The ginger man: how Wayne Adair’s business sprang from his exploits in the family kitchen at age 10

Wayne Adair of the Longbridge Drinks Company

Gary Law Email

July 31 2021 02:30 AM

It was the early autumn of 1999 and for 23-year-old Wayne Adair it was the end of another good summer at Papa Capaldi’s ice cream parlour on Queen’s Parade in Bangor. Papa Capaldi’s was something of an institution in the town but when the days grew colder and the nights longer trade just melted away.

“Business was good in summer, but winters were always a struggle,” says Wayne, looking back. He had gone into the ice cream business partly because his family was already in the trade — the Adairs had founded Riada ice cream in east Belfast and christened it by spelling their name backwards.

Wayne (right), however, was looking for something different to carry him through the winter, and he began to cast his mind back to when he was aged 10 or 11 and made his own ginger wine at Christmas.

“It became a bit of a tradition in the family,” he remembers. “Mum gave me this recipe that she had been given by her mother. I mixed it up and filled old milk bottles, jars, anything that came to hand. When other members of the family tasted it they would be all nostalgic about Christmases of old and tell me how it brought back fond memories. It was so popular I kept on making it every Christmas.”

Wayne had been given the opportunity to take part in a Christmas craft fair being organised in St George’s Market in that winter of 1999 and so he thought he’d have a go at selling his ginger wine.

“I fitted out a room at the back of the ice cream parlour and began mixing the ginger cordial. I bought 200 bottles which were sealed with a cork and got labels designed. I filled each bottle with a jug and funnel, plonked a cork on it and stuck the label on with Pritt Stick. I called it Papas after the ice cream parlour and at St George’s Market I sold the lot.

“It seemed like people couldn’t get enough of it. But it was a Christmas thing, so I parked it in January and only started think about it again in September. The following year I sold about 600-800 bottles at Christmas, and the year after that I sold about 1,000. But at that stage I still thought of it as just something to get me through the winter.”

After about three years of sales, Wayne rebranded the cordial, switched to a bottle with a screw cap, ordered self-adhesive labels and threw out the Pritt Stick. “I did the Christmas market at St George’s until about 2004,” he says. “Then the city council expanded the market to run every Saturday and when the new markets were launched I sold 100 bottles on my first day.”

Now it was a serious business and Wayne began to consider expanding.

“I started to think about other flavours like clove, cloudy lemonade and spiced winter berry,” he says. “My busiest season is still Christmas and we now supply Christmas markets in Glasgow, Belfast and Galway, but I also do a lot of business at fairs and markets throughout the year.”

Wayne no longer has the ice cream parlour and production of Papas has moved to a unit off the York Road in Belfast. But it’s still small scale and hands-on.

“We make 300 bottles in a batch and a small gravity filler fills just three bottles at a time,” he says.

Now there are eight flavours and around 60 stockists across Northern Ireland.

“Some counties have their own favourites — in Fermanagh, they love the clove cordial, in Armagh it’s ginger, while Belfast goes for cloudy lemonade.”

After about eight or nine years of making and selling cordials, Wayne came across the fact that ginger ale was invented in Belfast in the 1850s and decided to bring production back to the city by creating his own version.

“I started by trying to use the ginger cordial as the basis, but that didn’t really work,” he says. “In the end it took about three years to get the recipe right. In 2018, I got what I was looking for — a slightly darker ginger ale, with a touch of lime. My version is a bit more fiery.”

The Papa’s brand didn’t seem right for the new ginger ale, so Wayne looked around for a new name and when he learnt that the Queen’s Bridge in Belfast was formerly known as the Long Bridge, he knew he’d found it. The Longbridge Drinks Company now makes Belfast Ginger Ale in small batches, along with tonic water and a raspberry and rose mixer.

Now aged 44, Wayne has been producing his cordials for nearly 22 years and they’re enjoyed all over Northern Ireland. That 10-year-old boy who mixed his first batch in the family kitchen all those Christmases ago could hardly have imagined it.

The ginger man: how Wayne Adair’s business sprang from his exploits in the family kitchen at age 10

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