Au Vodka, the Swansea company behind the gold bottles stacked in supermarket fridges across Wales, is now owned by an American drinks giant. Sazerac said on Monday it had completed its takeover. It comes four weeks after the two sides signed a binding agreement.
Neither company is saying what it paid. Reuters and Bloomberg, each citing a person familiar with the deal, put the value at more than £300m. Sky News, which first reported the talks in August, had put it at up to £500m.
Sazerac is the fourth-generation family firm that owns Buffalo Trace bourbon, Fireball, Southern Comfort and more than 500 other brands. In a statement, Jake Wenz, its president and chief executive, said the company had “long admired” Au and that “we have big plans for Au as we welcome the brand into the Sazerac family”.
The statement describes Au as headquartered in Swansea and employing more than 80 people, but it makes no commitment on either. It also says nothing about whether Morgan and his co-founder Jackson Quinn stay on.
Morgan said the pair had started the business “with nothing but an idea and a belief that vodka didn’t have to be boring”. He added: “Having Sazerac take the helm feels like the right and natural next step for us.”
Asked by trade title The Drinks Business what happens next, Wenz said the focus would be on preserving what makes the brand special while bringing Sazerac’s resources to it in the UK and worldwide.
The Crucible Park brand home, the tours and the crazy golf
Whatever Sazerac decides, it now owns one of Swansea‘s odder buildings. Au moved into 1 Crucible Park at Swansea Vale in early 2025, a £5m, 30,000 sq ft headquarters with a café, a shop, a tasting lab, a content studio and a nine-hole crazy golf course, all open to the public on tours.
Au does not distil or can anything there. Its vodkas and ready-to-drink cans are made by contract manufacturers, according to The Grocer, so the Llansamlet jobs are in brand, marketing, sales and the brand home itself rather than on a production line.
Why Sazerac wanted it: the cans
The company’s last filed accounts, for the year to April 2025, show turnover up 27.3% to almost £83m and pre-tax profit of £6.7m. The growth came from cans: ready-to-drink volumes rose 65.8% to more than 1.1 million nine-litre cases.
That makes Au the second-biggest ready-to-drink brand in UK shops, according to The Grocer, behind BuzzBallz, the spherical-can cocktail brand Sazerac bought in 2024. Together the two account for around a fifth of the UK category by value.
It is the latest in a run of Sazerac deals. This year it has bought the Dirty Shirley cocktail brand and taken a stake in SipMargs, and had an offer of around $15bn for Jack Daniel’s owner Brown-Forman rejected.
From ballboy to a £300m sale
Morgan was 17 and working as a ballboy at the Liberty Stadium in January 2013 when Eden Hazard was sent off for kicking the ball out from under him. The two met again in 2024 to laugh about it.
He and Quinn, school friends, started Au two years later with a one-off run of 2,000 gold bottles sold to bars around the city. In 2017 they sold a fifth of the company to the DJ Charlie Sloth, and later a minority stake to private equity firm Metric Capital. Along the way they hired a private jet that never left the ground for a 2019 Black Grape launch with rapper Fredo, and paid Jake Paul £200,000 to wear a fake Au tattoo into the ring.
The sale comes a year after the Advertising Standards Authority banned three of the brand’s social media posts for breaching alcohol marketing rules.
Morgan, for his part, is not describing Monday as the end of anything. “This is just the start of Au’s next chapter,” he said.
Discover more from Swansea Bay News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
