The Kilbeggan Distillery

By 1843 John Locke would become the new owner of the distillery and through the next years the distillery earned reputation and the appreciation of the Kilbeggan town’s community.

Two incidents proved that. In the first occasion, after an accident during 1866 the steam boiler of the distillery was damaged. Due to financial problems at that time, Locke was unable to replace it, so the local community raised the funds and bought a replacement steam boiler as a gesture of appreciation.
In the second incident, after a fire broke out in 1878, the townsfolk merged, broke the doors of the warehouses and rolled the whiskey casks to the streets, so that they would be saved from the flames.

The Locke family would also have to face the crisis that all distilleries in Ireland met at the beginning of 1900s.
The distillery had to stop production for 7 years, from 1924 to 1931, but right after Prohibition ended in the U.S. in 1930, finances started to improve.

This financial improvement didn’t last long and by 1947 the distillery was put up on sale. Unsuccessfully and in 1957 it was forced to stop production once again.

In 1962 a German investor Karls Heinz Moller bought the distillery, sold its whiskey stocks and started work in turning it to a pigsty. The next owner in 1969 would also remove the remaining equipment.

The Kilbeggan community never accepted that they would lose the distillery that was so highly regarded and in 1982 the Kilbeggan Preservation and Development Association was formed.

The distillery was restored and reopened as a whiskey museum until 1987, when Cooley distillery bought it. Improvements began in order to become a fully operative distillery again and in 2007, 250 years after it was founded the distillery would use stills and produce whiskey once again.

Since 2011 Beam Suntory are the current owners.