Stout Gets Top Award One new brewery's getting a big head, says Martina Devlin. It's like espresso, burnt toast, walnut, chocolate, berry jam ... and a horse blanket. And you're meant to drink it. It's called D'Arcy's Dublin Stout and it's just won a major beer prize in a head-to-head competition with Beamish and Murphy's.

Less than a year after its launch, D'Arcy's is showing its mettle as a traditional dry stout. It's one of the Dublin Brewing Company's repertoire of four brews and it was the hit of the Stockholm Beer Festival recently. Produced in the shadow of St. James's Gate, the beer is brewed in a hands-on operation that relies on human expertise with the minimum of mechanical intervention.

"It's the kind of stout our fathers would have drunk," says head brewer Liam McKenna. "We don't use any stabilisers or preservatives, industrial enzymes, chemicals or food colouring and sweetening agents. We brew from the grains themselves - water, yeast and hops. We're a craft based production. We brew 12,000 pints for every two million that Guinness brew. Our brewers don't sit by a machine making sure the process is going according to a computer programme, they are measuring the gravity, the clarity, the pH, they are deciding whether to speed up or slow down the process. It gives you a beer with more flavour."

Mr. McKenna, who moved to Ireland from Canada to help set up the microbrewery (it employs 11 people) says his beers are available in 60 Dublin pubs. They include the Palace Bar in Fleet Street, The Stag's Head off Dame Street, Eamonn Doran's in Temple Bar and the brewery's local - The Cobblestone in North King Street. It's best known beer is the first it launched, Beckett's.

The Smithfield-based brewery does £400,000 of business annually in Ireland and further £600,000 through export to Britain, France, Finland, Sweden and Holland. An order has just been taken from the US and it is also about to start selling in Canada, Germany and Italy.

McKenna calls the Stockholm prize a useful marketing tool and adds: "It was an all-Irish final in the stout section, ourselves, Beamish and Murphy's, so obviously the Irish make good stout. It meant a lot to me as a brewer to win in this kind of company because I am always comparing myself to the competitors."

He is currently working on a fifth beer and has plans to open a visitors centre in Smithfield and run tours there in a few years' time.

 

Quaffing pints in the best possible taste, George Byrne discovers some new ales When the term "microbrewing" first crossed my eyes, I assumed it was yet another attempt on the part of those villainous vintners to minimise the measures meted out to the beleaguered bevvier - and charge us more for our shrunken sups in the process, of course. But no, instead we're in the process of a handful of hardy individuals formenting revolution of the formentation kind... and for once in Irish history this is a revolution taking place during opening hours.

For the uninitiated, microbrewing simply means a return to independent breweries making specialised brands in small batch sizes with the focus on quality rather than quantity. The emphasis is on all-natural, preservative-free ingredients and represents a large two fingers (or should that be four once you've had a few?) to what are sneeringly referred to as "the industrial breweries". To further this crusade, The Porterhouse in Parliament Street is currently hosting the 1st All-Ireland Independent Brewers' Festival. This sounds like a job for a professional.

I like beer, me. I recall recoiling with a mixture of awe and envy when Channel 4 ran a series called The Beer Hunter a few years ago and its presenter Michael Jackson (no gags... too easy!) was described as a "beer journalist". Christ, I don't remember seeing the ads for that gig! Jacko's brief was to seek out the ale action from all over the continent and, in fairness, he looked like a man who enjoyed his job. So, with such high journalistic standards in mind, let's follow the advice of Sweet in Teenage Rampage... come on join the revolution!

What a lot of people tend to forget, if in fact they were even aware of it in the first place, is that Dublin was once home to over 30 breweries until all manner of chicanery in the last century by the people up beyond in James's Gate did down the little guys and left Uncle Arthur as the premier pint in the capital. Guinness as oppressor, who'd have thought, eh?

"There's a certain amount of Stalinist revisionism that's gone on as regards the way brewing in Dublin developed," says Kieran Finnerty, managing director of the Dublin Brewing Company. "It's got to the stage now where people think that Guinness was always synonymous with the city, but that's not the case. What they did was undercut everybody else and put them out of business. But that was over a century ago, and it's long overdue that the small guys started to come back."

To paraphrase one of their more famous advertising slogans, Guinness may not be exactly good for you, but it sure as hell tastes nice. So what do the new breed have to offer to tempt the diehard black belter?

"All the ingredients we use are free from preservatives," explains Kieran, "so there's none of the chemicals involved that you get with mass-produced drink." So are you telling me that having a feed of natural beer won't give me a hangover? "Eh, no. Anyone who'd try to tell you that having 10 pints of microbrew won't have you feeling a bit seedy in the morning is mad. Less seedy maybe... "

Indeed. I remember a chap from Cork in Heidelberg the morning after we beat England 1-0 in June '88 complaining that he had the worst hangover of his life, despite the fact that the rest of us had quaffed just as much of the local naturally-brewed beer and were reasonably grand. Apparently the absense of a throbbing headache led him to believe that he'd entered into a new realm of alcohol-related after-effects, where the pain was so bad he actually felt nothing at all.

So, we're drinking for history and in defiance of evil multinationals here (hooray!) but what does the stuff taste like, I hear you ask?

...Beckett's Ale is suitably hoppy and will doubtless prompt endless witticisms like "I can't go on. I will go on," when those moments of doubt occur during a long session...this could mean that microbreweries are now ready to tackle the alcopops market. God, the world is changing and no mistake.

Vive la revolution!