Adrienne Heslin and Padraig Bric left their chalet in the Italian resort town of Tropea for a short snorkeling trip off the town’s beach. Heslin was using the time away to plan her artistic projects. Bric’s focus was on a potential renovation to his parent’s pub and guesthouse. Eight years previously, their son Hugo had suffered Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, dying during the night as he lay between his mother and father in bed. This holiday was for thinking about the future.
Bric was a nervous swimmer, and together the couple waded into the turquoise, blanketed reefs around the Gulf of St. Euphemia, an inlet leading to the Tyrrhenian Sea. Bric asked Heslin if he could have time alone, five feet from shore, to practice on his own, so Heslin left the water to take a shower. A few moments later, she heard a commotion behind her as people shouted and gathered, and returning to the beach, Heslin watched as a lifeguard tried to resuscitate her partner by blowing into his mouth and pounding on his chest. At approximately 4:15 p.m. on October 6, 2001, Padraig Bric was pronounced dead in the local hospital.
After five days of arranging formalities with the Italian authorities and trying to communicate with family members back home in Ireland, Heslin stepped into the Arrivals area of Cork Airport. Her luggage could be collected from the baggage carousel, but her partner—whom she insisted be on the same flight—could not. “Where do I go to collect a coffin?” she asked one of the flight attendants.
Heslin’s mother Norah had been looking after her five-year-old daughter, Maude, during their vacation, and had been the person to tell her that her father wasn’t coming home.
Home was Ballyferriter (Baile an Fheirtéaraigh in Irish), a rural Gaeltacht village on the west of the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, where Heslin had been living since 1992. She had spent the summer of 1989 working in Dingle after completing her studies, and had loved the area so much that she decided to stay, meeting a young man a short time later. For eight years, so that they could have their independence, Heslin and Bric lived in a mobile home in the garden adjacent to his family’s traditional pub.
According to the official census, 150 of the 200 people who lived in Ballyferriter spoke the Irish language on a daily basis, and while almost all spoke English too, it was framed in the lexicon of their poetically cadenced mother tongue. The area’s cinematic beauty had been showcased onscreen in the 1970 romantic drama Ryan’s Daughter, as well as in Tom Cruise’s 1992 epic adventure film Far and Away, but the wild, otherworldly nature of the landscape would not have seemed out of place in a science fiction movie. Isolated by topography and distance from the larger urban hubs of Killarney and Tralee, Ballyferriter experienced long, hard winters, exacerbated by the lack of revenue or activity from visiting hikers and touring families. Heslin’s own family were 184 miles away in Dublin.
The large roadside pub, with its faded green facade, was called Tig Bhric: “Bric’s House” in English. Tig Bhric stood squat across from a small, one-laned track, which led to Wine Strand, a windswept stretch of beach animated only by glistening black rocks and fluttering sea grass. It was originally built in the 1890s and had been passed down by Padraig Bric’s great-grandfather through the family.
Heslin had not been involved in running the bar, and only worked in the kitchen during busy periods. 38-years-old at the time, she wore bright, flowing clothes; bold, handmade jewelry; and sported a tinge of whitish gray in her shaggy, mid-length hair. Now a single parent of a young child saddled with a struggling business, Heslin—with the assistance of Bric’s cousin, Paul Lynch—became a publican.
Representatives from Allied Irish Bank, at a time when Irish banks were themselves under intense scrutiny due to an economic downturn, began to call at the pub. Heslin and Bric had not been married. As Bric had died intestate, the existing commercial debt of the business would be transferred to the couple’s five-year-old daughter, Maude Bric Heslin, on her 18th birthday. “The bank were addressing me as if I were an individual business borrower instead of the administrator of the estate of a dead man,” says Heslin.
One thing Heslin did inherit was a valuable publican’s license to sell alcohol, a coveted asset in a country whose pub culture has long been an integral part of the national psyche, particularly in rural areas where pubs are focal points for community activity. Having graduated in 1986 with a fine art degree from the College of Marketing and Design (now Technological University Dublin), and inspired by her great grandfather Hugh McCabe’s blacksmith trade, Heslin operated a metalworks studio at the back of the pub, which gave her a place to shape sculptures from mild steel. With beer and art at the forefront of her mind, she came up with an idea.
Heslin asked around for names of experienced people in the Irish beer industry and the same ones kept popping up: Oliver Hughes and Peter Mosley from the Porterhouse Brewing Company; independent brewery consultant Brendan Dobbin; and Cuilan Loughnane, at the time of Messrs Maguire brewpub in Dublin.
