During what’s already proven to be a tumultuous week for the controversy-prone superstar fighter, Conor McGregor was spotted in the unlikeliest of places on Thursday when he paid a visit to Cranbrook Liquors in Baltimore County.
“Look at that!” McGregor says in this clip posted to his Facebook page, gleeful as he walks up to a window display with his likeness promoting his new, $25-a-bottle Proper No. Twelve Irish whiskey. Inside, he chats with the staff, who tell him (to his elation) that customers had been anticipating Proper Twelve’s arrival on their shelves for months, and that Cranbrook has since been selling lots of it.
“We have Conor McGregor’s whiskey,” a cashier says they’ve been informing customers, “and they’re like, Whaaaat?”
“Well now you’ve got Conor McGregor here,” the Irish fighter happily retorts.
Proper Twelve, billed as “proper Irish whiskey from a proper Irishman,” debuted in his home country and the U.S. this past September to mixed reviews. The whiskey was blended at Bushmills in Northern Ireland by distiller David Elder, formerly of Guinness. Notably, the 12 in its name isn’t a reference to how many years it’s been aged—to be sold as Irish whiskey it must be made on the island and casked for at last three years—but rather the 12 postal district in Dublin where McGregor grew up. Another tidbit: Per a press release, $5 of every case sold goes to help first responders and emergency service organizations and charities.
McGregor was stripped of his UFC lightweight title last spring because he hadn’t fought for about a year and a half. He went on to try out boxing, and made what he estimated was “around” $100 million (well over his guaranteed $30 million purse) in a heavily promoted circus of a bout with Floyd Mayweather Jr. in August 2017, a fight McGregor predictably lost. He went back into the Octagon this past October, losing a fight to reclaim the title from Khabib Nurmagomedov in the fourth round.
It’s been a busy week for McGregor, who was arrested on Monday for allegedly smashing a fan’s phone outside a hotel after he tried to take a picture with the fighter. He’d reportedly just finished five days of court-ordered community service stemming from when he lost it during media day for UFC 223 in Brooklyn last April and hurled a dolly through a window of a bus full of fighters, injuring two.
McGregor stopped through Baltimore County after a “productive meeting” with the Pennsylvania Board of Liquor Control, which appears to have ended with a round of Proper No. Twelve.
