In 2002, a young drummer called Tom Delaney moved to Galway City on the west coast of Ireland and joined a five-piece punk band called Only Fumes & Corpses. The music review site Keep it Fast described the band’s music as “teeth-bared, intense hardcore that rushes past with no grace; just jagged, uncomfortable destruction.” To pay the bills, Delaney started a screen-printing business, Killer Ts, selling T-shirts to punk bands. It was a time of wild abandon. Delaney’s only responsibility was to thrash out songs such as “Mutation,” “Parasite,” and “Knives.”
On one tour with his band in London, Delaney discovered beers from a brewery called The Kernel, and enthralled, he started homebrewing in his bathroom, selling his Pale Ales at gigs. Eventually, he joined a homebrew club, its meetings hosted at a small brewpub in the city called The Oslo, home of the then-tiny Galway Bay Brewery. At the club, he struck up a friendship with the brewpub’s young head brewer, Chris Treanor, also a fan of punk. Delaney had no commercial brewing experience, no biochemistry or engineering qualifications, and no other contacts in beer, but he was determined for all that to change. He wanted responsibility, and beer became his new obsession.
Ireland is an island that has known violent and dramatic change throughout its history. One hundred years ago, on May 3, 1921, following centuries of brutal subjugation to the British, the island was partitioned into two states: Ireland, often called the Republic of Ireland, a sovereign independent state covering five-sixths of the land; and Northern Ireland, located in the northeast of the island, encompassing six of the nine counties of Ulster, today a part of the United Kingdom.
The island’s western shore, the traversing of which is known as the Wild Atlantic Way, is less populated, less tame, slower-paced, and in places starkly desolate, while the eastern shore boasts cities like Belfast and Dublin, and hums with the industriousness and modernity of life closer to London and Brussels. The population of the entire island is roughly 6.6 million. More people live in the state of Indiana.
When Tom Delaney was born, on Dec. 1, 1982 in Roscrea, County Tipperary, there was just one independent brewery on the island: Hilden Brewery in Lisburn, Co. Down. Then, Ireland was a bastion of religious conservatism. Now, its younger generations lean progressive, particularly in the Republic, where they have led the fight for legislation in recent years in favor of equal marriage and reproductive rights, and support pro-European, left-of-center policy in the face of rising global nationalism. Historically a peripheral influence on the edge of a continent, Ireland’s economy once lacked infrastructure and depended largely on agriculture. Now the low corporation tax rate in the Republic and the island’s highly educated workforce attract multinationals, with Google, Apple, Facebook, Airbnb, Twitter, and LinkedIn all establishing their European headquarters in Ireland.
Change has also brought an internal national reckoning. There are bigger gaps than ever between the rich and poor; homelessness plagues families; the influx of immigrants, especially from Eastern Europe, Brazil, and India, has exposed small but vocal elements of society which are racist and unsavory; greed and corruption—mostly related to property and credit—have given rise to significant financial hardship; and globalization threatens to erode some of Ireland’s oldest traditions.
In beer, Ireland has experienced a change of an equally dramatic nature. In 2002, the year that Tom Delaney moved from Tipperary to Galway as a 20 year old, there were in the region of 15 independent breweries on the whole island. At the end of 2020, 18 years later, there were around 150 businesses producing beer. One source suggests 99 breweries operating with their own kit, and a further 51 companies producing beer on contract. Behind this change is a cast of characters who are representative of the broader craft beer movement internationally—but who are also very much of this island nation on the westernmost edge of Europe.
Chris Treanor, a Monaghan farmer’s son, had arrived at Galway Bay Brewery straight out of college in July 2012. Originally, he had been looking for bar work in Dublin, but his resume was passed to the owners of the brewery, and he was invited for a three-day trial on a tiny Dave Porter kit at the back of The Oslo under the supervision of then-head brewer John Smith. At the end of the three days, Smith handed Treanor the keys and resigned. Treanor was now the head brewer. He was 23 years old. After three months of brewing Smith’s recipes, Treanor saw that the job of head brewer, the job he was doing, was still being advertised. “Fuck this,” he said. “I may as well fucking brew what I want to brew.”
Treanor had witnessed the recent success of a beer from a Scottish brewery, BrewDog, called Hardcore IPA, so one morning in October 2013, he mashed in on Of Foam and Fury: a hazy orange, 8.5% Double IPA with 132 IBUs; a big chewy, malty body; and hop flavors of grapefruit pith and resin. Treanor used Galena, Chinook, and Pacific Jade hops to contribute a spectrum of juicy citrus notes, but importantly, dry-hopped the beer twice with large additions of a variety from Yakima Valley called Simcoe, contributing a pungent, resinous aroma to the beer which few in Ireland had encountered.
