A distillery behind an eighteenth-century house.

Lough Gill Distillery stands on the Hazelwood estate, on a peninsula on the shore of Lough Gill just outside Sligo town. The estate’s centrepiece is Hazelwood House, a Palladian country house that English Wikipedia dates to about 1731 and attributes to the architect Richard Cassels, later known for Leinster House and Russborough, built for the Wynne family, who had bought the estate in 1722.

The site had a long industrial afterlife before whiskey. According to English Wikipedia, the house served as an army barracks during the Second World War and as a psychiatric hospital from 1946; around 1969 the Italian company SNIA built a nylon yarn factory behind it, which closed in 1983, and from 1987 the South Korean firm SaeHan made video tapes on the site until 2005. Those factory buildings are what the distillery reused.

In 2015 the investor David Raethorne founded Hazelwood Demesne Limited, which bought the estate to build a distillery. English Wikipedia says planning permission to convert the former factory into a single malt distillery was granted in early 2016, and that the distillery was fully commissioned in 2019 and opened that December. BeverageDaily, reporting in June 2022, described the conversion as a four-year development project and the still house as three copper stills made by Frilli of Siena, in Italy, for triple distillation.

Athrú and the Creation Trilogy.

The distillery’s brand was Athrú, a single malt Irish whiskey. Its launch releases were the Creation Trilogy: three 14-year-old single malts named Annacoona, Keshcorran and Knocknarea. The Belgian whisky blog Whiskynotes, reviewing two of them in March 2023, gave Keshcorran a finish in Hungarian Tokaji wine casks and Knocknarea a finish in oloroso sherry casks, both bottled in 2019.

A new distillery cannot sell its own whiskey until the spirit has matured for at least three years, so Athrú began with older stock. Whiskynotes wrote in 2023 that the distillery was still bottling whiskey sourced from other distilleries while its own production got under way, and that the veteran blender Billy Walker had a role in the project, with his signature on the label. The same review described the label and packaging as modern and luxurious.

According to Whiskynotes, younger and older Athrú whiskeys followed the three 14-year-olds. The distillery’s own spirit, meanwhile, was laid down in the warehouses the factory had left behind; Whisky Advocate reported in 2025 that thousands of barrels of various ages were maturing on the site in a rickhouse built during the Lough Gill era.

Irish whiskey and its new distilleries.

The seven brands in this group are all Irish distilleries: Killowen, Great Northern, Lough Gill, Clonakilty, Walsh Whiskey, Blackwater and Hinch. They are spread across the island rather than gathered in one district — Killowen in the Mourne Mountains and Hinch near Ballynahinch, both in County Down; Great Northern in Dundalk, County Louth, on the site of the former Harp brewery; Lough Gill in County Sligo; Clonakilty in west Cork; and Blackwater at Ballyduff in County Waterford.

Irish whiskey is a protected geographical indication. English Wikipedia notes that, under the rules set out in the 2014 technical file for Irish whiskey and checked by the Irish revenue authorities from January 2016, it must be matured for at least three years in wooden casks, and it recognises four styles: single pot still, single malt, single grain and blended. The word “single” may be used only when a whiskey is wholly distilled at one distillery.

The modern industry was rebuilt from very few distilleries. English Wikipedia records that Jameson, Powers and the Cork Distilleries Company merged as Irish Distillers in 1966, that Bushmills joined in 1972, and that Cooley Distillery was established by John Teeling in 1987; Great Northern, which Hospitality Ireland reported in August 2015 had begun distilling, was co-founded by him.

Ownership varies, and some of these names now sit inside larger drinks groups: BeverageDaily reported in November 2021 that Amber Beverage Group had acquired Walsh Whiskey, and in June 2022 that the Sazerac Company was buying Lough Gill Distillery, which Sazerac renamed Hawk’s Rock in 2025.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now, and where its whiskey is actually distilled, matured and bottled — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A new name from the Ox Mountains.

On 20 June 2022 the New Orleans spirits company Sazerac announced that it was buying Hazelwood Demesne Limited and with it the distillery, BeverageDaily reported. Sazerac, owner of Buffalo Trace in Kentucky, said it would develop the site of more than 100 acres into a whiskey production centre and visitor attraction, make it the home of its Irish whiskeys Paddy and Michael Collins as well as Athrú, and continue to develop Athrú with global distribution. It also hired Helen Mulholland, formerly master blender at Bushmills, to lead blending, manage cask selection for Athrú’s aged single malts and lead new product development, and said all of the existing team would stay. Sazerac has owned the distillery since 2022.

In April 2025 Sazerac renamed it Hawk’s Rock Distillery, after an outcrop in the Ox Mountains that inspired W.B. Yeats’s play At the Hawk’s Well, The Moodie Davitt Report and The Daily Pour reported. According to those reports, Sazerac had expanded production and warehousing since 2022, the site was closed to visitors during renovations, and the company had planning permission for a visitor experience; Whisky Advocate added that Sazerac was restoring Hazelwood House with the help of its staff archivist and archaeologist, Nicolas Laracuente, and quoted a company representative on the bird in the new name: “We have an eagle, and now we have a hawk” — a nod to Sazerac’s Eagle Rare bourbon. Sazerac’s chief executive, Jake Wenz, called the renaming “a new, yet familiar, frontier.”

The first whiskey under the new name followed in June 2025: Garavogue, a 20-year-old single malt named after the river that flows past the distillery through Sligo town to the Atlantic. Sazerac’s release describes a double-distilled spirit aged for at least 14 years in ex-bourbon American oak and then finished in French Muscat, Sauternes, Pedro Ximénez sherry and Barbadian rum casks. “We hope that Garavogue Whiskey invites Irish Whiskey fans to linger, explore and uncover the hidden stories of Sligo,” said Jess Scheerhorn, a Sazerac vice president. Sazerac’s release describes a reversed crescent-shaped bottle with a blue label carrying wave patterns for the river, and imagery and coordinates for the Hazelwood House windmill on the grounds.

For a design guide, Lough Gill shows how a distillery’s identity can be rebuilt around place — a house, a river and a mountain — when its owner and its name change. Compare Buffalo Trace, another Sazerac distillery named for a feature of its landscape, and Paul John, Sazerac’s single malt from Goa. For this guide we use lake blues and a limestone white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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