Ballykilcavan craft beer, which is produced on a Stradbally, Co. Laois farm, is brewing more than this time last year to keep up with demand, especially for cans.
“Having pubs, hotels and restaurants closed takes away some very good customers, but online sales of cans in particular have been going extremely well,” said David Walsh-Kemmis, who started the business in 2017.
“We’re also selling direct from the brewery but the Victorian legislation that regulates direct sales means that we have to sell a minimum of 42 bottles or cans at a time,” said David, the 13th member of the Walsh-Kemmis family to live and farm at Ballykilcavan.
“We have had to make sure that we can operate the brewery with the full social distancing measures. We’ve been lucky in that most of our sales are to the off-trade and we brought out a new range of cans last year,” he said.
New recipe ideas
“We’ve been brewing in our on-farm brewery since December 2018. The building it’s in was an old stone farm building from about the 1780s. It used to be the grain store for the farm and was where grain was milled for bread making and animal feed as well. We just put in the services, a new floor and plastered the walls. The kit was all new,” said David.
“There were a few small teething problems to start with but it’s all running very smoothly now. We have two full-time employees: Nigel Oakes took early retirement from Diageo and is now our head brewer; and Joe O’Driscoll was and is a really talented home-brewer, and he’s now head of sales and our innovation brewer who comes up with our new recipe ideas,” he said.
“We’ve expanded the range of beers, and now have a core range in both bottles and cans, and we’re bringing out a new limited edition can series in mid-May,” David said.
The series is called Clancy’s Cans after the five generations of the Clancy family who have worked at Ballykilcavan. The first beer in the series is a raspberry wheat beer, brewed with our own wheat and pilsner malt made from our barley.
“The next big job we have planned is to put in the visitor centre beside the brewery. The plan was to do that work this year and be ready for the start of the 2021 tourist season, but with planning and building work getting delayed at the minute, we’ll probably look to be ready for the 2022 season instead.
“We’re converting the 200-year-old mill house that backs onto the brewery building into the visitor centre. It’s a listed building so we won’t be making any structural changes to it but we’re looking to install a really experiential way of telling the story of the family and the farm and how we use our barley to make our beers,” David said.
‘Grateful to be living on a farm’
“After a really dry April so far, it’s great to see a bit of rain to keep the spring barley growing. We’re now just growing barley for our own brewery and for Waterford Distillery, and we’ve also put in two trial plots of Splendor and Tungsten malting barley to see how they perform here,” the Laois farmer said.
“All the crops went in between March 23 and 25, and look to have established really well. Having cover crops in the fields really makes a big positive impact on the soil conditions when we’re looking to sow in the spring,” he said.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful to be living on a farm as during the lockdown. Just to be able to get the kids out during the day without having to worry about trying to keep them 2m away from anyone is a massive benefit,” David said.
“The main disadvantage is the really slow broadband, which makes it really difficult to connect to any online meetings that are going on.”
