Bushmills plans £63m warehouse expansion
Northern Ireland’s Bushmills has submitted a plan to build 26 warehouses as part of a £62.9 million (US$83.8m) investment.
Bushmills opened its £37m (US$46m) ‘state-of-the-art’ Causeway Distillery in April 2024, which more than doubled its production capacity.
The new facility, located adjacent to the Old Bushmills Distillery, was part of parent firm Proximo’s £60m (US$74.6m) investment in Irish single malt distilling and maturation at Bushmills over the last five years.
Earlier this month, Bushmills submitted a plan to the Causeway Coast & Glens Borough Council to build 26 warehouses as part of the second stage of its expansion plan.
The 26 warehouses are proposed in 10 separate blocks, which comprise a mix of two and three warehouse bays. Each warehouse bay has the capacity to store approximately 20,000 whiskey casks.
The proposed development also includes the extension of an existing sprinkler pumphouse, the construction of new internal road infrastructure, plus landscaping and groundworks.
According to construction costs provided by Bushmills in the planning application, the phase two expansion represents an investment of approximately £62.9m.
This development has the potential to support approximately 305 full-time jobs within the construction sector over an estimated seven-year building period. Annually, this development could support 45 full-time jobs in Northern Ireland annually, the planning statement noted.
The planning application noted: “This investment will help protect existing jobs, sustain local supply chains, and reinforce the distillery’s role as a key economic and tourism anchor within the area.”
This latest planning application follows phase one of Bushmills’ expansion, which was granted in August 2018 for the build of 29 new maturation warehouses. At the time of writing, 16 of the 29 warehouses already granted planning permission have been developed and are in use.
Development work on the remaining 13 warehouses from phase one is expected to be completed by the end of 2028.
A separate planning application to propose the extension of the bottling facility will be submitted in 2026.
These developments could generate up to £1.6m (US$2.1m) in gross value added (GVA) annually within Northern Ireland, including £1.3m (US$1.7m) concentrated within the Causeway Coast & Glens area.
The company behind Bushmills saw its full-year revenue fall by 2% in 2025, with spirits sales (excluding Tequila) down by 4.8%.
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