Managing a distillery

Transcript: John O’Connell, manager at West Cork Distillers 

Well, my day can vary considerably depending on whether I’m travelling or not. Usually I spend about 50 per cent of my time outside the office, travelling abroad and within Ireland. When I am in the office, I like to get up at between 6.00 and 6.30. I’m in the distillery in Market Street by 7.30 every morning. I spend the first half an hour to hour in the distillery just watching production efficiencies from the previous day, just to make sure that the fermentations and distillations are going OK in terms of pure productivity and litres of alcohol produced. I come over to Market Street here, our main location, and here we’ve the analytical laboratories where I’d spend again roughly an hour checking the quality of the produce. So between those two things, checking efficiencies of production and quality, [it] would take up a good chunk of the morning.

I’d usually go on email then for an hour or so to catch up on emails, and after that I’d have a “pit” meeting with the team here in West Cork Distillers. We’re a fairly closely-knit team, and we always meet regularly just to talk about scheduling for production, etc., and just making sure customer service issues have been resolved, etc. In the afternoon of most days I’d spend a good bit of time preparing samples for dispatch and also doing R&D work. A lot of our R&D would revolve around production efficiencies and such like. Then, again onto the email for an hour or so, and that’s pretty much close to the end of the day at that point.

We’ve about 46 people employed here between the two sites. The distillery operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week — the only day it wasn’t open last year was Christmas Day. And then the bottling, administration and warehousing facility here on Marsh Road is open 24 hours a day, six days a week, so there’s plenty of activity here.