A tall story-media production, pure, a tale of Ireland's craft ill.
I live on a wonderful green island at the edge of Europe.
An island with snow-capped misty mountains, deep, fish-filled lakes, and a breathtaking coastline.
I live in a land of poets where we cast a cold eye on death.
My land is a land with ancient monuments.
But is this really why people come to Ireland?
When I'm coming to Ireland, to be honest, I'm coming to drink beer.
A woman drove me to drink. I haven't had the decency to even thank her.
I'll get messed up then I'll find my way.
And what would you think if I cut off my own face?
Would I need a shrink or a pair of the diamonds taking place?
So how do you feel is everything okay? How do you feel?
I can't wait back home to cross the choose out of clay and foam.
Music
Hello, my name is Brandon O'Reilly from Dyssa Reilly's Bar off-license at Microbury here in Balichon and County Donegal.
The Microbury at Donegal Brewing Company is situated here on site at the Bar off-license in Balichon.
The Microbury is a combination of 20 years of research and planning.
I completed my first course in brewing in 97.
Dyssa Reilly's Bar off-license has been in the O'Reilly family for the past 39 years,
and I suppose you could say the beer is in our blood.
Our first product, the Donegal Blonde, is a light refreshing style of ale
with the perfect balance of molts and hops at 4.2% which gives it that easy drinking character.
Dyssa's off-license has a selection of over 500 craft and border beers alongside our mainstream beers.
With the recent explosion in the Irish craft beer scene, we now have over 80 Irish beers
and have new ones coming in weekly.
Music plays
My name's Gotti Follis. I'm the brewer and owner here at Innsbruck St Brewery.
We're a very small scale, as you can see, farm brewery in the west of Ramana here.
We produce small batches of beer, roughly 1,300 bottles at a time.
Using a brewery that built myself out of old dairy equipment that we sourced from the local area here,
most of this stuff is old dairy equipment from dairy farmers who have not found it profitable to be in dairy anymore.
So it was a matter of collecting tanks, engineering them into a small brewery,
and now we're producing beer on a small scale.
We're picking this bog myrtle here today,
and we're going to attempt to recreate some of the flavours that would have been
in some of the very old ales brewed before the onset of hops.
Hops are relatively modern import.
Before that, beers and ales would have been made with local herbs that people would have found
on the moors and the countryside around here.
And I've no doubt that bog myrtle would have been used in those beers as well.
There's evidence to suggest that the Vikings used it.
In Scotland, it was also used as an ingredient a long time ago,
so we're going to make use of these very flavoursome, aromatic male catkins of the bog myrtle plant,
and we're going to try and get some of that lovely flavour into our beer.
One area of our brewery that we're hoping to develop is short run speciality beers using local ingredients,
either sourced on the farm here or in the local area, such as the bog myrtle beer that we're trying to develop today.
We've got a great range of herbs in Fremanna here, both on the farm and up in the myrlands,
which we hope to make use of over the next year to do one of small run speciality beers.
Bog myrtle is a very aromatic herb that grows in upland areas, bogland in Fremanna.
It's a very common herb in Fremanna here,
and we're hoping to try and get some of that aroma and flavour into the beer.
I started brewing really at university, as many students do, making a bit of home brew.
I was up in the north west of England, and there are a lot of really good relials from that area,
and that sort of got my curiosity and beer started.
I came back here to the farm in about 2002,
and we immediately started looking for farm diversification ideas because we're a small 30 acre farm.
It's not really viable from a agricultural point of view.
So we started brewing 20 litre batches in the kitchen here on the farm,
which we managed to trial in the local market and in the scale.
It was a pale ale, blonde ale, which was very well received by the local population here,
and that encouraged us to go on ahead and try and upscale our efforts.
So we moved up to 100 litre brewery,
and finally we're up now to our four bar plant here.
I suppose the idea of our beer is that we're giving people a choice,
which they haven't really had in the past.
Ireland's beer market's been dominated by a few big players for a long, long time,
and what we do is produce beer on a small scale with very, very good ingredients
that we know the provenance of.
