- Irish music playing Fáilte ar ais,

- And normally I'm welcoming people back to my bar, but we're at someone else's bar today, Sean McKane. A bar owner, bar man, Irish whiskey lover and fellow Dub, most importantly.

- That's correct, yes.

- So yeah, thanks for having us.

- Of course, more than happy, yeah, welcome.

- So, you've owned this wonderful place that we're sitting in. Tell us,

- I know, I do, yes.

- How'd you end up here?

- I ended up here, mixed story. Came here for school and then just kept going, pretty much, fell in love with the bar trade. I've been working in bars since I am 16, serving Kennedy's in Drumcondra, I probably shouldn't say this on tape. Serving Kennedy's in Drumcondra, Mich Kennedy was my hurling manager and she gave me a job in there pulling pints. And then went on to Na Fianna GAA Club, pulling pints in there and then I went to, Tamango's in Portmarnock.

- That's a name I remember.

- That was a good time, that was a nightclub. And then of course, different gigs in Croke Park You do your Christmas parties then you do your, Aviva Stadium and Six Nations and all of those things. But when I came here, then John Gulay from O'Casey's around the corner, he gave me a shot and made me work for it, and then was with him for almost four years and great times, really, good times. And I went from there to work in Barn 47, which is now called Hudson Den Haag South. Worked for a gentleman, Mark, who was my partner in this and yeah, good times there as well. He opened my eyes, to the capabilities of what hospitality can be. He understands like it's not just pulling a pint and over the shoulder. You know, he opened my eyes to how the actual business side of things run and then, yeah. And here we are together. Him and his cousin Paul seem to take a shining and said Sean, go and do your thing. And so I sit here.

- So no better than an Irish person to actually run an Irish pub.

- That was the whole selling point. He could see me as a barman in there, big venue. We had like 400 seats, 500 seats a night. And I'd be doing the bar with maybe a runner. You nearly need to be an octopus because like an island bar. And you have everything behind you, in front of you, everywhere you doing coffees and...

- And that's how a good Irish bar man is is that you're one hand, you're pulling a pint of Guinness out front and you're-

- Pulling a pint over shoulder talking to three different people at the same time.

- And you've got two runners on the go,

- Yeah it's almost a craft on its own, it is.

- I think we do, we make the best.

- So here this is, you're obviously running your place, Here at Sixpence Public House in Den Haag. How long have you been open?

- Opened the 15th of November, 2019. And it was fantastic. Really, really well, we had massive publicity of course we opened under "Shelby" and had the whole Peaky Blinders thing going on. And then it was at a sweet spot when I think Season Five just finished and everybody was mad about it. And the people traveling from Spain, from Belgium, people driving in one day down from Sweden to get a photograph in front of the Instagram wall. I didn't even know we had an Instagram wall. The Instagram wall, and driving back again like not even having a drink, having a cup of coffee. And yeah, we just, Copenhagen, I remember one father and son drove from Copenhagen, came in, the son had a whiskey, the father had a soda water. They put the hats on, took a photo, said goodbye and then drove back.

- Wow.

- Bananas. It was humbling and very, very.

- So you hit on something without even realizing it.

- Yeah, yeah. And then of course COVID decided to knock on our door. And then-

- So that would've been four or so months after you opened?

- Yeah, 14th of March. And it was unfortunate because it would've been my first Patrick's Day. Like I said, I had great times at O'Casey's, but I was the only Irish, Irish bar owner so it was my time day, you know, I'm going to show you what St. Patrick's can be.

- Put a stake in the ground, so to speak.

- Yeah, and we had major events sorted out. We had the Kosovo tribunal were going to host here, we had the [Irish] embassy wanted to use this place. One woman was even flying a harp, 12,000 euro in insurance just to get the harp over here to have that kind of level of musicians. And then the 11th, which was a Wednesday, everybody came in one after the other. And all of the reservations just started to go. And then we realized, okay, this is a lot bigger than we thought. And then the Saturday I called Mark and I said I think, naively I volunteered to close for two weeks to let this die down.

- It was only going to be two weeks, that was the cycle. And then it was maybe another couple of weeks. And then when did you reopen him?

- May 29th.

- So that was two and a half months.

