Jameson's dram a big draw for visitors

IT MIGHT BE the warming nip of malt at the end of the tour, or the “shindig nights”, or simply its central location in Smithfield. Whatever the reason, the Old Jameson Distillery is proving increasingly popular with visitors to Dublin.

John Callely, managing director of Watercourse Distillery, which manages the Jameson visitor facility in Dublin, has just totted up the figures for 2011 and they show that visitor numbers grew by 10.7 per cent.

Callely told me this week that 207,830 visitors passed through the doors of the historic distillery, up from 187,715 in 2010. It was a similar story last year at its sister facility beside the Jameson distillery in Midleton, Co Cork, where numbers rose by 9 per cent to 87,000.

Callely isn’t resting on his laurels though. “This year we’re hopeful of hitting 220,000 [in Dublin],” he said on a phone line from London, where he was on a field trip to drum up interest among the travel trade.

Its shindig nights, which provide the full “Oirish” experience to tourists, are already “completely booked out” for May, he said. “We have to market aggressively. We are on the go all the time and the success of Jameson in the US has helped us as well.”

About 92 per cent of those who visit the old Bow Street distillery in Dublin are from overseas, with Americans accounting for about one-third of the overall number.

The Smithfield venue has an annual capacity of about 300,000 – but that includes filling slots on wet Monday mornings and in the off season, when trade is quiet.

“We will have to look at ways of expanding but that’s down the road,” Callely explained.

It’s a nice problem to have in the current economic climate.