No artificial additives whatsoever. It is a completely natural beer.
It's bottle conditioned, which means that the carbonation is derived from the yeast in the bottle.
So there's absolutely no chemical input of any type into our beer,
and as a result you get a very full-flavored, unfiltered character full of beer,
and I think that's a great alternative to a lot of the mass produced beers that are on the market,
which although very drinkable, you could argue that they're a bit bland.
So we're giving people a bit more taste, a bit more flavor and a bit more goodness in their beer.
So today we've picked some bog myrtle from the local hills here in West Fermanagh.
I've brought it back to the brewery here. I'll put it in a mortar and pestle.
I'll try to crush it up a bit to release a bit of that aromatic flavor from the herb.
We've put that in what is essentially a big tea bag and placed out within that keg
of quite bland non-hoppy beer, so we're going to let the flavor infuse into the beer over a period of time.
We've got a special location where we're going to do this.
It's actually a local limestone cave, not far from here.
We're going to put the keg in the cave because the environment within the cave is very, very stable.
It's at a perfect temperature of about 9 or 10 degrees all year round,
and that would be the ideal environment to let this beer mature,
let the flavors and the aromas of the bog myrtle infuse into the beer,
so we may leave that down there for up to 6 months and then crack it open during the summer and we'll see what we've got.
So, my name is Kilian Amoura, and my partner in the brewery is Bart Adons,
and we are both veterinarians by training, but long-term beer fans as well, and Bart is Belgian,
so we've spent many years going backwards and forwards to Belgium and learning more about those beers
and developing an interest in Belgian style beers.
The mountain behind us there is Cro Patrick, and we're sort of on the slopes of it,
and the water that we brew it comes from underneath that mountain,
so we have a very strong attachment to Cro Patrick,
and we've let this lapse a little bit recently, but for a long time we climbed it every week and discussed brewing matters,
and that made the association between us and the brewery and the mountain even stronger,
so we decided to name our brewery after Meskin, who was St. Patrick's friend and personal brewer.
So, as well as being a brewery, this is a working farm,
and we use all of the byproducts of brewing to feed stock on the farm,
so there's no waste, we recycle the used grain, the leftover yeast at the end of the brew,
all of that gets fed to stock, the hops are composted and used as fertilizer for the garden,
and the whole thing is completely self-contained, it's like a little system on its own,
the water comes from the farm, the grain is fed to the animals on the farm,
and any products that can't be refed are composted and reused on the farm.
This is our red triple, it's a beer cell that doesn't exist really,
because the triples are sort of by definition blonde,
they were first brewed by an abbey in Belgium called the Trappists,
the Trappists from a village called West Mala actually, they defined the style,
triple, it's a triple should be eight to nine percent alcohol percentage, which this one is,
and we decided that we wanted to do something with it, we didn't want to copy it,
so we decided to make a red version of it, so that's it,
it's a beer that takes a hell of a long time to mature, about ten months,
and it's delicious, and I'm going to tour over now.
So this beer was brewed a year ago, and again yesterday.
We make Belgian style beer, what we do actually is not new,
we didn't invent anything, we've written our own recipes,
but they're all of course based upon existing recipes,
and we are members of a brew and gill in Belgium,
which has a wealth of expertise, and they've been very good to us,
and they've shared a lot of it with us,
and from trial and error we've come up with four or five recipes
that we would like to brew commercially, that we're very happy with.
Music
My name is Rick Levert, I'm the founder and the owner,
I suppose the head brewer of Kinnegr Brewing,
in Rathmon, in Danegal, on the coast of Danegal,
we're a fairly small brewery, ten hectare brewery,
producing a thousand liter batches.
Started a number of years ago as a hobbyist,
gradually became more interested in pursuing it further as a business,
spent some time formalizing the information,
the knowledge that we had from doing it as a hobby,
both in the institutes in Germany and then also in California and the US.
About two years ago we started with a small pilot brewery
where we were producing a hundred liter batches to develop products,
develop beers, test the market, improve our skill levels as well,
and during that time we began the planning for the brewery that we're now in,
which we opened up in July of 2013.
