A Derry liqueur company, a monk’s name and a cream liqueur sent abroad.

Saint Brendan’s Irish Cream Liqueur is a cream liqueur made in Derry, Northern Ireland. English Wikipedia describes it as a liqueur named after Saint Brendan and made with locally made Irish whiskey and fresh cream. The company behind it is Niche Drinks, a Derry firm that the wine-trade magazine Harpers said in August 2015 was founded in 1983 and whose principal product was St Brendan’s Irish Cream liqueurs.

The business grew up on Rossdowney Road in the city. The Irish News reported in August 2015 that Niche had been making and exporting its products from that site for more than three decades, and that it sent St Brendan’s to the United States, Scandinavia, Russia and mainland Europe. The same report said the company also supplied supermarkets including Marks and Spencer, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Aldi and Asda. Its managing director at the time was Ciaran Mulgrew, who was quoted in that coverage and was still in the post in later reports.

The name looks back much further than the company. The brand’s own website says it was inspired by Saint Brendan the Abbot, an ancient Irish monk known for his remarkable travels and adventure, and says his spirit guided its quest for an authentic Irish cream. The site sums up the idea under the heading “Purely Irish.”

The saint is better known as Brendan the Navigator, or Brendan of Clonfert. English Wikipedia says he was born around AD 484 near Tralee in County Kerry and founded a monastery at Clonfert in County Galway. His fame rests on a legendary sea voyage in search of the Isle of the Blessed, told in a Latin text whose title translates as the Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot; the encyclopedia dates its earliest surviving version to about AD 900. Among the groups he is named patron of are sailors and travellers.

Cream from Derry, whiskey named for a barman, and a liqueur at 17 percent.

The recipe is the brand’s main story. The Saint Brendan’s website describes the liqueur as a blend of dairy cream, triple-distilled The Quiet Man Irish Whiskey and other spirits, bottled at 17% alcohol by volume (34 proof), and lists tasting notes of vanilla, marshmallow, chocolate and a touch of spice. MGP Ingredients, the company that now owns Niche’s American partner, says on its own brands page that the cream comes from the fields of Derry.

The whiskey in the blend is a younger brand from the same company. Harpers and The Irish News reported in August 2015 that Niche was launching The Quiet Man, an eight-year-old single malt and a blended Irish whiskey, named after Mulgrew’s father, John Mulgrew, a barman who worked for some fifty years in bars in Belfast and, earlier, in Cookstown, County Tyrone. Harpers noted that John Mulgrew’s image appeared on the whiskey’s label. Today the Saint Brendan’s site links straight to The Quiet Man and says the aged whiskey finishes the liqueur “the proper Irish way.”

The liqueur has also turned up in other foods. The Irish grocery-trade title Shelf Life reported in July 2016 that Glastry Farm, an ice-cream maker in Kircubbin, County Down, had launched a Saint Brendan’s Irish Cream ice cream with Niche Drinks. The idea came from Derry and Strabane Council for the Derry stage of the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race during the Foyle Maritime Festival, and Glastry Farm’s managing director, Will Taylor, said he had taken it to Mulgrew, who backed it.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all coffee or cream liqueurs: Mr Black, Carolans, Saint Brendan’s, Kamora, Caffè Borghetti, Dooley’s and Coole Swan. Some are sweetened spirits flavoured with coffee; others blend dairy cream with a spirit such as Irish whiskey. Brands like these sit at many different points in the trade, from small independent companies to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and the same bottle can turn up on a supermarket shelf, in an airport shop or behind a cocktail bar.

A liqueur brand’s identity is usually carried less by the liquid than by a bottle, a label and the story it tells, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or licensed its name to others. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who created it, who owns it now, and where it is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its liqueur is made and how its bottles and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Derry maker, a St. Louis partner and a new parent.

Saint Brendan’s reaches American shelves through Luxco. The brand’s website says the liqueur is imported by Luxco, Inc., of St. Louis, Missouri, and MGP Ingredients describes Niche Drinks as Luxco’s Irish extension and a partner of more than thirty years. English Wikipedia says Luxco was founded in 1958 by David Sherman Sr. and Paul A. Lux as the David Sherman Corporation and took the Luxco name in 2006; it lists Saint Brendan’s among the company’s brands.

The partnership became ownership in 2018. The Whiskey Wash reported in May 2018 that Luxco had acquired a controlling interest in Niche Drinks, the Northern Ireland company that made an Irish cream liqueur for Luxco, and that Mulgrew would stay with the business. The two companies also said they planned to build an Irish whiskey distillery at Ebrington Square in Derry, though no timetable was given. Such a plant would have revived an old trade: The Irish News noted in 2015 that the city’s Watts Distillery on Abbey Street had stopped trading after a strike in 1921. Three years later Luxco itself changed hands: English Wikipedia, citing The Spirits Business, says MGP Ingredients announced a plan to buy Luxco in January 2021 and completed the purchase in April 2021. MGP has owned Luxco since 2021.

For a design guide, Saint Brendan’s shows how an Irish cream can build its identity from a place, a saint’s name and the whiskey in the bottle; compare Baileys and Carolans, two other Irish cream liqueurs. For this guide we use fresh cream, Foyle green and whiskey amber with an old-style serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Saint Brendan’s’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.