How a Corkman galvanised a worldwide whiskey community
Barry Chandler is the voice of Irish whiskey online.
With a mostly American audience, the Ohio-based Corkman, who left Cobh for the States in 2007, set out to create a joyful space for whiskey lovers to connect through his website Stories and Sips.
Shortly after he started his own YouTube page, a podcast followed. A Facebook group was born in 2019 and once the pandemic hit and everyone was sequestered at home, bored and pub-less, Chandler rallied his fans together with his lively online presence, forging a 9000-member fanbase across Ireland and America.
Now Chandler makes his living through corporate whiskey events and has just launched the largest Irish whiskey club in America. The goal, he says, is to get more people falling in love with Ireland and Irish whiskey, through experience: craic, song, and storytelling.
Here are six things to know about Barry Chandler’s rise to whiskey king:
1. HE TOOK THE EGO OUT
The Irish whiskey industry is full of ego-driven influencers. Like most aspirational industries, this is almost a prerequisite. Somehow he managed to become a linchpin in American Irish whiskey relations without the quintessential whiskey beard. Though Chandler has a touch of vanity (don’t we all?) he is refreshingly humble.
In a world full of “let me tell you all ’bout whiskey” Chandler acknowledges that he doesn’t know it all. In fact, he quite enjoys getting to learn it.
He willingly confessed that he uses audience questions as a learning tool. When confronted with a question he is unsure of, he’s been known to research and record a personalised video with the answer.
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2. HE SET OUT HIS STALL
Design is a clear strength of Chandler’s; the website is neat, the colour scheme is vibrant, and it feels authentic. As any influencer will tell you, authenticity is worth its weight in liquid gold.
The interactive whiskey map is a great draw for anyone road-tripping their way from distillery to distillery. Be that journey in person or online.
3. HE GOT INTO IT FOR THE RIGHT REASONS
The way Chandler tells it, you’d think he tripped and fell into this role, but it seems more like organic growth than haphazard flailing.
In 2009, he participated in his first Pelotonia, a Columbus, Ohio-based 180-mile bike ride to raise money for cancer research. He became an annual devotee of the race, but after seven years was running out of ideas on how to raise money. A friend suggested he host a whiskey tasting.
“Somebody said ‘why don’t you do a whiskey tasting Irish whiskies’.
I thought ‘I don’t have anything about Irish whiskey’,
They said ‘well you have an Irish accent, don’t you?
I said, ‘good enough.”
He went and gathered six bottles of Irish Whiskey that “looked good and had nice labels”. Charging $50 a head, he covered the booze and raised enough money for his charity cycle. It sold out without a bother, and with Google as his trusty sidekick, he embarked on his first tasting.
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4. HE GREW WITH IT
This tumbled into two, then three tastings before snowballing entirely into a sort of corporate team building staple in Ohio, when he was approached by a local whiskey distributer. Going in for the informal chat the anxiety pulsed through him. He was convinced he was going to be shut down because he had no formal training in whiskey. Instead, he was greeted with a three-point plan for a symbiotic relationship:
- Continue raising money for charity.
- Access to “loads of whiskey”
- To get more whiskies in front of more people with his tastings.
Suddenly he was fully legitimised and well on his way to becoming the community organiser we see now in 2021.
5. HE TOOK THE CRAIC ONLINE
The craic of an Irish pub is undeniable and it’s also typically the stage for most whiskey learning. Nearly every whiskey nerd will tell you the story of the whiskey that changed their life’s direction. One constant in these stories is the Irish pub.
Unlike other whiskey blogs and publications, Stories and Sips is very much craic-focused. It engages the online whiskey community in the most traditional way, through rí rá agus ruaille buaille in the form of an online Lock-In Livestream. These Lock-In sessions always feature a little sing-song. Aptly described on the Sips and Stories website as an experience where Chandler “chat(s) with special guests, pour(s) generous measures of the good stuff and toast(s) each other’s health.”
The vibes are chill and typically for an internet community, the comment section is great craic. Chandler has done well to foster an online community with no animosity. He has somehow distilled the vibe of an Irish bar into online culture.
“It’s about the way whiskey is part of Irish culture. In the craic and stories and things… why not create a virtual pub where we could have our little corner, where we could just talk as if we were in the pub, maybe with a musician? We’ll drink some whiskey, we’ll talk and people loved that. We did that for 16 months solid, and every week, and it was a resounding success.”
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6. HE BROUGHT CORK WITH HIM
The love Barry has for his work and whiskey itself is rivaled only by his love of Cork. Cork pride dominates his wistful reminisces.
There’s a wonderful sense of place and pride and place in Cork, and if something is made in Cork you kind of back it, you get behind it. You’d be for it before you knew anything about it, just because you came from Cork. There is that grá for Cork people all over the world and I took her with me, to America in Ohio and San Diego, California and I felt closer to Ireland and Cork, being able to talk about things that came from Cork.
When it comes to Cork whiskey he concedes that “it’s hard to ignore Midleton” because in some ways “it’s a place of pilgrimage”. However, he is particularly proud of the West Cork Distillery:
What the guys in West Cork are doing is tremendous, they don’t have any marketing or press or PR and they don’t talk about what they’re doing. The founders carry hammers in their back pockets, you know, to fix the stills. That’s a great success story, how much employment has been given to a town in Skibbereen.
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This year Chandler was nominated for Whiskey Communicator of the Year and launched the Sips and Stories Whiskey Club, which has already become the largest Irish whiskey club in America.