We do call it a farmhouse brewery, we are based on a farm in Danegal.
As most people tell by my accent, I'm not really from here,
I'm from near Boston, I grew up in different places around the northeast in the states,
but this is where my wife is from, so the brewery is actually on her home place.
We produce specials at least one every two months.
The idea with the specials is twofold on the one hand.
What we're trying to do is keep ourselves on our toes here,
trying out new techniques, trying out new recipes,
trying out just new ways of making beers, continually becoming better at what we're doing.
On the other side we are, I suppose, testing things,
seeing if we're coming up with certain ideas that find resonance amongst beer drinkers,
and also just keeping the palate fresh for them,
keeping new things coming out, something interesting for them to try at different times,
keeping things within the seasons, coming out with things that suit what they want to drink at different times of the year.
That's something that we see as being a very important part of what we do here,
is constantly kind of putting through and developing new products.
My name's Darren Nugent, and I'm the founder of Pokertree Brewing Company.
We're based in Carrickmore County, Toronto, just in the foothills of Sparrons.
Our aim is to produce a range of high-quality craft beer, all hand-made,
none use any unnatural ingredients or preservatives or additives, anything like that.
We make everything on premises by hand in small batches,
and we're currently producing two beers, a red ale and a light gold nail.
I spent a number of years in England, about 13 in total,
and I miss out on my wife to say that we're going to be back home to Ireland,
and so I had to think about a job.
My background had been marketing, had worked for various different agencies
and different companies in England for a long time,
and I thought, well, I'm moving back to Toronto, and I don't really want to be getting in the car
and driving for two hours every day up to Belfast to work on an agency job again.
So I thought if I could use what I know in terms of marketing and selling
to try and sell something of my own.
So I thought about what I could make for a long time,
and the idea of beer always stuck with me.
I really enjoyed trying beers no matter where I went in the world.
I loved trying local beers, and I was quite adventurous.
I loved trying things in every place I went to, and I'd come home,
and there was nothing here really, there was no choice.
So I thought, maybe there's an opportunity there.
There's some more research I did, and more really the passion grew,
and I taught myself how to brew different styles
and really start to appreciate beer, and the more I did do that,
the more I understood really this is what I want to do.
These are the first of four beers that we're going to produce.
This is the Red Earl Ruby Ale, and this is Green and Golden Ale.
This is our third beer that's coming out next week.
For surprise today that is called Seven Sisters,
and that's a treacle oatmeal stout,
which has loads of licorice flavour in there,
and something which we think is going to be a bit different.
This is the very first beer we produced.
It's called Grianne Golden Ale.
It's a light and fruity summer-aging, quite light-bodied.
We really developed this to make it appealing to people
who normally drink larger, and it wouldn't scare them,
so they would try it.
They saw it in the bar and would think, oh, I'll have a go with that.
But it would also have enough flavour in there
that it would appeal to people who like craft beer.
So we used quite a few different malts in there.
We've also got some New World hops, which gave it a real strong aroma.
We've got Galaxy from Australia, which gives us grapefruit notes.
There's a green bullet from New Zealand, which is a lot of citrus,
and then we have Cascade from America, which again is citrus.
And on top of that, we used coriander seed and lemon peel in the boil.
And the whole thing comes together, we think, to create a beer,
which is beautiful to drink, smells great,
and hopefully, you know, people will enjoy it.
A lot of people ask me why we chose the name Poker Tree
for the name of the brewery.
And the reason is that there's a tree in the middle of the village
that has a story associated with it.
And the story goes that in the past, on certain nights,
the devils spotted playing cards under this tree,
and that if you approached them, you could challenge them to a game.
And if you lost this game, that your soul is his forever.
So we were thinking about, you know, what we were going to call the brewery,
and this area particularly has lots of folklore and lots of stories.
There seems to be stories associated with every tree and every rock.
There's also stories about the devil being buried in bottles
and I have been told separately that this tree was the location of that bottle
and the devil was under it.
So those things came together and I thought, yeah, that's a good name.
And that's why we call the company Poker Tree Brewing.
Just breathe.
A tall story media production.