Of Foam and Fury hit the taps of Galway Bay’s bars—including The Oslo in Galway and The Black Sheep in Dublin—in November 2013. “Galway Bay’s 8.5% ABV hop explosion is the beer everyone’s been talking about, because it’s the beer everyone’s been waiting for,” wrote John Duffy on his blog, The Beer Nut, on Dec. 30, 2013.
A few months earlier, Treanor had picked up Galway Bay’s first bottling machine in Belgium. He needed someone to help him bottle, so he sent a text message to Delaney, whom he had met at the homebrew club, asking if he could help out for one day. Delaney arrived at The Oslo early on the morning of Aug. 1, 2013, and during a grueling, 15-hour shift, helped Treanor fill by gravity and cap and label by hand.
“We were fucking broken,” says Treanor. At the end of the punishing day, Treanor cleaned down the machine and prepared for another heavy cycle the next day. He could see that Delaney was exhausted and resigned himself to finding someone else. But before he left, Delaney turned to Treanor and asked a simple question: “What time tomorrow?”
One element of Irish beer’s renaissance was new legislation. Back in 2005, then-Minister for Finance Brian Cowen introduced an excise tax relief for small breweries, officially set out in the Irish budget of 2006. It was just what early starters, such as the Porterhouse Brewing Company and Carlow Brewing Company, needed to propel their businesses—and it was the spark which ignited first-wave independents such as White Gypsy Brewery, West Kerry Brewery, Dungarvan Brewing Company, Trouble Brewing, and Metalman Brewing Co.
Aidan Murphy, a food science and technology graduate of University College Cork—who had gone on to complete a master’s degree in brewing and distilling at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh—took the opportunity of the excise relief to open Galway Hooker Brewery in 2006, named for a class of traditional fishing boats from the area. He had served an apprenticeship producing cask ale at Okells Brewery on the Isle of Man, spent summers as a student in the beer gardens of Germany, and traveled around the U.S. discovering IPAs, all the while formulating a plan for his own enterprise.
“There were no hoppy beers here at that time. It sort of opened our minds.”
Trying to move away from what he described as Ireland’s “Holy Trinity” of Pale Lager, Red Ale, and Stout, Murphy’s first beer was the 4.3% ABV Galway Hooker Pale Ale. Its hopping rates would be considered modest by today’s standards, and it was never dry-hopped, but at the time it was released, drinkers took note. Murphy was introducing a new flavor to Ireland: that of the Cascade hop. “There were no hoppy beers here at that time,” says Rossa O’Neill, former chairperson of Ireland’s National Homebrew Club. “It sort of opened our minds.”
The Irish have always been proud of their food and drink, whether that’s the wealth of seafood offered by their coastline; the cheese and butter of their dairy farms; or the cereal grown for baking bread, brewing beer, or distilling whiskey. Emigration has played a role, too. Because of the Irish Famine, 40% of the population emigrated in the second half of the 1800s. 10% of the population left during the Great Recession. As Ireland recovered and people started to return home, they brought with them their experiences of the food and drink cultures of the U.K., mainland Europe, and the Americas. They were now willing to seek out, and pay for, higher-quality food and drink products. Many of them wanted good beer.
Another element was education. More than a year before he helped Treanor with that first mammoth bottling day, Delaney learned that there was a class being organized in Dublin by Shane Smith of Ireland’s National Homebrew Club, which would prepare beer enthusiasts for Beer Judge Certification Programme (BJCP) exams. The class would meet each week at The Headline Bar on Dublin’s Clanbrassil Street. There, Delaney discovered Saison and Oud Bruin and Belgian Tripels, as well as Lambic and Oude Geuze.
Other attendees included Emma Devlin from Donegal and Cathal O’Donoghue from Cork, a couple who would go on to open Rascals Brewing Company in Dublin using Galway Bay’s original brewhouse from The Oslo. Also in the class was Matt Dick, who would crowdfund £100,000 in eight days to set up a cooperative brewery in Belfast called Boundary Brewing, focusing on Hazy IPAs, big Stouts, and fruited Saisons. Another attendee was Declan Nixon, who would lead production at new brewery Simon Lambert and Sons in Wexford (now YellowBelly), producing Citra Pale Ales, passionfruit Sours, and Helles Lager. Rossa O’Neill was also there, and in addition to his work in the homebrew scene, he would go on to brew for Brewtonic in Dublin, the drinks arm of a series of Bodytonic bars.