As one of the most experienced brewers in Ireland, Loughnane received regular calls seeking advice from naive homebrewers and cynical businesspeople. When he answered Heslin’s call and agreed to talk, she jumped in her car and made the four-hour journey to Templemore in County Tipperary where Loughnane—shaved red hair, piercing blue eyes, his right lobe pierced—made a pot of tea and gestured for her to sit down at his kitchen table.
“Opening a brewery is like buying a horse,” Loughnane began. “What do you want your horse to do? Do you want it to look beautiful? Do you want it to race in Cheltenham? Do you want it to plough a field? What’s the vision for your brewery?” He explained how difficult brewing was, and how challenging the immature market in Ireland had been. When Heslin left Loughnane’s house to drive back to Ballyferriter that evening, Loughnane thought that he would never see her again.
Recently a single mother and now plunged into not inconsiderable financial debt, Heslin had a choice: to sell the pub, leave Ballyferriter and, with her daughter, move back in with family in Dublin; or to embark on a time- and capital-intensive business producing and selling beer in a difficult market in one of the most isolated parts of Ireland, using the pub to try to turn her life around.
She chose the latter. Heslin convinced fellow Ballyferriter publican Dónal Kane of Kane’s Bar to match her €20,000 investment, money she scraped together from whichever sources she could find, to finance a small brewing system. When Heslin opened her brewery, it was the only one in the whole of County Kerry.
Beoir Chorca Dhuibhne officially launched in 2008. The brewery’s name translated from Irish as “Dingle Peninsula Beer,” but it was known to all in the English language simply as West Kerry Brewery.
She did all this without ever having brewed a beer in her life.
On Saturday, September 13, 2008, the West Kerry Brewery team jumped excitedly into their car to drive to their very first beer festival, the two-day SeptemberFest organized by the Irish food board, Bord Bia. The event was hosted at the historic Farmleigh House in northwest Dublin, an 18th-century estate with art galleries, a working farm, and an Edwardian library.
Heslin’s persistent calls to Cuilan Loughnane had demonstrated to him that she had a unique opportunity in her pub, and that she was serious about doing things correctly. He began introducing her to his malt and hop suppliers. Brewery consultant Brendan Dobbin put together an 800-liter brewing system for her, one which took water from a well 150 feet underneath the ground owned by her pub. Dobbin also secured for her a house yeast from a bank of cultures he had established during his long career in the industry, a strain with the characteristics of an English ale yeast: medium attenuation, high flocculation, and a subtle ester expression.
In the trunk of the car, Adrienne Heslin, Dónal Kane, and Paul Lynch had gently placed the results of their first brew: one single cask of their Golden Ale, Béal Bán.
“Opening a brewery is like buying a horse. What do you want your horse to do? Do you want it to look beautiful? Do you want it to race in Cheltenham? Do you want it to plough a field?”
When they arrived at the festival to set up their stall, they saw the other brewers unloading vans with marketing paraphernalia, complex dispense systems, and pallets of kegs and bottles. Heslin’s face reddened as the West Kerry team unloaded their single cask and gravity handpump. It didn’t take long for the cask to kick, and they began walking around the festival sheepishly, trying to find other brewers who might chat to them over the next two days.
During a short conversation with Peter Mosley and Oliver Hughes of the Porterhouse Brewing Company, Heslin learned almost as much about production and business as she had in the several months she had already been brewing. Originally from England, Mosley was an experienced brewer and production manager, and had established Porterhouse’s reputation for bold and flavorful ales.
His commercial partner, Oliver Hughes, was a larger-than-life character with a shrewd business sense and a booming voice. His former career as a barrister had equipped him with skill as a raconteur. Hughes had led the early charge for small, independent Irish breweries, setting up the Porterhouse with Liam LaHart in 1996 as a brewpub in Temple Bar, Dublin, inspired by the Firkin chain of cask ale brewpubs operating in England in the 1980s and 1990s.
Hughes wasn’t shy of controversy, and campaigned for the release of the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four, groups of wrongly convicted Irish people in the British court system; he also became embroiled in legal disputes with Anheuser-Busch and Carlsberg when Porterhouse released a Wheat Beer called Weiserbuddy and a Lager dubbed Probably. John Duffy, Irish delegate to the European Beer Consumers Union who blogs as The Beer Nut, describes Hughes as “one of the Godfathers of Irish craft brewing.”
