St. Kilian Distillers - The Genesis

1/ The first contact

In the mid-90s, as a student of business informatics in the beautiful Rheingau region, I was invited by my good friend and then Sparkasse advisor Dirk Hess from Kirchzell to a personal, self-prepared dinner.

Knowing Dirk's cooking skills, I couldn't turn down this invitation and, as was customary, arrived with pleasant company and in a good mood at my friend's home that evening. The dinner was exquisitely delicious and, to my surprise, was crowned by a whisky tasting of exquisite Scottish Single Malts. This was to be my first encounter with Single Malts.

Dirk was one of the first in Lower Franconia to own the set of "Classic Malts of Scotland". Here I fell in love (not with my extremely attractive companion, but) clearly with the Lagavulin 16 Years, one of the best peated whiskies from the West Scottish Isle of Islay. This experience clearly left its mark on me.

As I later learned, my friend Dirk acquired his whisky knowledge from a certain Andy McNeill from Aschaffenburg. Andy is certainly one of the leading and most important Single Malt apostles in Franconia and beyond. I can still highly recommend his Celtic Events and his special bottlings for collectors!

2/ London Days

In the mid-90s, I worked for several years as a young investment banker in mergers and acquisitions at a London investment bank. It was an educational but also tough time. 80 to 90 hours of work a week for seven consecutive days was the norm. Plus two to three flights a week.

As a specialist in the telecommunications industry, I was given a lot of responsibility very early on, did a good job, and my English bosses Jack, Rob, and Mark quickly began to appreciate me. It so happened that one or the other of them would give me a bottle of Scottish or Irish whisky as a small token of appreciation after a successful transaction. There were, for example, Tullamore Dew, a Chivas Regal 12 Years, and Wild Goose.

Over time, quite a bit accumulated, and my room in my shared apartment in Petticoat Lane in Spitalfields slowly became cramped. Fortunately, in the few hours of free time, my investment banker buddies regularly came to my place and emptied one or two bottles to the sound of Radiohead and Greenday. The showpiece of my London collection was to be a rare bottle of whisky from a Belgian independent bottler, which I had bought for a proud 89 pounds at the time in the Ritz Hotel shop.

The Scottish spirit was matured by the Belgian Michel Couvreur in French Bordeaux casks and bottled after six years. The bottle was hand-labeled, strictly limited, and sealed with wax. I loved this whisky not only for its special taste and fruity nose but also for its captivating individuality. Unfortunately, my buddies loved it too, and so not a drop was left when I later returned to Germany from London.

Today, a bottle of Couvreur can easily cost 500 euros.

3/ The Dead Poets Society

At the end of my student days, as an expert in the international banking environment (I had worked alongside at several banks and investment banks to earn some extra money), I was invited by some fellow students to give an evening lecture at their "private club" in Mülheim/Ruhr. The topic was to be: Nick Leeson - the dramatic fall of the English Barings Bank due to out-of-control speculation in Singapore. I accepted the offer and went to the Ruhr the following week, well prepared.

About 20 male and female students gathered in the "Club", the lovingly converted attic of a venerable private villa belonging to an industrial family. After a few drinks and the obligatory small talk, my lecture was to begin. To my surprise and distinct disappointment, the ladies of the evening were not allowed to attend my presentation, as it was a men's club in old English tradition, not only regarding the tie requirement. Unthinkable today.

Under protest, I began my presentation to a greatly diminished audience, which was to last a good hour. Visibly thrilled by the newly acquired knowledge, the club owner, to my great delight and with applause, presented me with a bottle of Knockando 12 Years - an exquisite Scottish Single Malt Whisky. This was to be the first bottle in my whisky collection, which today comprises over 2000 bottles.

By the way, the famous Whiskey Sour was served as a cocktail, which the ladies in particular really liked.

4/ The Scotland Trip

In 2003, Malte and I decided to go on a whisky trip to Scotland. Malte is a great guy from Cologne and works in my company. By now, I had established my own M&A consultancy (note: Mergers & Acquisitions) in Frankfurt am Main. Like me, Malte particularly loves peated single malts, so our destination was the Isle of Islay, the famous Scottish island of Lagavulin & Co. This was to be my first whisky trip.

It was early summer and we had a week. There were about a dozen distilleries on the island, so we decided to set up headquarters in a quaint hotel in Port Charlotte. Equipped with two rented mountain bikes, we visited all the whisky distilleries within 7 days, gradually increasing from 20 ppm to over 100 ppm, the more ppm the peatier. Ardbeg, Caol Ila, Bunnahabhain... one distillery was more beautiful and exciting than the other.

In doing so, we lost quite a few pounds on our bikes while crossing the island. We saw few inhabitants, but plenty of sheep, which in herds sometimes blocked roads and paths for extended periods. The landscape was unique and the long sandy beaches reminded me of the beaches in the Caribbean, where I had been on holiday before.

