Supporting craft breweries

The Waterbank has a few Franciscan Well beers on tap, as well as Trouble Brewing and O Brother.

It can still be good if done right but my favourite is when a craft brewery takes over a traditional bar like the Rising Suns pubs. Not sure what it's like in other cities but practically any pub in Limerick worth it's salt has a Treaty tap so you get the best of both worlds.

The bare room and chipboard style that absolutely everywhere in London seemed to go for is the one I hate. The type all over Bermondsey Beer Mile and the Mother Kelly's chain loved.

I mean, the recent closures aside, things are a lot better than they used to be, 20, or even 10 years ago. You've a reasonable prospect of getting at least one (actual) craft tap in a decent number of Dublin city centre and even suburban pubs, even if it's just one token IPA. That just didn't happen in the past - the nearest you could get to 'craft' was a German weiss.

What I am seeing recently, though, is a good number of pubs that used to have one or two independent craft taps losing them to 'Cute Hoor', Open Gate/Smithwicks Pale Ale or Five Lamps taps. There just seems to be a big push by the macro breweries to reclaim all the tap space in pubs.

Not that the CCPC will ever do anything about it.

It's nearly 60 years now since the state first called the big breweries actions "anti competitive but not illegal". They have no intention of making it illegal.

It's a different set of firms doing it now, but the same results.

It's not just brand loyalty.

We are a terribly insecure and squeamish country when it comes to standing out or trying new things.

Our palette is incredibly bland too. Most of the country thinks black pepper is too spicy and olive oil was only for your ears up until about 2001.

Being able to sell in bulk and butter up clients with freebies is something that exists across commerce. It's not a reason to single out and hate breweries.

Thornbridge could give me a much better bulk deal than Orbit so should I hate Thornbridge ?

I drink in plenty of macro led pubs that have a craft tap so again blame the publican who takes the deal not the sales man doing his job legally.

Pub I occasionally find myself in for music events always had a pale ale /IPA on tap. Was lways something there for me.

Now they've changed their taps and have 2 hazy/east coast/juicy/milky stuff. Probably just won't drink when I go there now! (snuble juice and big bunny the only non macros, now).

My own personal feeling is the GBB pubs deteriorated after one of the orignial business partners sold up. I remember when they just had the Oslo and Cottage in Salthill and he seemed like the hospitality expert in the partnership. With the other lad more focused on the brewery

The only negative I have in craft beers is they took the prices offered by the established brands without the same marketing overheads. Beer is not that expensive to make, even in Ireland. 

Nah, it is, if you're not benefitting from economies of scale. If you can guarantee you'll be buying x million tonnes of grain once it only contains y percentage of moisture, as opposed to the independent brewery who can only guarantee buying z thousand tonnes of grain, you're getting a much better price per tonne. Same with hops - the macros just don't use as much hops per keg as an indy making IPAs, and they still also benefit from economies of scale.

A lot of publicans are clueless and when the papers and vintners tell them a keg has gone up so you need to charge 15c more they just do it blindly.

They then either put everything up or the macro passed the craft because they were not told to put it up.

Anyone have accurate prices these days as I'm a bit out of date. Macro was always cheaper on my experience.

Terms like local lager always reminds me of this

Antelope is owned by Big Smoke who's next beer was called "Popular Global Beer" in his honour.

I loved it so much I immediately ordered a few kegs of Popular Global Beer for the pub.

You deal with an awful lot of aggressive cockney clowns over there trying to return keg beer because it is off (cloudy)

I was in Brew Dock on Sunday before the Bruce Springsteen concert and all seemed normal. All the beer the same, staff wearing GBB gear. Maybe the changes haven't come into force there yet or new owners waiting to use up stock etc