Although she wasn’t aware of it until after the fact, Heslin’s timing for opening the brewery couldn’t have been better. In 2005, the Minister for Finance, Brian Cowen, had introduced a tax rebate for breweries that produced fewer than 20,000 hectoliters (17,000 U.S. barrels) of beer per year. West Kerry Brewery easily qualified. It was also part of what Caroline Hennessy and Kristin Jensen described in their book, Sláinte, as the “second generation” of Irish breweries. “After the pioneers came the establishers,” they wrote.
Oliver Hughes and Peter Mosley found themselves in County Kerry for the 2012 opening of their new project, a distillery in the town of Dingle that would produce whiskey, gin, and vodka. They decided to tour the area, and took the Slea Head Drive around the Dingle Peninsula. When they passed Tig Bhric in Ballyferriter, they remembered their conversation with Heslin at Farmleigh in 2008, and decided to call in for a beer.
Though the Porterhouse is a much larger brewing company than West Kerry Brewery, Mosley and Hughes immediately identified with Heslin’s enthusiasm for beer; her passion to create something of provenance; and her championing of independent, Irish products. “Her values echoed with ours,” says Mosley. “We were impressed with the bar, impressed with the beers and impressed with Adrienne.”
Mosley suggested some technical changes she could make to her water profile, as well as improvements to brewery hygiene that could boost the quality of her beers. Hughes advised Heslin to focus on her local market, and agreed to connect her with bars in Dingle. He also promised to introduce her beers to the Porterhouse’s sister company, a national beer importer and distributor called Grand Cru, based in Dublin.
Heslin threw herself into the brewing community in Ireland, and joined the Independent Craft Brewers of Ireland (ICBI). ICBI meetings took place every few months, mostly to discuss the emergence of the Intoxicating Liquor (Breweries and Distilleries) Bill, known colloquially among brewers as “the Taproom Bill.” The organization also made headway on a project to create an independence seal for brewers in Ireland.
Loughnane describes Heslin as an “outlier” who kept “the committee focused on the big vision when it gets bogged down in semantics,” while Rick LeVert of Kinnegar Brewing says she brought “an outsider’s perspective to the group.” Elisabeth Ryan, the Coordinator of the ICBI, said that Heslin was “one of the most passionate people in the organization,” and “one of the most generous in terms of wanting to promote Irish beer.”
Following Hughes’ introduction, West Kerry Brewery had also begun working with Grand Cru, the national distribution company. “Down there you’re nearly finishing their sentences for them,” says Phil Tavey of Grand Cru. “When I order beer, it doesn’t necessarily land when it’s supposed to land. Being in Dublin, we’re used to everything moving at a pace. Time is money. When you’re in Ballyferriter, it’s a different animal.”
“I thought that if I could sell the bar, I could pay off the bank. I just wanted for us to be free.”
In 2014, Heslin was contacted by an American brewery to see if West Kerry Brewery would be interested in taking part in a “transatlantic recipe swap.” Jay and Lori Wince of Weasel Boy Brewing Company in Ohio had been traveling in southwest Ireland two years previously; confused by the place names on the road signage, they stumbled upon Tig Bhric. “It definitely doesn’t look the way it sounds,” said Jay Wince of the Irish language. “A lot of places in Ireland feel very remote to us because what’s considered a small town here in Ohio is actually a larger city in Ireland.”
The Winces returned home, inspired by what they had seen at West Kerry Brewery, especially Heslin’s metal sculptures, which were propped up in her workshop and dotted around the garden. “We have a very strong art community in Ohio,” says Lori Wince, “so after that trip we decided to feature the art of local artists in a gallery space in our brewery.”
Weasel Boy wanted to brew West Kerry Brewery’s Riasc Red, named for the local townland and falling somewhere between an English-style Bitter and an Irish Red Ale in style, though Heslin also added botanicals from her garden to the recipe. The Winces suggested that Heslin brew Bitter Sable, their 8.2% American-style Imperial Black IPA. It would be the first IPA that Heslin had brewed, the highest alcohol by volume that she had ever tried to achieve, and also the first time that she would use New World hop varieties—in this case, Summit, Centennial, Amarillo, and Cascade.
Weasel Boy’s interpretation was driven largely by its ability to secure the malts Heslin sourced from an English malthouse, which yielded a beer with a pleasant caramel, nutty, and dark-chocolate character, and a dry finish. After searching for weeks for Yakima hops, Heslin produced a version of Bitter Sable that was more malty than Weasel Boy’s original, and which, to most local drinkers, felt closer in style to a 19th-century British Stout or Brown Ale than an IPA. “There’s a lot of olde sweete shoppe about the aroma: humbugs and liquorice,” wrote John Duffy on his blog. “It doesn't taste like an American black IPA. It tastes like a jolly nice porter, all tart dark fruit, Christmas cake and high-cocoa chocolate.”