A special experience was the visit to Bruichladdich. The distillery had been closed for many decades before some investment bankers from London bought it, renovated it from the ground up, and restarted production. Immediately, the new Bruichladdich was chosen as the best whisky in the world during that time. A new legend was born, and we stocked up heavily. So heavily that we almost didn't make it back to Germany because of all the bottles.

This trip was followed by many more whisky trips to Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, and the USA. I made it a tradition to invite my best employees on a joint whisky trip for three to four days once a year. This is a great opportunity for team building and a great chance to acquire one or two dusty rare bottles at an interesting price in the furthest corners of the distilleries for one's own collection.

5/ Frankfurt Westhafen Tastings

In 2008, I decided to look for an apartment in Frankfurt. I had previously lived in Berlin for several years to establish our capital office there. The timing for buying an apartment was more than perfect due to the global real estate crisis triggered earlier in the USA. Prices were at an all-time low. As a banker, I had internalized the basic rule of successful stock market and real estate speculation: Buy Low, Sell High. Or in German: The blessing lies in buying. 80 percent of people do the exact opposite, which remains inexplicable to me to this day.

I found what I was looking for on an island in the new Westhafen in Frankfurt. A modern, two-story penthouse with great rooftop terraces, a unique skyline view, and an included underground garage and boat dock. After a few days, I spontaneously bought the keys to the penthouse from the owner, a fashion photographer who had only occupied it for the first time a year earlier, and moved in. What to do with the new home?

As a passionate whisky fan with several hundred bottles of accumulated delicacies, I had a large, blue-lit, copper shelf forged for my babies, which extended over two floors in the loggia. A few weeks later, I invited friends and acquaintances, including good clients of my company, to the first "West Harbour Whisky Tasting". Food consisted of several platters of fish sandwiches from Gosch Sylt and Subway sandwiches. The concept was a bit unorthodox, but all the guests were enthusiastic, and word got around. It turned out that this type of social gathering and conversation, supported by numerous noble single malt whiskies, was very conducive to business. Many whisky parties with numerous guests followed in the years thereafter. The pressure to expand the whisky collection, buy more bottles, and explore new regions and topics increased with the steadily growing knowledge and increased demands of my esteemed visitors. In these years, my whisky collection soared into the four-digit bottle range.

When the hustle and bustle later became too much, and some neighbors pulled out all the stops after a Star Wars & Whisky New Year's Eve party in my penthouse, I spontaneously decided to sell. In the meantime, prices for high-quality real estate in Frankfurt had risen noticeably, and I could put the profit to good use for building my own whisky distillery in my hometown. Not that these funds would have been enough for the construction of St. Kilian. Many times that amount has flowed into Germany's largest single malt whisky production to date.

However, the arguments for such a large investment in one's own whisky were compelling: such an investment is always high-proof and liquid, no matter what happens, and I wanted there to be a quality whisky in Germany that could prove itself in an international context.

6/ Mackmyra Svensk Whisky and the 30-liter cask

At the beginning of 2010, I heard about the Seehotel in Niedernberg, located between Aschaffenburg and Miltenberg on the Main. There was supposed to be a good whisky selection there. So I set off to sample some rarities with Dirk Janssen, who was then the bartender and whisky connoisseur. Towards the end, Dirk remarked that the Swedish chef of the Seehotel from the far north had brought him a bottle of Mackmyra Svensk Whisky, and that they could open it to celebrate the day. Not bad at all, this Mackmyra, a harsh drop, but with a very good character. I hadn't even known that whisky was produced in Sweden. In the land of Absolut Vodka. According to the chef, one could also acquire one's own 30-liter casks of the raw, smoky spirit there. I had never heard of such an interesting possibility. And the smaller the cask, the faster the contents mature. Wow.

In early summer, I planned a holiday trip to Pennsylvania, USA, with my then-girlfriend. On the way back to Germany, we made a spontaneous stopover in Stockholm and, after a few hours' drive north, visited the idyllic Mackmyra Distillery for the first time. We were immediately welcomed and well looked after by Jonas Berg, one of Mackmyra's eight founders. It ended with me acquiring half a dozen of my own 30-liter casks in various designs. This happened very easily, and I was simply thrilled. At that time, there were already 15,000 Swedish cask owners since the founding in 1999. And you could even buy shares in Mackmyra on the stock exchange. Not bad, these Swedes.

To this day, there have been many mutual visits, and we have become friends. Our Master Distiller Mario Rudolf even had the opportunity to work at Mackmyra's new Gravity Distillery for some time, gaining further valuable experience and Swedish insights.

And of course, today you can also buy your own 30-liter cask at St. Kilian. Skoll.

