Interesting interview with David Walsh-Kemmis founder of Ballykilcavan craft beer brewery.

What is your own background briefly?

I graduated with a computer science degree in 1999 and started off my career in IT in Dublin for 5 years before coming home to Co. Laois to take over our family farm when my father retired.  It probably wasn’t the best idea in terms of stable income, but the farm has been in the family for 13 generations since 1639, and I didn’t want to be the one who broke that chain.  I’ve now been farming here for 16 years, mainly growing malting barley for the brewing and distilling industries.  In 2018 we opened up a new craft brewery in one of our 240 year old stone outbuildings, and we’re now brewing our beers here using barley, water and some hops from the farm.

Does it seem like a logical background to what you do now?

Even though I’m not doing any Java programming these days, the IT skills transfer pretty well both to farming and to running the brewery.  There’s a lot of planning and problem solving in both, and it helps to be able to put together a website yourself, even if I’m a bit old school and have it hand written in HTML.

How was the last 12 months? What were your big wins?

The business has been growing steadily since we opened, and even though the pandemic was a bit of a shock at the start, we’re actually seeing a big increase in sales now.  We were selling about 90% of our beer in bottles and cans and since the pubs have closed, those markets re going really well.  Having beer in cans has been a big help – they’re lighter and they don’t break when you ship them, so we’re selling a lot through online stockists like The Beer Club, Craft Central and BeerCloud.

We’ve also just agreed a national distribution deal for our canned beers with Radical Drinks, so our beers will now be available across the country for the first time.  Exports stopped in March, but there are signs of life in those markets again now, so we’d hope to be shipping beer abroad again relatively soon.

What would you have done differently?

I think the one thing I would have done in hindsight is to make the move to cans earlier.  Bottles still have a place, but having cans has definitely increased our potential to sell beer to a much wider audience.  I probably should have bought more fermenters when I was setting the brewery up as well, but that’s something we can look at again.

1 min pitch for what you are doing now / how are you managing during these corona times?

For us, the most important thing was to have a way for customers to buy our products online and have them delivered to their door.  That means partnering with online retailers and having canned beers and special transport packing cases to keep our bottled beers safe.  The pubs are closed, but people still want to be able to drink beer, so we needed to make it as easy as possible for them to buy it.  We’re also doing direct sales from the brewery, but we’re restricted by the Victorian-era legislation on the quantities we can sell direct.

Why did you get involved with craft brewing?

I always had an interest in brewing, but since I started farming, I also had a keen interest in what happened to our malting barley once it left the farm.  Before we started the brewery, all our barley was delivered to the malt house, and we never really knew where it was being used after that.  Now, having spent a year of preparing the ground and looking after the crop, it’s great to get it back into the brewery and be able to brew a wide range of beers with it.

What has worked so far & what new flavours are your planning to brew?

One of the big successes we had recently was releasing a limited edition series of cans.  We’ve called them Clancy’s Cans, in recognition of the five generations of the Clancy family who have worked and continue to work on the farm, and the first beer in the series was a raspberry wheat beer that we were completely sold out of before it was even packaged.

Over the next few months, we’re going to be very busy brewing enough stock for our existing and new markets, but we’re planning more limited edition beers, more small-batch barrel-aged releases, and a full-flavour but very low alcohol beer.

How can people find out more about you personally & your work?

The best way is to follow us on social media – @ballykilcavan on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.  It’s a real mix of a look inside the brewery, the restoration of the 18th century farmyards and keeping track of the growing barley and hops that will eventually be used to make our beers.  Because we can’t have any visitors in at the minute, I’m currently making a series of video tours around the farm and brewery, and I put a new one up every week to show people around.

Who and where do you get inspiration from?

I get my inspiration from the surroundings here at Ballykilcavan and from my family. Everywhere I walk around the farm, there are reminders of the previous generations who have lived and worked here, and that gives me the encouragement to continue their work and try and make the place financially sustainable for future generations.

What are your future plans?

The next big step for us is to build and open our visitor centre.  During a pandemic might not seem like the ideal time to be doing it, but we’re confident that we can attract a good number of domestic visitors next year and then hope to get overseas visitors back in for 2022.  We’re converting the old mill house beside the brewery into a reception area and taproom so that visitors will have the chance to discover the stories of the farm and family, see the beers being produced in the brewery and finish by trying a few samples of the different beers we brew.

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