12 minute read
THE TRUE FARM EXPERIENCE
Brewing Company – the need to diversify a 378-year-old family farm that was not making any money, the desire to support a young family, and a passion for brewing and for growing the best possible ingredients for its range of beers.“It was a mixed farm when I took over but I converted it into a tillage farm,” says David. “We ran it for about 11 years. When I had a look back over the figures I could see that, apart from the single farm payment, we just weren’t making any money. We were just breaking even on the tillage side of things.”
He admits that the family was worried, so he decided they needed to do something different just to keep the family farm alive. David – a homebrewer since 2007 – had long dreamed about using the farm’s award-winning malting barley to start up a commercial brewery. As the income from tillage kept falling, he realised that it was time to act, as he puts it, “to preserve the farm for future generations of the family”. He also viewed it as a fitting way to use the property’s beautiful 18th-century stone farmyard which is too small for modern agricultural machinery. The brewery will be situated in an old grain store and mill house; while the company wait for the planning process to be completed, it is brewing its beer in the new Lock 13 brewery in Sallins, Co Kildare. “Certainly this year – ideally by October – we’d like to be brewing on-site,” reveals David, adding that it will take about a month to put the brewing kit together once it arrives. A focus on quality ingredients is and will be at the forefront of the business, with 100 per cent of the barley used to make their beer sourced from the Walshes’ farm. The company’s ale malt is malted by Minch Malt in Athy, Co Kildare, in their Robert Boby malting plant, which produces an ale malt specifically designed for craft brewers. Its crystal malt is micro-malted by Maltbox, and its amber and chocolate malts are roasted in small batches in a custom designed micro-roaster for maximum freshness.
So, with such quality ingredients in use behind the scenes, what craft beers are currently on the menu at Ballykilcavan Brewing Company?
“We have three beers and because we’re growing all our own barley, I wanted to make sure that you could still taste the malt in them,” says David. “We brought out a pale ale to start with, which is one of the real traditional craft beers. A pale ale is a nice balance between the malt and the hops. The next one we brought out was a traditional Irish red ale. I’m a big fan of red ales. I mean, I know they’re not a ‘sexy drink’, they don’t have a great sort of
David Walsh-Kemmis
Ballykilcavan’s range of beers.
The brewery yard. Joe Healy and Livestock Chairman Angus Woods lead a protest in Dublin.
reputation, but it’s actually just a really nice, drinkable beer full of malt flavours. And then the third one we brought out was the IPA, which is much more about the hops but there’s still a nice, strong malty base underneath that.”
There’s plenty more to come from Ballykilcavan, and the signs are positive for the industry as a whole. Recent figures from the Irish Brewers Association (IBA) show there are now around 100 micro-breweries operating around the country, with production rising from 86,000 hectolitres in 2014 to around 238,000 last year. The ‘Irish Beer Market Report 2017’ found that beer remains far-and-away Ireland’s most popular alcoholic drink, accounting for just under 45 per cent of the market share. According to the IBA report, Ireland’s beer industry directly employs 1,064 people, contributing €424 million to the state’s coffers in 2017. Irish beer exports, by volume, rose marginally by 0.2 per cent last year, making the country the 8th largest beer exporter in Europe. David envisages that the export market will be something that the company will be strongly pursuing in the next few years.
“We’re only on sale ten months, but if we can get any export opportunities we’ll take it,” he says. “Obviously, we’ll need to look at it in terms of the logistics. We started very low cut, because I wanted to build up the reputation of the brand, so it was a case of going out and meeting everyone personally just to introduce the beers to them and making sure everyone was happy with them.”
The company is also hoping to reap the benefits of TD Alan Kelly’s new craft beer legislation with ambitious plans to install a visitor centre, taproom and artisan food hub in the rest of the farmyard. In terms of a five-year plan for the company, he’s hoping to have his beers available nationwide by then.
“Obviously, a lot of other small breweries have their own craft beers as well, because we do have a good reputation for producing good beer in Ireland,” David adds. “People from abroad appreciate that. I think they’ll like the story that we have here, between the history of the farm and how we’re growing all our own barley on the site here.”
FINDING
ORLA CONNOLLY CATCHES UP WITH BEEF AND SHEEP FARMER JOHN PEACEFARM ON THE CONNELL, AUTHOR OF THE COW BOOK, TO LEARN MORE ABOUT HIS PASSION FOR WRITING AND FARMING AND WHERE HIS INSPIRATION COMES FROM.
John Connell had spent several years living abroad before travelling back to the family home in his native Longford. Like many who have ventured to travel to Australia or Canada in search of work or adventures, six months quickly turned in five years and soon he had built a life away from Ireland. But, having spent his time abroad working as an accomplished journalist, lecturer and award-winning documentary maker, when he returned home the man who had once contemplated becoming a priest also made the decision to return to the familiar world of farming.