Melbourne native Daniel O’Connor—a tall, wiry homebrewer with a graying mohawk and handlebar moustache—worked in Australia as a production coordinator for companies that partnered with large manufacturing plants in China. The role required engineering nous, a focus on quality control, and detailed planning and organizational skills. In October 2013, O’Connor and his Irish wife, Leonie Hurley, decided to move back to Ireland, finding a place to live in Dingle in Hurley’s native County Kerry. Facing down a winter in rural Kerry, O’Connor sent out numerous job applications, all of which were ignored.
In March 2014, O’Connor found out that there was a small brewery in Ballyferriter, not far from where he was living in Dingle. He drove to Tig Bhric and sidled into the pub, asking to speak to the owner of the brewery. A casually dressed woman came to the front and after a brief conversation, during which she laid out her struggling financial position, she agreed to give O’Connor a short apprenticeship. If it worked out, Heslin would consider offering him a full-time, paid position in the brewery. She needed all the help she could get.
Despite the additional pair of hands and its growing status, business at Tig Bhric was struggling. With constant pressure from Allied Irish Bank to fulfill the debt obligations of her daughter Maude, Heslin’s mental health suffered. Oliver Hughes encouraged her to keep fighting for the brewery and the pub. “He provided a real sense of being there during my depression,” says Heslin. “He empowered me to understand my value.”
Heslin learned, however, that a new brewery would be opening just eight miles away. Other breweries had opened in County Kerry since West Kerry Brewery was established—Crafty Divils, Kerry Brewing, Killarney Brewing, and Torc Brewing—but they were far enough away so as not to compete with the taps she had fought for in the area. Now, Finn MacDonnell, fourth-generation owner of the well-known Dick Mack’s Pub in Dingle, with its own publican’s license, would be installing a BrauKon brewing system from Germany in an old stone building beside the pub.
Heslin decided that she would put the pub up for sale. Financial pressure, increased competition, and mental health issues took their toll; O’Connor was mostly alone in figuring out how to deal with many of the production issues. “I thought that if I could sell the bar, I could pay off the bank,” said Heslin. “I just wanted for us to be free.”
On July 30, 2016, Heslin received a phone call from Peter Mosley. Oliver Hughes—her mentor and friend—had died of a heart attack at the age of 57.
Hanging up on the call, Heslin walked to the back of the pub, past her metalwork studio and the brewery, to the stone wall in her botanical garden.
To her north stood An Triúr Deirféar—in English, the Three Sisters—a trio of jagged peaks (Binn Hanrai, Binn Meanach and Binn Diarmada) which, despite their collective title, feature no female names among them. To the east of the pub, Smerwick Harbour caressed a two-mile-long stretch of white sand that had given its name to her first beer, Béal Bán. To her west, the mighty Atlantic was faced off by high rocky cliffs, punctuated with tiny coves and beaches, rich in smuggling folklore.
To her south, four kilometres along the Slea Head Drive to Teeravane, rose Croagh Mháirtín, a mountain in the Ballynahow Commons that defined the view from Tig Bhric’s garden. Exactly halfway between the back garden of the pub and the foot of Croagh Mháirtín, Heslin had buried her son Hugo after his cot death in 1993. One of her metalwork statues stood beside her, a piece of art entitled “Clipped Wings” depicting a female torso, a woman missing her arms and her legs. Heslin couldn’t turn her eyes away from the mountain, its slopes rising to a triangular peak, cutting into the horizon: brooding, dark, silent.
Cuilan Loughnane, now operating his own brewery, White Gypsy in Templemore, was visiting Dingle with his wife in the period after Daniel O’Connor had joined West Kerry Brewery, and felt it would be rude to come so close to Ballyferriter and not pop in to say hello. Heslin greeted him warmly and offered him a beer. “I was absolutely dreading it,” says Loughnane, who hadn’t tried West Kerry Brewery’s beers for a few years. He ordered a Béal Bán, and listened as Heslin told him about the improvements they had made to quality control, the advice they had taken on from Peter Mosley, and her full-time employee. “I remember drinking it and thinking, ‘Holy shit, she’s come a long way,’” says Loughnane. “I couldn’t believe it.”
