As former global head of cider for Heineken, Karen O'Neill is undertaking something both familiar and completely foreign with Beekon Batches, her range of "honey refreshers," a self-created subcategory of alcohol, that she launched just before Covid struck Ireland.

After two years spent "muzzled and handcuffed," O'Neill is looking forward to exhibiting her drinks on the Artisan Producer's Row at Taste of Dublin later this month and getting it into the hands of consumers who have been relatively difficult to court.

"We're creating something totally different, so you have to try it," she said, adding that uptake during trials has been "phenomenal" but people remain sceptical.

"'It's not a beer, it's not a cider, it's not an ale, what is it? If I haven't tried it, I'm not going to take the risk,'" she says of the general consumer mindset. "But you know, we're still here, we're fighting hard, and we're excited for what's to come."

The drinks are made by fermenting fresh honey, with the flavour varying from batch to batch and season to season. In addition to the standard honey flavour, there are also ginger & lime and elderflower & Sicilian lemon varieties, and no preservatives or sulphites are added.

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O'Neill, who came up with the company name by combining bees with her initials, said the business has become her vocation, having worked in the drinks industry for 23 years, starting by being part of the launch of Smirnoff Light in the late 1990s.

"I jumped ship from a corporate job to try and see if I could create something that was really quite different, very clean and very refreshing," she says of her decision to start Beekon Batches.

The enterprise didn't start as a homebrewing operation though. O'Neill had the idea in mind and collaborated with recipe developers and contract brewers before going into "quite a sizeable production".

The development process required experimentation and took 18 months due to the difficulty in mastering the honey fermentation process and getting the honey to dry up in the yeast in a way that would work with the intended flavour profile and convert the sugars.

"That was an 18 month process where we developed liquidity, we knew we were onto something We did a series of kind of trial tests on liquid with people. We went straight for production, and quite a sizeable production. I think our first production run was about 30,000 bottles.

"We managed to seed into a lot of the ... hub chains, groups, restaurants, hotels all over Dublin, and it was early days, but we got a tremendous commitment from them, but that obviously all fell off a cliff [with Covid-19], and we had to start from scratch.

"And within a couple of weeks we ended up in Musgraves and SuperValu, and actually getting central billing listing [for national distribution], which is no mean feat, and extended our network into a lot of off-licence chains," she said.

"But we were never homebrew. It was always highly ambitious with a very well developed proposition ... so from the get-go, it kind of had a premium, big-brand feel about it."

Her decision to jump ship from Heineken came at a time before corporations had embraced the sustainability agenda when she had "a crisis of consciousness" and a desire to "make an impact."

"All roads lead to bees, and whatever we were going to do, we were going to try and share the spotlight, and cultivate a pollinator approach to the brand, so that's exactly what we did," she said, listing efforts made to start pollinator programmes with bars and restaurants, education programmes on bees, partnering with men's sheds, creating bee hotels in beer gardens, and distributing thousands of Irish wildflower seeds.

"We've created an impact, and put it at the heart of the brand, as opposed to a lot of companies that are trying to reverse engineer that. So it was a huge personal mission ... and it's just a cleaner proposition."

Ahead of Taste, O'Neill is confident of making the most of the showcase and converting both attendees and retailers to Beekon Batches, and the company is currently undertaking an investment round ahead of a planned launch in the US.

Indeed, the company, which just launched a canned version of its brews, hasn't even launched in the UK or Europe, having had its wings clipped by Brexit, but O'Neill recently completed a successful visit to the ProWein trade show in Düsseldorf, and she's trying to make up for lost time and leverage the opportunities she has.

Beekon Batches will be at Taste 2022 June 16 - 19, located at the Artisan Producers Row in front of the band stage. Tickets for the Iveagh Garden event can be found HERE.

Photo: Helen Kennedy and Karen O'Neill.