a point where we felt it was world-class and the dream started from there. I guess our vision was very different from a lot of other distilleries, especially in Ireland. Our approach was very dictated by the gin whereas a lot of distilleries were dictated by whiskey. We were using the gin to fund the gin. That was our point of difference in that we were going deeper down the rabbit hole in the gin world whereas other distilleries were pulling back when they got to the three-year mark with the whiskey.”
He explains that with whiskey production you are dictated to by three ingredients – barley, yeast and water but with gin, you could put 100 ingredients into it if you wanted. “The creativity side of gin was a draw for me,” he admits.
Practicality and sustainability go hand in hand
Boatyard’s Double Gin has been crowned the number 2 trending gin brand in the world by the Drinks International Brands Report
Joe’s goal was and still is to be the leading Irish gin distillery making sustainable spirits and by engaging his team and bringing them on the journey with him, they have achieved something pretty amazing. In February 2023 they became the first B Corp certified distillery in Ireland.
Sustainable practices were the natural way of doing things from the outset but he didn’t call it this. To Joe, all these steps, which come under the sustainability umbrella now, are what he describes as practicality. “We were doing a lot of things in the distillery back in the early years just because they made sense. For one, our gin waste gets made into chocolate by the Proper Chocolate Company in Dublin. They use our botanical waste – juniper, coriander, citrus peel and things that have been through the still already but still have loads of flavour. It would effectively just be thrown out otherwise. That led on to a whole food exploration with a martini marmalade and a slow gin jam and all sorts of things that are weird and wonderful. It’s repurposing. Why would you not do that?” he asks.
All these little things added up and they realised there was something in it but one particular practice stands out for Joe. “We were doing distillery tours five days a week and we are quite generous with samples on our tours. One of the girls asked why were we using glass for this? It was a bit of a penny-drop moment. So we cut out all glass and packaging from our distillery. We fill containers to pour samples for our guests. The gin for retail or bars goes into holding vessels after the point of distillation and into refillable glass bottles. So that idea snowballed into things like our liquid waste gets sent away once a week to a biofuel plant that converts it into energy going back into the grid. That’s the biggest source of waste material for the distillery. Our grain waste goes to a farmer next door.”
They also produce vodka in the distillery and for this, they buy organic wheat from a farmer called Mark Gillanders, an hour from them in Co Monaghan. “ I grew up on the farm so I wanted to give the farmer a better price and have a good relationship. He would argue about why would you use fertilizer when there are natural things like clover that can do the same job. It’s intrinsic that our partners feel the same as us and put that before profit and we have a brilliant relationship with Mark.”
Lifting the bonnet
The distillery takes its name from the disused Boatyard that it was built on, on the banks of Lough Erne
They eventually realised that they were doing things a bit differently to most. Even down to things like the team taking two days out a year to do litter picking for the council. “We were doing all these things and we couldn’t really figure what box it fit into and that’s when we found B Corp. It lifts the bonnet on the intrinsics of your company. The environmental part is a big part of it but it also looks at your gender pay gap and the difference between the highest and lowest paid member of staff in your company. It’s really detailed and you can’t skip around it. They really uphold the values and that’s what attracted me to it. We got to the end of the process and we achieved one of the highest scores for a distillery and we are still the only B Corp distillery on the island of Ireland, although I think that might change soon.” He says it was a great moment after 18 months of work but they soon realised they were only at the start of their journey. “There is so much scope. The biggest cost is time and commitment and for us it has to be practical. We are still very small but we have to prioritize that,” adds Joe.
Worldclass team
They have 14 employees at present with Joe describing them as “a worldclass team”. Michael Smoley runs their US market. They have big growth plans for the US and are already stocked in 500 bars in the New York area.
Their commercial director is Declan McGurk, formally from the American Bar in the Savoy in London. Joe approached Declan during Covid and asked him to come and work for Boatyard and luckily he said yes. Joe describes this as a real game-changer for them. “Declan was a real advocate of best bars around the world and he gives us that link to engage with these bars now.”
“We’re really at home in cocktail bars – that’s our natural home,” explains Joe. “The rise of the martini is from zero to hero. It’s such a simple drink to make but has bags of flavour. It’s easy to make it well. It carries a lot of flavour.”
We asked Joe to talk us through the perfect martini. “For me, it’s always going to be simple. If you want a perfect martini, get a bottle and put two parts gin, one part martini and one part water and leave it in the freezer for an hour. That is how to make it perfectly.”
Showing off Fermanagh
The Boatyard Distillery Tour is now included in the ten best things to do in Northern Ireland on Trip Advisor and Joe is very passionate about showing off his home. “I wanted to show off Fermanagh. I love bringing people in to my home, which is what I call it. I love giving that welcome. I love the storytelling element. It’s a part of the business we see getting bigger. We want to put Fermanagh on the map.”
Home is clearly so important to Joe and what he has achieved is something his family are very proud of. His sister, Teresa Moss works alongside him as the distillery manager. “My family has been intrinsic to the success of the distillery, especially in the early days,” he says. They are the judge and jury and I always get honest feedback from them, whether I like it or not!”