“I suppose when I came back I hadn’t intended on getting as involved with farming as I did but I found a great solace and peace in it and also, I’d been away long enough to appreciate the lifestyle of being a farmer as well,” says John. “I know at times it’s a very tough job and there wouldn’t be great money at it, but I grew to really appreciate it... it was something totally different than living in the city and I really enjoyed it.”
As his time back in Longford ticked on, John found himself combining the two drastically opposite loves of his life – writing and farming – resulting in what has become a phenomenal literary success in the form of The Cow Book. What sets The Cow Book apart from John’s former work is most noticeably the undeniable truthfulness that is apparent in his storytelling, as he portrays his life on an Irish farm with nothing less than genuine honesty, including a fractious relationship with his father.
“For a long time I wrote other books about the refugee crisis, I wrote a book about JFK, but in a sense I wasn’t really writing my own story and my own truth... we often hear that [you should] ‘write what you know’ but it took me a few years to realise that writing what I know was about being a farmer,” he explains. “That’s my truth and people have responded because there’s an authenticity to it that wasn’t quite there in those other books that I wrote.”
With his passion for writing reignited by his love of farming, John describes the whole process of bringing The Cow Book to fruition as a natural one, despite the obvious manoeuvring that comes with writing about real people in your life and shared intimate moments. “Certainly you think about certain aspects about talking about your own family,” he tells me. “But then you realise, particularly in the last few months when people have come to me and they’ve all said ‘well, this is our family too’, all I did was put words to what every farming family is like and all the little trials and tribulations we have.” He credits this ease to the fact that he was finally writing what he again refers to as ‘his own story’.
On the surface, the book deals with the everyday practicalities and circumstances of one family farm in Longford and all that encompasses, including livestock, fierce family politics and the tasks involved in routine rural farming life. It also focuses heavily on the history of an animal that John refers to as “the hidden member of the family” – the cow – and its long-standing role in the story of man. After all, cattle are said to have been domesticated as far back as 10,500 years ago.
“I wrote the first chapter and it was about delivering a calf and I didn’t think people would be interested in the book. But it turned out that so many people are, because I suppose it’s a universal story for farmers and farm families all over the country and world,” says John. He credits this universal approach for its popularity among audiences both home and abroad, but acknowledges deeper themes are present in the story aside from the everyday routine – themes that perhaps global audiences can connect with. Most notable is his focus on faith and the finding of peace of mind – a difficult topic in a world where people are always on, always connected, thanks to the proliferation of digital devices.
“It’s about family and home and returning home and finding peace in the world and it’s about faith and local community and, yes, it’s about cows as well,” he adds. “Henry David Thoreau influenced me while I was writing the book and I certainly got more in contact with my faith... the book is about faith and finding peace and in a busy world I think everyone is searching for a little piece of that.”
John regards the undeniable success of The Cow Book as a happy coincidence of writing what he loves, and maintains that the attention he’s received since its publishing was entirely unanticipated. He maintains that writers write because they are compelled to do so, to meet a need or a hunger that lives inside. Literary success might be a dream outcome, he believes, but you can’t plan on achieving that. Inspiration for his book struck after he came through a significantly dark time in his life, one that is touched on between its pages, and he credits farming as giving him something real and positive to do with his time. And, despite The Cow Book allowing him to achieve his ambition of one day attending The Late Late Show as a guest, he remains surprised that it was the subject of cows and farming that landed him a much-coveted seat on-stage. “I always dreamed about this and hoped it happened one day, but I didn’t think it would be over a book about farming and cows,” he says. “I suppose what people like about it [is] that it’s a real story but it’s about farming and everyone can relate to that.”
Yet, despite the various opportunities that the success of The Cow Book has afforded John, he doesn’t count this as the best outcome of the project. Instead, he references the connections made among the farming community as the most positive side effect. “I suppose the nicest thing is meeting farmers and farming families from around the country and them saying to me ‘We read the book and that happened here and this happened there’,” he explains. “You realise that, after the bad winter we had, you can think that we’re on our own. But you realise that everyone is going through the same stuff and there’s something lovely about that.”
John’s story is far from over – he reveals that he has already written the first draft of his next book, which will be on shelves sometime next year and will pick up where The Cow Book finishes off. Set in Longford, it’s similar in its blended focus on farming and history, as well as a continuation of his life story.
“I didn’t finish telling my whole life story in The Cow Book,” he says. “I know Irish people love history so I think they’ll all like it, and it’s set around [the] time of year when it’s just that little bit quiet before silage and hay, when you get to breathe out and kind of look up from the yard and say ‘there’s more to life than silage’. I hope people will enjoy it, and then there’s another farming book on the way after that.”
But that’s not all on the horizon – John also has plans to become involved in a play in the Abbey Theatre with the acclaimed actor Stephen Rea. Clearly he doesn’t believe in relaxing too much after success. “I think every farming family, they’re always busy, so I don’t know how to be idle,” he says with a laugh.
Yet for the moment, he confesses that his focus will be on taking a breath and returning to his core passion – life on the farm in Longford.
