The pint of plain may be your only man, but the stout drinkers of Carlow now have even more varieties of the black stuff to choose from. O'Hara's Celtic Stout was introduced last week by the Carlow Brewing Company and will be competing for a share of the market with the long-established big guns of the business.
It's the third beer to be produced by the company, a recent entrant to the rapidly expanding but still tiny micro-brewing industry. There are now 11 such breweries in the State, producing about 50 hand-crafted beers, and, with an additional five per year predicted in the immediate future, the variety of beers on offer to Irish consumers is set to increase dramatically.
But the Carlow managing director, Mr Seamus O'Hara, acknowledges that taking on the big players of the industry will not be easy. He says some pubs in Carlow, anxious not to sour relationships with their major suppliers, have not only declined to stock his beers but have been "almost hostile to us". He says, however, the "more progressive pubs" have been open to the idea of a local newcomer "and those pubs are where our market is anyway".
The Carlow company was established last August and has just three full-time employees, yet the micro-brewing industry is labour-intensive. On that basis the small brewers, through the re-formed Brewers and Maltsters Guild of Ireland, have appealed to the Government to introduce a staggered excise system to give them a better chance of competing with the multinationals which dominate the industry.
The guild was established in 1696 and reincorporated in 1996, exactly 300 years later to the minute, says its secretary, Mr Dean McGuinness, who runs the Celtic Brew company in Enfield.
All 11 existing micro-brewers are members of the guild and must adhere to a founding charter, which includes a ban on the use of additives and preservatives. Mr McGuinness argues that drinking a major corporation's beer is like eating a hamburger whereas drinking a micro-brewer's product is like dining in a French restaurant. "You don't know what you'll get with each different one, but you know it will be quality."
The sudden emergence of small breweries is not a new development in Ireland, more a matter of history repeating itself. There used to be hundreds of breweries in the country, 12 along the Liffey alone.