7/ The encounter with David F. Hynes, Master Distiller from Ireland

In 2010, as a collector, I was at the InterWhisky trade fair in Frankfurt am Main. At one of the whisky tasting stands, I happened to strike up a conversation with Mr. Queisser from Wiesbaden. As a former management consultant and member of a LIONS Club, he had traveled widely and, like me, was a big whisky fan. He had a particular soft spot for Irish whiskies, which I was not so familiar with at the time. So he offered me Connemara Whisky from Ireland to try, as a lover of peated whiskies. I hadn't even known until then that the Irish offered such a good smoky whisky. Until then, I only knew that from the whiskies of the Isle of Islay in Scotland. This acquaintance developed into a friendship that continues to this day.

Some time later, Christian Boos, a good acquaintance and the leading expert on artificial intelligence in Germany, took me on a whisky trip to Ireland. He was already a big fan of the green island back then. For four days, our driver named Eddie drove us across the country in his Rolls Royce. We visited almost all the whiskey distilleries that existed. In Ireland, due to strong consolidation, there were only a dozen left. Cooley's Distillers, the home of Connemara, was particularly exciting. There I met David F. Hynes for the first time, the Master Distiller and Managing Director of Cooley's for over 30 years. In Kilbeggan, the oldest licensed whiskey distillery in the world, also part of the Cooley's group, I tried to convince David to sell me my first cask of whisky. Very unusual for Irish distillers. With a lot of persistence and persuasion, I finally managed to win David over, and so I became the owner of my first whisky cask.

When an old, disused textile factory with its own spring in my home village in the Odenwald, not far from Frankfurt/Main, went up for sale a year later, and David again held his famous Master Class seminar at Interwhisky (and presented the new, absolutely sensational Connemara Turf Mor), I convinced my Irish friend to extend his trip by another day to inspect this property together.

Finally, in the winter of 2011, we spent a day together in beautiful Rüdenau and concluded our very own special whisky tasting around a campfire at dawn. This moment was the spiritual birth of St. Kilian Whisky Distillers. Back in Dublin, David promptly implemented what had been discussed after a good dozen drams and first ordered the two 6000-liter copper pot stills from Forsyths in Edinburgh (3 years delivery time). Not much later, Cooley's was acquired by Jim Beam from the USA. And shortly thereafter, Suntory from Japan bought the Beam Group in a multi-billion dollar deal. Time for David to dedicate himself fully to building his new baby, "St. Kilian Distillers - Single Malt Whisky made in Germany" for a while. The old textile factory gradually became Germany's largest single malt whisky distillery through careful and extensive renovation. What fortunate circumstances led to this genesis. After four and a half years, the marvel stood in Rüdenau, and production began promptly on St. Patrick's Day 2016.

8/ Back to the roots: Coming home

Once it was clear that St. Kilian would begin production on St. Patrick's Day in March 2016, the decision was made to return home after a long, worldwide odyssey and settle down. Our village Rüdenau is located not far from the romantic district town of Miltenberg on the Main, also known as "the Pearl of the Main". The small historic town of Miltenberg has been very popular with tourists for many decades. Bus travelers and international river cruise tourists appreciate this beautiful spot on earth more than ever today. In addition, we are only 60 minutes by car from Frankfurt am Main. Frankfurt Airport is only 45 minutes away. This places us right in the middle of the Rhine-Main area. Almost 4 million inhabitants live in our catchment area. And yet we are idyllically situated on the Main, between the Spessart and Odenwald forests. Embedded by forests and mountains and unique nature. If you have traveled abroad for a long time and spent a lot of time in big cities, then you really appreciate this. Home is always the best!

Even in Roman times, there was a large Castellum here with 500 mounted legionnaires. Rüdenau was then used by the Romans as a wine-growing area. According to legend, the Romans worshipped water saints in our valley. Even today there are three springs in Rüdenau, and the Rüdenau coat of arms is shaped by these three springs. Fauna and flora are still absolutely in harmony with us. The climate in our area is very well suited for the long-term maturation of single malt whisky. It is surprising that no one before us had thought of it. We are very lucky that we have such a great location.

Our region was a true gourmet region even before us. Numerous winegrowers and vineyards characterize the landscape. We have a first-class brewery. And there are various manufacturers: spices, marzipan, and much more. Of absolute top class! Our single malt whisky couldn't be missing. And of course, we work together with numerous businesses here in the region. In a very short time, we have already made many friends and the people are very open-minded and also wonderful fans. For this, we are truly very grateful. Thanks to the local "Whisky Friends," we experienced a fantastic start to our business.

The future vision of St. Kilian is clear: The climate, the water, our ingredients, the landscape, and the people: All of this promises top quality. Our unique team, which is at work here, works every day with great enthusiasm to produce an absolute top-class product. We want to be world-class, and we will achieve that. Of course, we can only do this together with our fans and our friends. We are therefore grateful for any feedback and look forward not only to every visitor but also to every comment on the internet and social media. We are not only a whisky distillery but also a modern internet company. Here we will make a special effort to communicate with our customers and our fans.