- That was the first lockdown. And then we had I think restrictions, so it's 6 o'clock predominantly food only. And then they opened it to 12 and then eventually we went to full hours, but we only got two weeks of full hours and back to 12, back to 10 back to eight. And then in that time I got my hands on Thomas and Christian who have, you know they're just as, if not more important to this place than I am because they are just remarkable. They work like I've never seen before. And they're so they're young, they're 22 and 23, but they've got heads on them like 35 year olds, you know, who've been doing this for 15, 20 years. So in that, they stuck around then the first lockdown after the first lockdown, the second lockdown, they stuck around through the second lockdown and got to work.

- And what you doing to kind of keep the business going when you were?

- AH, liquor of course.

- Okay.

- We started making Limoncello, Ciaobello, and the two boys have now turned it into a pretty decent business. We're doing shadow, we're doing markets, we're doing Irish stew in a bag, we're doing bourbon, take away, anything that we could.

- Obviously you've got, you know, the bar, you've got a kitchen. And you've got staff, and you want to keep them-

- Keep the staff. Well that's the main thing. You have to keep them interested. They said to me at the beginning of the second lockdown they said, Sean, what do you want to do? Do you want us to go home and come back when you open up again? And I knew if I said yes, I'd never get them back. I said, lads, if you stick with me, I promise you, if you just sick with me in this second lockdown we're going to do great things together. And that's what's happened. That's fantastic.

- Good, good. So we're here to talk about Irish Whiskey, and we'll get to your favorite in a few minutes and have a great selection behind us. So first experience of Irish Whiskey?

- Graduation night. I went to C.U.S. on Leeson Street and graduation night, and I was working in Kennedy's at the time and I was astounded by the lads who used to do, a pint and a little one. I didn't know what that was.

- A pint and a little one?

- A pint and a little one.

- So I knew that as a pint and a chaser?

- Pint and a chaser, yeah, or a pint and a "baby Jamey" or something. And even though you asked for a "baby Jamey", they'd want Powers. So something it was, what's going on here? So, and of course first pint after graduation walked in with all the boys from school and the teachers, and taking you're Billy Big Bollox Give me a pint and a little one, and the barman looks and he goes, are you sure you want that? Like I'm 18, like and I didn't want it. I learned the next day that I really didn't want it, I wasn't ready for it. But then after that, of course years later, just looking at what different whiskeys are and my uncle, my father's sister's husband, he's mad into his whiskey. He has a collection, a remarkable collections at home. And he just started just saying what this is and what that is. And I was thinking, okay, it may be something.

- And you mentioned to me he worked at Midleton?

- His uncle or his father was a gatekeeper at Midleton. So he has the full Midleton collection from bottle one way up to, I don't think he has 2020 yet because I think COVID put a spanner in the works for that. But I know he has from the first one all the way up.

- So are you, will you get in the will or, are you the heir of those bottles?

- I hope I'm getting some. Let's see how well the bar goes, contributing at the end, or buy it from him. Yeah his own two boys are also big whiskey lovers. Okay, so you went to a bar when you graduated from CUS, a pint and a little one. I wouldn't have drank whiskey back in my late teens or early 20's either. Just I think it's something you come to as you get older. Is that a fair comment?

- It's a fair comment, but I've always been a bit of an old, like I'm only 33, you know, I mean, when I was 21 my Dad was telling me you need to start dressing your age. Stop wearing my clothes, you know what I mean? So I've always been a few years ahead and those kind things when, like most of my friends here are minimum 10 years older than me. You know, got a handful of friends that are around the same age and that for me and my brother, who also lives here in The Hague, he lives in Holland. Most of our friends are much older us. You know, they're in their forties, their fifties, their sixties.

- Is there a whiskey drinking culture here?

- Yeah, there's one good customer here, Dennis O'Donovan, I'm happy I'm going to call you out, Dennis. He only comes in on a Friday and he had a couple of pints and he doesn't go mad. And then every Friday he treats himself to one.

- From the top shelf?

- From the top shelf. One decent one. He'll look, he'll have two, three pints and say what am I going to have tonight? And then course then the challenge is you have to sell it to him, you know? He'll ask you to sell it. So then you're saying, well I have this and I have that. I have a Teeling's Pineapple Rum Cask up there. That was the last one that he had and he absolutely loved it. You have a lot of the lads who are in that age bracket that I just described who are friends that also they would come in and have a whiskey and this place kind of made whiskey fun for them when they started seeing all of the bottles and they're like, what's that and what's that? So then you kind of, we started a whiskey culture then almost in The Hague.

