The Gin, the Bees and the Racecourse
Silks Irish Dry Gin has been named Ireland’s Country Winner at the World Gin Awards for the second year running, with Gold to go with it, and the timing is a little more pointed than it first appears: 2026 also marks 300 years of recorded racing at Bellewstown, the racecourse that gave the gin its name. Here’s how a family orchard, beekeeping introduced to support pollination, and that view of Bellewstown shaped an award-winning Irish gin with a remarkably local sense of identity.
The Boyne Valley does not let you forget its history. The river runs through a landscape thick with ancient monuments and farmland that has been worked for thousands of years, and around Drogheda that history extends to distilling too, with records pointing to eighteen distilleries operating there in the eighteenth century before the last of them fell silent by the 1850s. It stayed that way for more than 160 years, until distillation resumed at Boann Distillery in December 2019, marking less of a beginning than a return.
One particular strand of that return started somewhere entirely unglamorous: an apple orchard, and beekeeping introduced to help pollinate it.
Sally-Anne Cooney had already spent close to three decades in the wine and spirits trade before joining the family distillery, but Silks did not really come from that professional grounding. It came from something closer to home. She and her mother Marie completed a beekeeping course with the Federation of Irish Beekeepers’ Associations in 2011, though it was 2016 before they began keeping bees in earnest, specifically to support pollination across the family’s apple orchard, a stretch of land holding around 6,500 trees.
The honeyed, hedgerow-scented world that produced eventually became the blueprint for a gin, and rather than build Silks around an unfamiliar or imported botanical list, Sally-Anne kept the recipe close to what the family already had: apple, honey, elderflower and hawthorn blossom drawn from their own trees and hedgerows, layered onto a classical structure of juniper, coriander, angelica, cassia and cardamom. The apple blossom asks for particular patience, since its harvesting window is short and easily undone by wind or wet weather, so it has to be collected and dried carefully each year, a small, seasonal piece of labour that a bottle on a shelf gives no hint of. “We knew that we needed a good name to stand out in a very competitive market,” Sally-Anne has said of choosing Silks, which takes its name from the colours worn by jockeys at Bellewstown Racecourse, visible from the distillery grounds. The connection runs both ways, in fact: the Cooneys have converted a horsebox into a mobile gin bar, nicknamed the Ginbox, which turns up at Bellewstown race meetings when the summer festivals are on.
Bellewstown itself carries more history than a passing racecourse reference might suggest. Racing there was first recorded in August 1726, in the Dublin Gazette and Weekly Courier, making it the second-longest continuously running racecourse in Ireland after the Curragh, and in 1780 it secured royal patronage from King George III in the form of His Majesty’s Plate, a prize that held for more than two centuries. It has its share of folklore too, most famously the 1975 Yellow Sam betting coup, in which the gambler Barney Curley had an accomplice tie up the track’s only public phone box to delay news of a 20-to-1 winner reaching off-course bookmakers. Three hundred years on from that first recorded meeting, the course marked its tercentenary in the same year the gin claimed its second consecutive Country Winner title, a coincidence that gives the racecourse name on the label rather more weight than decoration.
Boann was founded by Patrick and Marie Cooney, whose family has lived and worked in the Boyne Valley for more than two centuries, and the “fifty years in the drinks trade” attached to that story is not a loose figure. Pat Cooney spent roughly four decades building an Irish drinks business from the ground up, growing it into a major manufacturer and wholesaler before selling part of it on in 2012 and keeping a cream liqueur facility and cidery in the family. That is the apprenticeship Boann was built on, and it shows in how deliberately the business has grown since: Peter, Patrick and James Cooney now handle exports, sales and finance, and the distillery’s ambitions have extended well beyond the original gin project into Single Pot Still Irish whiskey, with expressions built from malted and unmalted barley alongside oats, wheat and rye. The gin itself is distilled separately from that whiskey programme, in small batches through a custom 500-litre Bennett still fitted with a vapour infusion chamber, a feature the distillery added specifically to draw out the more delicate aromatics from softer botanicals like apple blossom and elderflower without overcooking them. The more traditional botanicals are macerated for 24 hours first, and the finished spirit is reduced to bottling strength using water from Boann’s own deep well.
That same instinct for place carries into how the distillery runs itself. Boann is a Gold member of Bord Bia’s Origin Green programme, operates a closed-loop water system, sends its spent grain to a local farmer for cattle feed, and plants around 1,000 native trees a year as part of a barrel-sustainability plan, a habit that sits easily alongside the 6,500 apple trees the Cooneys were already tending before Boann existed. The distillery itself sits just outside Drogheda on the Platin Road, close enough to the M1 to be within an hour of Dublin or Belfast, and it has become increasingly set up for visitors, with tours taking in the stills before opening onto the wider operation. Newgrange, the Hill of Tara and Bellewstown are all within easy reach for anyone building it into a longer Boyne Valley itinerary.
My first impression was oddly specific: warm honey and Dutch tulip fields in bloom. Juniper, citrus and spice step forward as the spirit settles, with apple blossom giving the aroma a gentle orchard lift and elderflower adding a further floral layer that stays measured rather than perfumed. On the palate, juniper holds a steady, central presence while citrus oils bring brightness through the middle, orange and lemon keeping the softer botanicals in the background, and the finish develops a light warming spice before settling into a clean, rounded dryness. The orchard ingredients give it personality while the underlying structure remains recognisably gin from first nosing to last sip.
Tasting cues Juniper: medium and steady Citrus: bright lemon peel with gentle orange oil Floral: apple blossom and soft meadow florals Sweet notes: warm honey nuance Herbal and spice: light warming spice with subtle botanical depth Finish: clean, rounded and gently warming
At the 2026 World Gin Awards, Silks was named Ireland’s Country Winner in the London Dry Gin category and awarded Gold, with judges noting a fresh nose carrying leafy and menthol notes, a touch of minerality, balanced botanical complexity and a little warmth on the finish. A second consecutive Country Winner title, following the same result in 2025, makes the outcome more interesting than a one-off medal, particularly when the judging notes keep circling back to balance and botanical complexity rather than any one standout note. It is not the gin’s first recognition either; it picked up a Gold medal from the Beverage Testing Institute not long after its 2021 launch, so this year’s win looks more like the latest instalment in a pattern than a fresh discovery. That pattern extends across the distillery, too, with Distiller of the Year and Best Production Team honours at the Icons of Whisky Ireland awards and a World’s Best Apple Brandy title for the 1848 Apple Brandy at the World Brandy Awards.
The gin works particularly well in a straightforward G&T, where a dry tonic and a restrained garnish, an apple slice or a strip of lemon peel, let the orchard and citrus elements stay visible. Boann’s own Apple Bee cocktail leans further into honey and apple rather than working against them, and for something longer and warmer, ginger ale with orange peel takes the drink in a softer direction.
It would have been easy to build a gin around a racecourse view alone, or around an orchard image without much behind it. Silks holds up because neither element is decoration, right down to the horsebox bar that shows up trackside when the racing is on. This year’s award gives it another reason to be sought out, but it works more as confirmation than as the story itself. What actually holds the story together is a lot more ordinary than a medal: a family orchard, bees kept to pollinate it, hedgerows that happen to run along the back of the hives, and a racecourse close enough to see from the still house. All of it was there long before anyone thought to put it in a bottle.
Further information: https://www.boanndistillery.ie/product/silks-irish-dry-gin/
All materials are reproduced in good faith and remain the copyright of their respective owners. ©Luxfanzine, 2026