The final element in the Irish beer revival was infrastructure. Breweries launched a trade association, calling themselves the Independent Craft Brewers of Ireland (ICBI). An online forum of homebrewers which started in 2007 called Irish Craft Brewer had divided into two separate groups by 2011: the National Homebrew Club, and Beoir, the Irish beer consumers’ group. Local chapters of both groups started springing up all over the country, and there was an appetite for competitions where homebrewers could receive feedback and consumers could gather to support new creativity. But there were few qualified to assess beers against objective criteria. With more competitions, Ireland needed more beer judges.
On Feb. 8, 2013 in an office building in Dublin’s financial services district, BJCP President Gordon Strong and BJCP International Representative Ali Kocho-Williams proctored the first-ever BJCP exam in Ireland. Delaney passed. Not only did he now have a qualification and more confidence in his knowledge and palate, discovering in particular a passion for spontaneously fermented beers, but he had just made friends with the next generation of Ireland’s most exciting brewers. Irish beer was now a community.
Then, the foreigners arrived.
Different ingredients became commonplace. New styles appeared. Scott Baigent from New Zealand and Cam Wallace from Australia set up Eight Degrees Brewing Company in Mitchelstown, Co. Cork in 2011, introducing Pale Ales and IPAs with Antipodean hop varieties. In 2012, Rick LeVert from Boston opened Kinnegar Brewing in Co. Donegal with his Irish partner Libby Carton, producing a wide range of accessible, flavorful, and consistently good modern ales. In 2014, a veterinarian from Belgium called Bart Adons started a Belgian-inspired brewery called Mescan Brewery in Co. Mayo with his Irish colleague, Cillian O'Móráin, named after St. Patrick’s supposed personal brewer. In the same year, American Joe Kearns took up the job of head brewer at The White Hag in Ballymote, Co. Sligo, bringing with him the experience of working in Hoppin’ Frog Brewery in Akron, Ohio and helping build the brewery into a bastion of Irish craft beer. (Following recent comments that “showed support of organizations that promote hateful and divisive ideologies and conspiracy theories,” however, Kearns has now departed the brewery.)
Treanor and Delaney were inspired by what was happening outside of Ireland, too. Visitors to The Oslo from the United States brought a random selection of beers for them to try, including Dark Lord from 3 Floyds Brewing Co. and Goose Island Brewery’s Bourbon County Stout—two monstrous Imperial Stouts. The gifts inspired Galway Bay’s next big release.
“We were kind of small and nimble and nobody knew any better. We thought we were doing God’s work.”
In October 2013, now on a growth trajectory, Galway Bay hired Delaney in a full-time packaging position. Not only would he be bottling, but he’d be washing kegs, cleaning tanks, digging out the mash tun, heating water, and watching Treanor develop recipes. On Feb. 3, 2014, Treanor and Delaney packaged Two Hundred Fathoms, a 10% ABV Imperial Stout which had been aged for several months in Yellow Spot whiskey casks. They painstakingly wax-sealed and hand-labeled each of the 800 bottles themselves. It was among the first barrel-aged Imperial Stouts in Ireland. In April 2014, it was pouring in the Galway Bay Brewery bars in Galway and Dublin.
Another of the brewery’s pubs called The Salt House, located on Galway’s Raven Terrace, stocked bottles of Cantillon Gueuze in its bar fridge, and Delaney would regularly finish off nights in the city by sharing a bottle with friends. He began ordering beers from an online Belgian distributor called Etre Gourmet, buying crates of Boon Oude Geuze which came in 250ml bottles. “They were little parcels of joy, and the perfect end-of-shift beer,” says Delaney. Meanwhile, visitors to Galway would bring wild beers from California’s Russian River Brewing Company and Almanac Beer Company, Wisconsin’s New Glarus Brewing Co., Michigan’s Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales, and Oklahoma’s Prairie Artisan Ales. There were still no spontaneously fermented beers being produced in Ireland. Delaney longed for someone to give it a go.
Of Foam And Fury and Two Hundred Fathoms had cemented Galway Bay’s place as Ireland’s most exciting brewery. RateBeer named it Ireland’s Best Brewery in 2014, 2015, and 2016. The two beers seemed to win every award going. This small brewery along the Wild Atlantic Way was making waves. “We were kind of small and nimble and nobody knew any better,” says Delaney. “We thought we were doing God’s work.”
More breweries had opened in Ireland in 2014 and 2015 than had existed in the history of Irish beer before that. Their businesses were growing. But things were about to change.
As the market became more saturated and competition increased, debt levels in the Irish beer industry grew. Pressure intensified for access to bars, exacerbated by multinational breweries offering bar owners favorable terms which squeezed independent breweries out of tap line-ups. In 2016, for example, Rye River Brewing Company in Kildare reported a loss of €3.5 million ($4.25 million). Loan amounts had to be written down. Hiring sprees stopped. Planned export market launches were put on hold.