- Well it's going on since, so 33 I did some quick in my head. It would've been about 15 years ago that you did your Leaving Cert., roughly speaking. We've come along way in 15 years in Irish whiskey.

- We have, yeah, yeah, in Irish whiskey majorly so. Like I said was working in Kennedy's it was Powers, Jameson.

- The old suspects. Probably the same as when I did my Leaving Cert. You had the four, five brands, two or three distilleries.

- Had a bad reputation for some reason I think "The Wire" gave Bushmills a bad reputation.

- Yeah, I it was, it was funny when I was growing up there was you know, you and I being Dubs, you would drink Jameson, because it was the Dublin whiskey. Well didn't that move to Middleton [in Cork] in '76, '77. So you know much to drink then. Beause the last thing you want to be doing is drinking a whiskey from Antrim or a whiskey from Cork.

- Cork, exactly, yeah.

- But there's always been this kind of, I don't know, underlying snobbery, you know, parochial thing. But I thinking it's all changed now given that there's, you know, four new distilleries in Dublin, you know, right down the Wicklow border we have Powerscourt and Glendalough as well. It's all changed.

- Yeah, I think the mentality of things change as well. People encourage other people to do things now, and that's a fantastic thing. You see young lads, Jack and Steven from Teeling's. What they did with that was remarkable. They turned that completely from a couple of barrels that they inherited to now I think knocking on the door of Jameson at this point.

- They're doing, to their credit, you mentioned a Pineapple Cask. I told you we had our Recioto Cask last night in Amsterdam, god it was just off the charts, and not an expensive whiskey.

- No, and you don't expect it. Like people see it and they think, oh I'm not going to bother touching that. And you find out it's only nine euro a drop.

- Yeah.

- Wow. So they're making it accessible to most walks of life as opposed to your Midleton's that are accessible to those who have the 75 euro to spend on it on a 35 cl. glass

- So now it's great that you're seeing the evolution of it as I have. And obviously you jumped into it sooner than I have. But I'm at 52 and you're at 33, so you were having fun long before I ever thought about it. So with that let's talk your favorite.

- My favorite has got to be the Green Spot. Any of the Mitchell's, also we got their subsidiary of Midleton. How do you say you, you know, you go to are the Mercedes, you want Mercedes, you got to Mercedes. You want BMW, you go BMW. And that's how you can look at your Bushmills and you can look at your Midletons. But I think this is almost like a Tesla, it's going to be.

- Now I'm thinking to what's happened with them, the Teeling's and what they've done. I think so often we, you know, this is essentially part of the big boy stable, you know? It's an Irish Distillers product owned by Pernod Ricard, they've done a great job. You know, I've read all about the history of "The Spots" and history, because we know with every Irish whiskey there's a story just like with everybody in the industry there's a great story. And they're often knocked for, Jameson's, you know, being commercial whiskey. But if it wasn't for Jameson, there'd be no category.

- Nope, it wouldn't.

- So the fact that they pulling from things like the Leoville-Barton and the Montelena, which is you know, close to where we live. There's, I mentioned it to they just literally this week they're launching a range out of Greece, from a Greek winery. And I'm not sure if you're going to see it here, but there's an Irish family in British Columbia, Stewart family, and they've done a collaboration with them, in the Okanagan Valley. So, not sure what will go to which market, but they're taking a great core product and they're adding a layer to it.

- And yeah, I think another one similar to the Spots is Method & Madness-

- Yeah, that's their experimental line. Have you got got the here?

- No.

- We struggle to get them on the west coast. Some of them might-

- On the way home?

- Dublin.

- You can in any airport.

- The problem is there's only so much room in the suitcase.

- You can always take a few extra suitcases.

- So let's take a drop of your favorite in a glass and have a little bit of a taste. So obviously this is how you would present the whiskey here. At Sixpence Public House. Ice, water, neat. How do you drink yours?

- I actually normally have it in a tumbler with one cube.

- You're a good man.

- But I'm not going to do a full measure because I still have work to do today.

- What are, you said cube, is it big?

- A smaller cube. I tend to hold it until the cube will start to drop. I like it cold and I don't like it too hard.

- If it works for you that's great

- And the book, I think it's called, History of Whiskey or something. In the first couple of pages the writer basically says there's no right and wrong way to drink whiskey. You like it with cola, drink it with cola. You like it with ice, drink with ice.

