If you pick up a bottle of the delicious Five Farms Irish cream liqueur during the festive rush you will do so in the knowledge that you are part of a growing number of people who will add it to their ‘must have’ list this Christmas.
Spurred on by well-known Raphoe man, Johny Harte, Five Farms is now firmly challenging the likes of Baileys in the ultra-competitive drinks market.
Harte, the son of the late former Donegal TD has been in the alcohol business for over three decades, building and reviving numerous Irish whiskey brands.
But with Five Farms now expected to produce over €20 million in revenue this year alone after its initial launch in 2017, it has certainly come of age.
Harte says that he wanted to create a product that better represented the traditional Irish roots of the drink – and with the combination of Irish cream sourced from Cork, a healthy 10 percent serving of Irish whiskey in the mix (and who could forget the Madagascan vanilla), Five Farms seems to have certainly achieved that goal.
A veteran of the whiskey industry, Harte had a hunch that Irish cream had existed long before Baileys.
“The longer I was in the industry, the more I realised the brand had very strong roots in traditional Irish culture,” the Donegal man told independent.ie recently. “I’d read this report years and years ago that made the point that most Irish-Americans thought that Irish cream was a hand-me- down recipe from their grandparents.
“I‘d believed that Irish cream as a category didn’t exist until the 1970s. But I kept meeting people who’d say, ‘I have a recipe for Irish cream that was handed down to us’. In the beginning, I didn’t know if that was hearsay or sentimentality, but it kept recurring.
“And when you start digging deeper, you find that people did make a version of cream liqueur at home on their farm as a special treat for a special time. And when a lot of Irish emigrants went to the US, they brought that concept with them.
“Gilbeys were really retaking the heritage of Irish creams and it was great they did that because it protected Irish cream as a category — today, there’s a world-accepted geographical indicator for Irish cream. But I wanted to celebrate the origins of Irish cream and bring it back to the farm.”
“ ‘We’re the only cream liqueur that knows exactly where the cream comes from’
The result was Five Farms, a joint venture Harte launched in late 2017 with the Missouri-based McCormick Distilling Company, a contact he had developed while working for John Teeling’s Cooley Distillery in Louth. Five Farms, a super-premium brand that retails at about twice the price of Baileys in Ireland, is named after the five family-owned farms in West Cork where the company sources its fresh cream. Single batches of cream from each farm are combined with triple-distilled whiskey from a Cork distillery and flavoured with vanilla imported from Madagascar.
Harte says Five Farms has a 15pc butterfat content — the highest-possible proportion in a cream liqueur — and contains 10pc Irish whiskey, which is 10 times the industry average for Irish cream liqueurs.
It’s packaged in a retro-style, 700ml black bottle with a ceramic swing-top cap. “We didn’t have 200 years of tradition but we knew we could replace that with authenticity and traceability,” Harte says. “We’re the only cream liqueur that knows exactly where the cream comes from.”
The 59-year-old and McCormick, which distributes Five Farms, have poured a combined €10m to €15m into the brand, with most of the spending going to sales and marketing.
That investment has paid off in spades: the brand is now sold in 24 countries, having just launched at Nicolas — France’s most prestigious off-licence chain — and at the Trader Joe’s grocery chain in California. It’s also sold at Harvey Nichols and Harrods in London, the Dan Murphy’s off-licence chain in Australia, and is even available aboard Alaskan Airlines flights.
In Ireland, Five Farms is on the shelves at SuperValu, Tesco, O’Brien’s, Centra, Spar and Marks & Spencer, selling for €30 to €35 a bottle. Harte expects to sell as many as 16,000 bottles in the domestic market this year and 700,000 bottles worldwide, generating €20m in revenue for the nascent brand. “Our plan for the next three to five years is to get to sales of two million bottles, or revenue of €60m,” he says.
Harte, who grew up in the small border town of Raphoe as one of nine children, didn’t lick that entrepreneurial streak off the ground: the family of his late father, Paddy Harte, had run a pub and butcher shop for generations and Paddy Harte himself was poised to set up a butchering business but entered politics instead, serving as a Fine Gael TD for Donegal North East for 36 years and becoming a junior minister at the Department of Posts and Telegraphs during the short-lived coalition government of 1981 to 1982.
The brand was rolled out first in the US and exports began to other traditional markets for Irish whiskey and Irish cream, such as Canada and Australia. But Harte is surprised by Five Farms’s popularity in the Irish market.
“Mick Harris teases me all the time because I’d said we’d never sell this in Ireland because Ireland is such a tough place to sell products — you’re never a prophet in your own land,” Harte says. “I’m actually still shocked at the reception the brand got in Ireland. People say they identify with it, and they like the story, because it’s true.”
If you haven’t tried Five Farms just yet, treat yourself this Christmas.
And after you taste it, we dare you not to make it a ‘must’ on your Christmas shopping list every year.
