Cheers
DID you hear the one about the Aussie and the Kiwi who opened a brewery in Ireland? No, it’s not a Southern Hemisphere version of the Paddy Irishman/Englishman/Scotsman jokes: in November last year, Australian Cameron Wallace and New Zealander Scott Baigent started their very own micro-brewery in Mitchelstown, Co Cork. In March, this year, Eight Degrees Brewing launched their first beer, Howling Gale Ale, named for the bracing winds that come down from the Ballyhoura Mountains in the hinterland of their North Cork home.
Once upon a time in Ireland, as in most of Northern Europe, there were hundreds of locally-brewed beers. But by the early 1970s, when four young Englishmen — Michael Hardman, Graham Lees, Bill Mellor and Jim Makin — fetched up in the most Westerly pub in Europe, Krugers, on the Dingle peninsula, Irish pubgoers had been reduced to choosing between a single stout, (invariably Guinness, other than Murphy’s or Beamish in Cork), Smithwick’s ale and, possibly, Harp lager. So horrified were the young tourists, they formed CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale). There and then, they resolved to fight the impending homogenisation of the British beer market by the big brewers and the potential elimination of unique local brews. Ireland, though, seemed a lost cause.
