James Ammeen was born just three years after Belfast’s Royal Irish Distillery closed its doors in 1936.
It was the city’s last distillery to close under the pressure of prohibition, partition and economic depression, marking a sad end for what had been a thriving global industry just a few decades earlier.
He may be just a few months out from his 85th birthday and have no Irish ancestry to speak of, but the Pennsylvania native has become one of the most important figures in Belfast’s Irish whiskey revival.
With a successful business career in textiles behind him, James Ammeen arrived in Belfast for the first time in 2017 and stepped inside the former A-wing of Crumlin Road Gaol.
“I walked around. It was damp, it was cold, dreary,” he said. “But you know, I thought this could be exciting if it’s done right.”
Just a few months earlier, a business prospectus from some investors in Boston was sent to his New Jersey home.
“I thought your plan won’t work, but it’s a cool idea.”
James had ended his 50-year career in textiles just five years earlier, selling off Neema Clothing in 2012.
“I was thinking is it time to retire, is it time to play a little more golf? What do I do with the rest of my life?”
But slowing down was not in his DNA.
Born in Ellwood City in western Pennsylvania in 1939, a small town around 38 miles north of Pittsburgh, James won a scholarship to study at New York’s Columbia University.
He admits the relocation to New York in the late 1950s was something of a culture shock, but he would go on to graduate from Columbia’s business school in 1962.
A 23-year career in in Burlington Industries followed.
At its peak, the New York enterprise was the largest textile company in the world, employing 88,000 people in more than 100 sites.
It built four textile plants in the Republic during the 1970s in Tullamore, Longford, Tralee and Gilloge in Co Clare.
James was a regular visitor to the southern factories between 1978 and 1985, but never ventured north.
“This part of the world was familiar to me,” he says.
He eventually set up his own business Neema in 1991, a play on his surname.
“We built the company up to a fairly sizeable level and were producing in the Philippines, Indonesia, China, India, Vietnam, Italy and Mexico.”
Neema later acquired Halston Enterprises in 1999, one of the most famous names in American fashion.
At the age of 73, James felt the time was probably right to retire and sold off Neema in 2012.
But his business brain never quite switched off and he was soon drawn to the world of whiskey.
It was around this time that Japan’s Suntory acquired US bourbon giant Jim Beam in a $16 billion deal.
“I’ve never been a big drinker,” he admitted. “When I did drink it was a vodka or an occasional beer, I was not a whiskey drinker.
“But I remember there was a front cover of Fortune magazine which said ‘the boom in bourbon’. It got my attention!”
He was later approached with an investment opportunity in a small US whiskey company.
After initially rebuffing the offer, James did his homework and instead of investing, he bought the company.
That kicked off his current partnership with William Bocra.
They acquired the Clyde May’s brand, named for an infamous Alabama moonshiner who earned a purple heart fighting in World War II.
After many decades of illicit production and an eight month stint in a federal penitentiary, his spirit eventually became legal in 2001.
“His whiskey became known as the State Spirit of Alabama,” said James.
“That put me in the whiskey business.
“Shortly thereafter, I said you know, Irish whiskey is next. It’s growing, it’s really not a category yet, but I think it’s going to catch on and rival Scotch some day.
“I could feel it back in 2015/16.”
James initially travelled to Dublin and held talks around a potential investment.
“It wasn’t the right one, but we said we’d keep our eyes and ears open.”
In August 2017 he was contacted by some people in Boston who wanted him to read a business plan they had put together.
“I read it, I didn’t particularly think the plan was brilliant. But the idea was a cool idea.”
The plan was the Belfast Distillery Company and idea was a working whiskey distillery and tourist attraction in the former A-wing of Crumlin Road Goal.
Plenty of the ground work for a distillery inside the former prison had already been done by Peter Lavery.
His project eventually stalled, with the Belfast businessman putting his energy into opening the Titanic Distillery in 2023.
Now the chairman of Belfast Distillery Company, James said his redrawn plan was built around securing more capital, obtaining a brand and establishing a route to market, particularly in the US, the biggest buyer of Irish whiskey.
A key strength for McConnell’s is the marketing and distribution operation (Conecuh Brands) already in place in the United States.
The 2017 Belfast visit involved many meetings, including with Stormont departments, Invest NI and those involved in the first stalled attempt.
“We met with anyone who had anything to do with this,” said James.
“We got back on the plane and went back to New York. We said this could really be something.”
James said there was an acceptance it would be very difficult, that would require more investors coming on board.
“But at some point we decided it was worth an attempt.”
Belfast Distillery Company quickly settled on the McConnell’s brand from the list of potential assets available to them.
The McConnell family, whose involvement in the Belfast spirit trade dates back to the 18th century, went on to establish J&J McConnell, which built the Cromac Distillery in the Ravenhill Road area during 1899.
“We love the J&J McConnell story – 1776 – really the first Irish whiskey sold under a name.”
James admires the business history, pointing out that the McConnells ran a successful business, but were hit by tragedies and circumstances beyond their control.
And of course the symmetry with the birth of the United States stood out for the American contingent.
Belfast Distillery Company eventually tracked down an original bottle of McConnell’s from the 1930s era.
“It cost £10,000, but it gave us the exact bottle, the dimensions and the liquid,” said James.
“We wanted to get something as close to that as possible.”
Like many infrastructure projects, the distillery development was hit by the Covid-19 pandemic.
But, some six-and-a-half years after he first set foot in Crumlin Road Gaol’s A-wing, James and his team of US investors returned to see the result of their significant investment.
Asked whether he still believes it was a ‘cool idea’, he smiled: “It was a very cool idea.
“Today it seems more right than when we decided to do it,” he added.
“If you’re swimming against the tide, I don’t care how good a swimmer you are, it’s going to be difficult.
“If you’re swimming with the tide, you don’t have to be quite as good a swimmer, but you can still make progress.”
James believes the tide is very much in McConnell’s favour.
“I always ask myself a question: If you had it to do all over again, what would you do different?
“I don’t think we would do anything different.
“I just wish we could have done it two years sooner.”
