Taste the nation: I left my job in IT and started a brewery on my family farm
David Walsh-Kemmis is the man behind Ballykilcavan Brewery
In 2004, David Walsh-Kemmis left his job in IT to return home to his family farm and take over the business. It was a calling.
"Ballykilcavan Farm has been our family home for 13 generations," he explains. He spent ten years continuing to grow barley as the generations before him had always done, before deciding to look into diversification.
"Farming is all about diversification, and historically, it has been an integral part of our business in order to keep the farm viable for future generations" he points out. "When I took over Ballykilcavan from my father in 2004, my motivation was to try to sustain it so that someone else would be able to take it over from me. So, after a lot of research, we realised that in looking to add value to the barley that we are already growing, brewing was the obvious choice. My wife and I opened a craft brewery in the 240-year-old stone grain store on the farm, and the Ballykilcavan Brewing Company was born in December 2018."
In a previous life, the grain store which houses the brewery was used to store barley and oats after harvest, milling them for bread making, feeding animals and maybe even making beer. The farm stretches over 440 hectares and while it was traditionally a mixed farm, today they grow barley in the majority, both for their own beers and a crop for Waterford distillery. "Ballykilcavan is situated in prime malting barley growing area, just outside Stradbally, Co. Laois. We have been growing it here for at least three and probably five generations and our barley is malted by Minch Malt, just 11km down the road in Athy."
The ingredients are what make the product stand out, says Walsh-Kemmis. "Our brewing water is sourced from our own well, which was specially divined in the 18th-century farmyard just outside the brewery building. As well as our own barley, we also have a small but expanding hop garden, and we grow both bittering and aroma varieties. They are mainly traditional British varieties, along with a few early maturing American varieties."
Today, the brewery produces five varieties of bottled beers and seven canned beers, ranging from IPA to lager to stout and once a year at Christmas they release one barrel-aged beer which has been aged in a bourbon barrel.
Starting a brewery in a market that can't get enough of IPAs was a stellar move, but not without its learnings, says the brewmaster. "I was very focused on the products, to start with. I wanted to make the beer as good as possible and then I just thought that everything else would take care of itself. The thing is, that there is a whole other heap of things that you need to think about when you are to sell a product."
Distribution is the biggest challenge. "You can make the product - that's fine - but if you can't get it to customers or potential customers and that's where you're going to suddenly get into trouble very quickly." Though it was challenging at the beginning, he'd do it all again. "I run marathons. There is a part in every race where you say to yourself 'I'm never doing this again,' and then after a little while, you start to get excited about doing another one. It's like that."
The family story that is woven into the fabric of the Ballykilcavan Brewery is what holds it apart from its peers. It informs the way that they approach their product, the ingredients they use, the beers they choose to produce. "We named our first few beers after fields on the farm. Then we started to run out of fields so we had to think of something else, but we always try to tie it back to the story, to the story of our family".
On every label you'll see a griffin, which is on the family crest of the Walsh family. "If you look on the label of every can or every bottle of our product you'll see a picture of the wind vein that we have on the farmyard which has a griffin on it and looks down onto the land in all its glory."
