Dennis Hurkmans, co-owner of Bus Whiskey Distillers in Loosbroek, is still missing two thousand bottles of whisky. It has now been more than a year since his business was broken into. The thieves took several valuable bottles with a retail value of around two tons. Despite a lot of media attention and a barrel of whiskey for the golden tip, not a drop has been found to this day. “We will not be discouraged.”
It remained quiet about the theft for a long time. A golden tip was not forthcoming until Dennis Hurkmans’ daughter called her father at the beginning of this year. “She said that they had found our whiskey in Son en Breugel at a company. I thought that was a strange place. In addition, I thought it was even weirder that she said that she was already on the road with my wife. I wondered why they had not called me.”
“At one point my daughter said: ‘Yes, duh. Because our Whiskey is chipped, Dad’,” says Hurkmans. Not much later the penny dropped and it turned out to be something different. “Our cat’s name is also Whiskey, I thought. My daughter asked if I wasn’t happy. Well, I wasn’t really. Although it was of course nice for that cat.”
“The whiskey was never found,” Hurkmans says with pain in his heart, more than a year after the major theft. “We never received a single tip. Nothing was ever found.”
The more than two thousand bottles, which cost between 60 and 120 euros for half a liter, were stolen on the night of October 9 to 10 last year. “The police did come afterwards, because they exceeded a certain damage amount. They indicated that the technical investigation could come, but they were busy. I understood that too.”
“So we took the loss ourselves.”
The stolen bottles of whisky, including a number of exclusive varieties, were not insured. “That was due to the fact that we always had pre-orders. Those bottles were only on the sidewalk for a few hours and then they were already gone. In addition, insuring bottles of whiskey is expensive, because it is worth a lot per liter.”
“So we took on the loss ourselves,” he says about the two thousand stolen bottles, which together had a retail value of about two tons. “One-off releases will no longer come back. I can’t make more of those, but the standard whiskeys can.”
The total damage that the company is ultimately left with: approximately 70,000 euros. Despite the loss, Hurkmans keeps his head high. “You have to worry about the things you have influence on. The rest that happens to you, I take note of it, learn from it and move on.”
The bottles are now insured and are stored even more safely. “They were already secured in a kind of cage construction. Later a joke was made about this during a games evening in the village. It was said: ‘It was indeed a koai construction’. I could laugh about that. We’ll just keep going and not let ourselves be discouraged.”
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