Meet the family behind the award-winning Comeragh Mountain Lamb

If my uncles came back and saw that there was lamb from the Comeragh mountains in a Michelin-star restaurant in Dublin, they’d find it hard to believe,” smiles Willie Drohan. “And these are the things you get a kick out of.”

It’s the sort of day where everything feels fresh, bright and new when Irish Country Living pulls into the yard at the Drohan family farm in Mahon Falls, Co Waterford. Little wonder as lambing season has just finished.

While most people associate lambing with January and February, up in the Comeraghs things move at a different pace. Soon it will be time for the newborns to move up the mountain, where they will spend the summer grazing on heather, sorrel and wild herbs, before, well ... you can guess what happens next.

“Lamb is associated so much with Easter,” says Willie. “But mountain lamb is like spring lamb in August or September.”

It’s a message that Willie has been passionate about spreading since setting up Comeragh Mountain Lamb with his brother-in-law, Aidan Dunwoody – dashing pre-conceptions that mountain lamb was no match for its lowland counterpart.

“People said mountain lamb wouldn’t sell well, that it wasn’t good enough, that you couldn’t eat mountain lamb,” he recalls.

Willie lives on the farm with his wife Bridget and their four daughters: Ellen (eight), Alice (six), Grainne (five) and Niamh (two), but the family has farmed here for six generations.

“The mountains have been the only aspect of farming that haven’t changed with modern methods,” observes Willie. “The mountains are what they would have been 50 years ago, 100 years ago.”

While Willie has a 70-cow dairy herd and also produces beef, sheep have been his passion since he left school at 15 to farm with his uncles, Willie and Paddy. Today, he keeps 650 Scotch Blackface ewes, a breed first introduced to the Comeraghs in the 1740s.

“People laugh at you when you’d say you’d know individual ewes,” he smiles. “It’s hard to explain it, but it’s something that’s just in you. I remember my mother giving out to me: ‘William, you’ll be late for school.’ At lambing time I’d go off checking them and I’d barely make the bus. When I’d come home the books would be thrown in the corner and I’d be out again.”

When Willie first started farming he produced store lambs to sell back to the market, but in the late 1990s he began finishing them himself for the factories. However, he soon realised that mountain lamb was being “totally lost in the food chain”, with little value being placed on what he saw as a premium product.

“If you go back to the early 2000s, a lot of people got out of sheep,” says Willie, who felt power had gone to factories that could “dictate so much”.

“And make it nearly unviable, or just barely enough, to keep you at it,” he continues. “But you want to make enough money to have a good quality of life. Nobody wants to get up in the morning, work and break even at the end of it.”

Taking the bull – or rather the ram – by the horns, Willie teamed up with his brother-in-law, Aidan, and set up Comeragh Mountain Lamb in 2008. Having already approached Flynn Meats in Waterford to act as their abattoir, investment was modest – a second-hand refrigerated Vauxhaul van for deliveries and a website.

What was perhaps more daunting was approaching a chef to get direct feedback. Michael Quinn, who was then head chef at Waterford Castle, agreed to cook two lambs on a spit at the local food festival, which Darina Allen was also attending. No pressure.

“These are the people who are going to tell you very quickly,” laughs Willie. “But Darina spoke very highly of our lamb and Michael had faith in the product and he put it on the menu at Waterford Castle.”

Indeed, it was Michael who nominated Comeragh Mountain Lamb for the Euro-Toque’s local hero award that they won in 2011. This led to involvement with a distributor, who introduced their lamb to some of the top restaurants in Dublin, including the Michelin-starred Thornton’s.

Local businesses, such as Ardkeen Food Stores, also came on board. (Indeed, when Irish Country Living interviewed owner Colin Jephson in 2013, he said that he would have to have Comeragh lamb as part of his last supper.)

In the early years, Willie was happy to let somebody else handle the sales.

“All I wanted to do was just farm and that was my comfort zone,” he says.

However, when his distributor retired he had little option but to start knocking on doors himself to get his lamb on the menu.

“At times, they might look at you as if you had two heads, because coming from where we come from we have a good strong accent,” he laughs. “But the chefs, they like to get to know you. It mightn’t happen the first day you go in. It mightn’t happen the third day. It could be the fifth call.”

One of Willie’s most loyal customers is award-winning chef Kevin Thornton.

“Comeragh lamb is usually the first lamb we use in the year,” he says, explaining that because they buy the whole carcase from Willie, they can use every bit of the lamb as part of their tasting menu.

According to Thornton, it’s the mountain diet that makes a difference to the taste of the lamb.

“It’s completely different lamb because of what it’s fed and the flavours are completely different,” he says, adding that when a farmer has passion for his product, it makes it exciting to work with them.

Other restaurants, including Restaurant 41 at Residence on Stephen’s Green, Forest Avenue and Moloughney’s in Dublin, The Tannery in Dungarvan and butcher counters in Fallon & Byrne in Dublin and Grogan and Brown in Kilkenny use their product, while about 20% of sales are done through the website. Willie is now in a position where he can also buy lambs off other farmers in the Comeraghs, and refers to the community as “close knit.”

“Especially in commonages,” he says. “There’s something about it, if you want to call us mountain men.”

As for farmers who want to start selling their own produce directly, Willie has this advice.

“You have to believe in your product and you must be in for the long haul. If you think you’re going to get there in a couple of years, I don’t think so,” he pauses.

“Or I’ve done something wrong.”

Not at all. After six generations in the Comeraghs, his mountain lamb is just going higher and higher.

Visit www.comeraghmountainlamb.ie.