The Dublin Brewing Company is the brainchild of Kieran Finnerty. He contrasts Ireland's devotion to a handful of breweries with Germany where every region has its own brew which is passionately supported by the locals. "Over there your local beer is part of your identity, just like your local football team. You drink it just as you would support your local team. It doesn't matter that its taste might equate with Manchester City, while the beer of the next brewer along tastes like Manchester United - you drink the Manchester City one because it's your local brew," says Finnerty.

Governed by strict brewing laws the German beer market is comprised of a large number of small breweries spread across a country in which no brewer has more than a 5% share of the market. Meanwhile here in Ireland, where no such laws exist, brewing is pretty much confined to Uncle Arthur which has close to 80% of the total beer market with Murphys and Beamish mopping up most of the rest. "Most beers in Ireland are mass Produced by and mass marketed. So you get the same seven or eight beers in every pub in the country. It doesn't matter whether the pub has ten beer taps or fifty, the same beers are on offer in both," says Finnerty. Through his recently-formed Dublin Brewing Company Finnerty hopes to get the Irish punter hooked on local brews. "We see an opportunity for regional diversity, whereby you have a brewer in, say, Galway which makes a beer peculiar to that area and perhaps another guy in Cork. We only plan to sell our beers in about 100 pubs in the Dublin area and have no intention of taking it down to Galway or wherever," he continues.

The beer in question is called Beckett's, after the eponymous Nobel Prize-winning playwright, and has just become the first Dublin Brewing Company product to hit the market. Beckett's is currently available in 15 city centre pubs. Best described as a light ale, Finnerty hopes that Beckett's will straddle the divide between beer-bellied hairy chested pint drinkers and longneck swilling sophisticates.

Finnerty is hoping to exploit two contemporary fads, microbreweries and the sudden fashionability of Dublin. "In the US, where trends tend to start, microbreweries have been going since around 1980. In the 50's and 60's everybody wanted to be like their neighbour, everybody wanted to drink what their neighbour was drinking, and so mass brewing was the thing. In the 80's and 90's the pattern has reversed and people want to establish their individuality and having your own particular drink is part of that. Some people identify with th Sierra Nevada brewing company, others with Anchor Steam in San Fransisco, and so on," says Finnerty. Then there is the meteoric rise of Dublin, the new hip place to be. Believe it or not, but dear old dirty Dublin is currently the trendiest, most cultural, most booming city in the world. At least after Cork. "I was walking along in New York, trying to think of a business opportunity in Ireland when I noticed a sign on an empty building which said, 'Coming soon, HMV Records, as seen in London, Tokyo and Dublin'. It dawned on me that Dublin had suddenly become a major player almost overnight. A year earlier that sign would have listed Melbourne, Sydney, Paris or Amsterdam rather than Dublin. Dublin had become a great brand name and nobody was using it. Ireland was being used as a brand everywhere but Dublin, not really at all," says Finnerty.

At around the same time, drinking in a pub in New York, Finnerty noticed that, while it specialised in foreign beers, the pub had no stock from Ireland. However it stocked a whole range of beers from Munich, a city with a similar reputation for beer guzzling. At this point Finnerty pinpointed a gap in the market, for a local beer, brewed in Dublin. All he needed now was the name. "I was having a drink in the Boston Brewing Company which makes Samuel Adams and puts great emphasis on its Boston origins. So I thought, I want to have a microbrewery, I want to emphasise the Dublin aspect, why not call it the Dublin Brewing Company," remembers Finnerty. And so Finnerty set up the company of that name and has just brought his first product, Becketts beer, to the market at a cost of £1m.

Financed by himself and two other investors the company is located in the Smithfield area of Dublin, just across the River Liffey from the Guinness brewery. Finnerty expects to claw back the initial investment within the year. A stout is planned before the year is out, and investment has just been secured for a bottling plant which will swell employment from its current level of six people to around thirty. The bottled beer will initially service the pub sector and later the growing off-liscence sector as well.

While Finnerty's background, in publishing and ironmongery, may not seem to be particularly useful in his current enterprise, he insists that it was. "I'm a great believer that all businesses are essentially the same. It doesn't matter what your making, you are creating a product and then you are creating an identity, and then you have to sell it, whether in its tens or tens of millions. Take publishing, you spend a month writing the book or magazine, you take it to the printers, and when you get it back you have your product which you have created for a certain target audience, just like any other product," says Finnerty. And, just like with any other product, there must be a gap in the market to accomodate it. But if it's such a good idea, surely there would be microbreweries on every street in Ireland by now? "Well it has been done before. One microbrewery tried it in 1982 and failed for technical reasons. This put other entrepreneurs off, because they thought, 'It's been tried before and failed, so why should it work for us,' even though it failed for technical reasons rather than from a lack of demand," says Finnerty, who believes that the microbrewey's time has arrived in Ireland. "Ireland is fragmenting or diversifying culturally. People are travelling more, society is becoming more liberated and open to new influences and one manifestation of this is that people are demanding a greater variety of beers, both from Ireland and abroad," says Finnerty.

But surely the big boys of the industry can do this more cheaply and effectively than stand-alone microbreweries?

"You'd be suprised how many people know the origins of the beer they drink and how they don't like to be fooled. They like to know that if they're buying from a small brewery, that it is actually a small brewery and not a mass producer masquerading as one through smaller subsidiaries or subcontracting. It's all part of that wanting to be different, wanting to be identified with a small and, by implication, authentic drink," explains Finnerty.