Soon after Daniel O’Connor’s arrival, a new glycol line had been installed in the brewery, as well as cooling jackets around each of the tanks and a digital thermometer that delivered accurate readings. When O’Connor had first started working at West Kerry, the beer had been conditioned by dropping a cooling coil into the fermenter, introducing a risk of infection and oxidation.
“There was a lot less control when I first came in,” says O’Connor. “There was massive variation from brew to brew.” O’Connor was now in constant contact with Peter Mosley, who had assisted in particular with issues relating to water treatment, yeast management, and hygiene. “Because Daniel was very open to advice and taking things on board, there was a real transformation in the beer,” says Mosley. “The beer was coming out light-years ahead of what it was before.”
West Kerry Brewery had also added new tanks and increased production. With local accounts secured through Hughes’ and Mosley’s Dingle Distillery network, West Kerry Brewery’s top-selling beer was now its Golden Ale, Béal Bán. The brewery’s 5% Red Ale, Cúl Dorcha (named after a local beach and translating to “Dark Corner”) and 6% Porter, Carraig Dhubh (named for the “Black Rock” seen from Wine Strand) were more in demand in the Dublin market.
The economic health of Ireland was now showing signs of recovery after the Recession between 2008 and 2014. “A penny dropped,” says Heslin. “I realized I had an asset.” Heslin took the pub off the market, choosing instead to add a bed-and-breakfast upstairs, and to buy out the shares owned by Dónal Kane so that she was now the full owner of West Kerry Brewery. Allied Irish Bank agreed to sell the debt obligation to a private investment fund, and Heslin hopes to negotiate on fresh terms with the new lenders. “My attitude change was based on the encouragement I’ve received from colleagues in the industry,” she says. “This time in financial negotiations, I have my self-esteem. That is critical.”
Heslin’s change in attitude spread to the team in the bar, the bed-and-breakfast, and the brewery.
“There was a real transformation in the beer. The beer was coming out light-years ahead of what it was before.”
In 2017, Tig Bhric was shortlisted for the Vintners’ Federation of Ireland’s Pub of the Year award in the Innovation category, which rewards pubs that demonstrate how innovation had improved their business through marketing, renovation, or the implementation of new processes. In the same year, West Kerry Brewery’s Porter, Carraig Dhubh, was listed as a finalist in the Blas na hEireann Irish Food Awards.
Then the crowds arrived. Lucasfilm Ltd. had filmed Star Wars: The Force Awakens on the nearby Skellig Islands, but for environmental reasons had been unable to secure permissions to shoot the next installment of the franchise there. Attracted by the otherworldly quality of the scenery around Tig Bhric, the film producers reconstructed a 6th-century monastic site comprising eight beehive huts on Ceann Sibéal in Ballyferriter, bringing hordes of fans of Star Wars: The Last Jedi to the area—and to the pub.
Tig Bhric also became a venue for the Other Voices festival, Ireland's leading live-music series, which films for three days every December.
Finn McDonnell of Dick Mack’s pub, who had experienced huge success in his first year in charge of the newest brewery in Kerry, had decided to pour West Kerry Brewery beers on the taps of his famous family pub alongside his own beers. “We want to support local,” says McDonnell.
Heslin recently invited a group of brewing colleagues, as well as publicans from the Dingle Peninsula who poured West Kerry Brewery beers, to Ballyferriter for an off-season party in Tig Bhric. Rick LeVert and Libby Carton of Kinnegar Brewing made the seven-hour drive from Letterkenny to Ballyferriter. Peter Mosley traveled from Dublin for the occasion. Upon entering the pub, they saw their own beers pouring on Heslin’s taps; she had ordered in one keg of beer from each of the participating breweries for the evening.
Eventually, discussion turned to Heslin’s branding. The front label of all the West Kerry Brewery beers features an illustration of the Three Sisters mountain range, an image which instantly communicated the provenance of the beer. The back of the bottles are emblazoned with a mysterious, triangular graphic.
The story of the back label is not to be found on the brewery website, or on its social media accounts, or in any article about the brewery. It’s an illustration that Heslin created herself, a depiction of Croagh Mháirtín. In the winter of 2001, a few weeks after returning from Italy, and seven years before she would launch her brewery, Heslin climbed the mountain. At its summit, 1,322 feet above sea level, she scattered the ashes of her best friend and partner, Padraig Bric. “That’s not written anywhere in terms of marketing,” said Heslin, pouring pints behind the bar. “But it means a lot to me.”
Words + Photos by Breandán Kearney
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