- Because you've paid for it.

- Yeah.

- It's your drink What ever way you want to enjoy it, enjoy it.

- Yeah, Green Spot's your favorite, we should say Sláinte. So what is it about this? Yeah it's just a classic flavor. We're down to the bottom of this bottle. So it's really opened up.

- It doesn't last long here, that's about a week on the shelf. And that tends to be one of our quickest sellers as well.

- So a week on the shelf is, you know, 50, 50 here give or take, over the year and probably around St. Patrick's

- We sell them a bit more Christmas especially. It's that one step above a Jameson that you can, you know, you can justify spending a few extra for it. You know, it's crazy, it's not like Midleton, it's not like Jameson 18-year old, but it's still, it's up there.

- And you do whiskey flights here, yeah?

- We do, yeah we do whiskey tastings, we do both serviced tastings, and run of the mill standard print-out tastings, where we give you the individual whiskeys with the information about them and you can do it yourself. Or what we tend to get with the Bachelor Parties and that they'll want somebody there to do it.

- A little of tutoring.

- Yeah.

- A bit of education.

- A bit of education. Where they come from, what type of bottle is it? Who owns the company or what's the relevance to Dublin. It also helps when you have a Dublin accent, and you're telling them about the whiskeys. But you know Christian, he's the go-to guy when it come to the tastes. He just Italian from Northern Italy and he's just so relaxed and so calm that they're just, they're happy to sit back and listen.

- Something about the Italians-

- There is yeah.

- Realized that we have an accent but yeah, the Italians have they have a bit more class. So if you're doing a Green Spot tasting would you add on the Montelena and the Leoville-Barton with this?

- I give them an option if they wanted, it depends what their budget is more so. I have price categories, I think it's 35 up as far as 175 and there's four levels in between. And then the 175 would be three from the cabinet and two from the shelf. And the 35 would be four from the shelf and one from the cabinet. And even the one from the cabinet wouldn't be, it wouldn't be the Bow St., put it that way.

- Great, great selection. Great to have such a range of Spots here. And obviously, you know, behind the bar there's about another almost two dozen, on offer. You know, it's a lovely, lovely range. It's pretty deep, and you're responsible for buying it all?

- Together with Thomas and Christian. And also with the brand ambassadors we do a lot of work together with them. So the Dewar's guys, they own a boozer around the corner called The Taproom. Sergey and Ytaly. But Sergey used to be the Dewar's rep. So when you start off, you tend to partner up with your big companies, the Bacardi's and that. And Dewar's is the Bacardi pouring whiskey, and Sergey got involved quick as you like, no extra hassle, no nothing and just jumped on board with us helped to build a selection. And then Thomas and Christian, the more education that they do and the more learning that they do every day, then they come and say, Sean, this is an Ashton or Hannah so this is, one that people have asked for that we haven't had in for a while. Okay, you go for it. And then Christian will say, well I did a tasting last week and two of them requested this. You know what I mean?

- It's interesting having come down to Den Haag from Amsterdam. We went through a number of Irish bars up there and I have to say I won't name names. But I disappointed with Irish whiskey selections.

- Yeah that's fair, yeah.

- So credit to you and your team here for a decent, really decent selection. You know, one of the bars, four times as many Scotch bottles as there was Irish. And when you look at the selection, it doesn't have to be the way. You can have smokey, peatey Irish if you want at different levels.

- Have Connemara, the steadfast. 12-year there, and we have the single-malt.

- So there's great Scotches, I'm not knocking Scotch at all but I think, you know an Irish pub should have a good selection of Irish whiskey.

- You want to be rubbing shoulders with the Scots if you're going to be buying yourself a whiskey bar for sure, absolutely.

- Great, well listen we're going to a little Sláinte and then enjoy the rest of this yeah, well thanks, thanks for having us.

- Course, yeah.

- Yeah, there's something about it. I'm a Redbreast lover, but there's something about Green Spot that just, it's lovely, so, yeah. Go raibh maith agat.

- Tá fáilte romhat.- Thanks for having us Yeah, we look forward to coming back in when it's opening time, and maybe doing some damage to the credit card. So yeah, thanks. Sláinte

- Pleasure.

- Nicely done, well done sir.

- Thank you sir.