Supporting craft breweries

Tesco in Jervis, or M&S, are probably about the best options around there.

They had two taprooms and a regular turnover of new small-batch beers in them. The packaged core range and their draught lines in pubs were almost more of an advertisement for the brand than a serious effort to make money. You can see that model at work in how every Rascals can has an ad for the taproom on it. Black's of Kinsale operates similarly, but seems to have done better at organic growth. It's quite an American approach, because speciality beer there is consumed at breweries, not so much bars. It's not about "brewery tours": punters come to breweries to drink, not to look at the brewing process. However, our pub culture, our licensing regime, and the dominance of multinationals within them, means it's very hard to make it economical here. That said, if it was going to work anywhere, I'd have thought Killarney with its endless stream of coach tours, was the place to do it.

Killarney Brewing, like Boyne Brewhouse and Rye River 1.0 before them, seem to have tried to become a big player out of nowhere, and in the tiny Irish specialist beer scene, that's a formula for burning through money and failing. If you don't have very wealthy and tolerant backers, it's not sustainable.

Depending on your definitions of "craft beer" and "bargain", probably Tesco or Lidl.

Crew on Thomas Street and Treaty City on Nicholas Street are both jewels in the Limerick beer scene, but I don't know if either does takeaway.

It's been well under way for a while. The tax breaks are still there, but I suspect its the consumer interest that isn't. We have a layer of bigger, established independents, like Rye River and Carlow, who are doing enough to get their beer into conscientious consumers' weekly shopping baskets. They, and biggish regionals like Wicklow Wolf and White Hag, have put that one draught line into the local pub, to satisfy the on-trade demand. But that seems to be the limit of what the market will support at scale — everyone else is a niche trade, doing their best to make a living at it, but susceptible to closure because of warehoused debt, cash flow, or other small-business pitfalls.

As I see it, not enough Irish people are interested in beer for us to have a mainstream interesting beer market. Sure you can't beat a pint of Guinness. Instagram said so.

A nice west coast from Whiplash has been decanted into the DCFC mug and it's now smooth sailing to Limerick. 2 security lads doing the rounds so I appreciate the shout to bring it.