A Laois farmer is tapping into the backstory of his farm brewery to sell his beer throughout Europe.
David Walsh-Kemmis, founder and managing director at Ballykilcavan Brewing Company, said that it is easier for them to sell beer into Milan and Paris than it is to Cork or Dublin.
“The Irish beer market, particularly in the pubs, is so heavily dominated by two large brewing companies, that it’s easier for us to sell into Europe where there is a lot more scale available,” he said.
“Greater Paris has more than 10 million people, and the French and the Italians are always interested in our family story and the way we make the beers, using ingredients sourced from the farm.”
Ballykilcavan expects to produce 70,000L of beer this year. It doesn’t have any plans to sell non-alcoholic 0.0 beer. “We don’t have the equipment or capital to make that possible,” he said.
“Between the brewery and the visitor centre, we are employing two full-time staff and two part-time,” David said.
March is always a busy time on any malting barley farm, and this year was particularly busy at Ballykilcavan near Stradbally, where David was racing to get his barley sown and to have beer ready to be sent out all over Europe from his on-farm brewery.
He has two distributors in France, one in Northern Italy and one in the Czech Republic.
“February and March are two of the busiest months of the year in the brewery,” David continued.
“We’ve managed to build up a good export trade now, and all our overseas distributors look for a lot of stock for St. Patrick’s Day, so we have to make sure that it’s packaged and ready to go out in early March,” he said.
“We are working on some events for later on in the year, and we will be running a tap takeover and trad night in DM Shelly’s Bar in Portlaoise, for Indie Beer Week, a celebration of independent Irish breweries which runs from May 24 to 28.”
Medals for the brewery
It’s been a good start to the year on the awards front. The brewery’s beers won three medals at the prestigious Concours International de Lyon beer competition in March, including a gold for its red ale, named after the Brickyard field on the farm.
Ballykilcavan has also just won the Laois County Enterprise Award for 2023, and will be representing the county at the National Enterprise Awards in the Mansion House, Dublin, in June.
“We’re delighted and very honoured to be representing Laois at the national awards,” David said.
“It’s a tough competition – 30 of the best companies from around Ireland are involved, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed that we might pick up something on the night.
“The Lyon medals are great to get as well. It’s a very highly regarded competition, and they’ll be a great help to us as we look to expand our sale in France.”
Malting barley
Back on the farm, David is very relieved that he managed to get his malting barley sown before the weather broke in early March.
“We’re on pretty light soil here,” he said. “That’s not an advantage if we get a hot dry summer, but it does work for getting fields ready for sowing early in the year.
“We’re now chopping our straw and putting in a cover crop straight after harvest on all our fields, and the aim is to graze them, but not to plough them until just before we’re ready to sow.
“In an ideal world, we would plough a field, and then roll it and sow in within a couple of days if the weather plays ball,” he added.
David is growing two crops of barley again this year – RGT Planet for the brewery and Laureate for Waterford Distillery.
“Both look good at the minute,” he said. “We got the second split of nitrogen on at the end of March and both crops are coming towards the end of tillering now, so we’ll be looking at our first fungicide in about a week.
“Plant counts are good – 280 to 300 plants per square metre, and they have two to three tillers across the field, so I would be hopeful that they’ll do well if the weather cooperates.
“Our hop garden has suddenly burst into life as well, so we’re busy training the plants to climb up the strings that we set up on the trellis. They’ll reach 6m in height by the middle of the summer, and should be ready for harvest by the end of September.”