A spate of Irish breweries ultimately closed for a variety of reasons, including Independent Brewing Company, Dingle Brewing Company, Achill Island Brewery, Kelly’s Mountain Brew, Jack Cody’s Brewery, Baile Brewing Company, Muckish Mountain Brewery, West Mayo Brewery, The Blackstairs Brewing Company, Jack Doyle’s Brewery, Arthurstown Brewing Company, Boghopper Brewing, Brewbot, Radik Ale, and Evans’ Brewery. None had been open for more than six years. Most did not last longer than two.
Another significant development in Irish beer was a gradual increase in the outright purchase of independent Irish breweries by large beer conglomerates. In 2013, Molson Coors UK & Ireland bought Cork’s Franciscan Well Brewery. In 2015, the C&C Group plc acquired 5 Lamps Brewery in Dublin and Alltech bought Station Works Brewery in Newry. The Pernod Ricard-owned Irish Distillers purchased Eight Degrees in 2018. The debates over definitions of “craft” and “independent,” as they have in other countries, became increasingly emotive and divisive.
Then, on June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom voted 51% to 49% to leave the European Union. The only place where the U.K. shared a land border with the EU was on the island of Ireland, where Northern Ireland bordered the Republic of Ireland. Years of work developing peace, culminating in the Good Friday Agreement, signed by all parties and both governments in 1998, had worked to nullify the border. A majority of the people of Northern Ireland had voted in favor of remaining in the EU, but, against their will, would be forced to leave it.
Delaney started to receive emails about whether Galway Bay was “Brexit ready,” recommending that someone in the company should be tasked with the extra customs paperwork and rising cost of business in dealing with suppliers and customers in England, Scotland, and Wales, as well as across the island’s border. Today, Irish breweries are still unsure whether to continue working with suppliers from Great Britain. Almost five years after that vote, confusion reigns.
In March 2016, Treanor decided to leave Ireland for a head brewer role in Switzerland with WhiteFrontier Brewery. Galway Bay was left without its maverick leader and gifted head brewer.
Delaney was the next-most-senior brewer at Galway Bay. He loved the on-the-ground work: mashing in, cleaning tanks, tweaking recipes, solving problems, and choosing high-quality raw materials. But he had seen the extra tasks for which Treanor had been responsible, including excise tax administration, managing people, and being a face for the brewery at events across Ireland. Delaney wanted to focus on making the best beer that he could. He was also entertaining the thought of setting up his own project to create spontaneously fermented beer. When Treanor and brewery owners Niall Walsh and Jason O’Connell approached Delaney to ask if he would take the job as head brewer, he turned them down.
Instead, Delaney proposed a counter-offer. Galway Bay was sizing up its kit to a partially automated 40-hectoliter (34-barrel) Eco Brew Tech system, and Delaney asked about buying the 20-hectoliter Dave Porter one the brewery had purchased in 2012, explaining that he wanted to start his own brewery dedicated to Lambic-inspired beers. Walsh suggested that Delaney stay with Galway Bay and take some space in its new Oranmore facility for his own wild project, using the Galway Bay kit he was brewing on every day to produce his own wort. Delaney accepted and almost immediately ordered a 40-hectoliter foeder and 32 five-year-old, 220-liter wine barrels from the Bordeaux cooperage Bossuet. His allocated space was soon filled with oak.
Meanwhile, Galway Bay hired from outside for the role of head brewer, bringing in an American called Will Avery, who had previously brewed at Burnt Hickory Brewery in Kennesaw, Georgia. In the meantime, Delaney sought a mixed culture of yeast and bacteria which would give his side project its own identity. He began conducting homebrewing tests, pitching blends from several yeast banks into different worts, and adding the dregs of various Belgian Saisons into others. He was also gifted a slurry which had its origins in Belgian Lambic.
He took some of these early experiments to beer festivals. The night before events, he wasn’t able to sleep. “I’ve never felt so vulnerable as a brewer,” says Delaney. “No hops. No spirit barrels. No tricks. Just naked, delicate beers, pouring alongside massive IPAs and Stouts.” The beers weren’t always good. Some stank of what he refers to as “poopy Brettanomyces.” Others expressed mild THP. But there were some beers that Delaney was proud of, and he isolated those cultures to pitch into his foeder. Delaney named his foeder Panta Rhei, a term which derives from Greek philosophy and translates to “everything flows.”
Despite the hurdles of Brexit, pressure from multinationals, and increased market saturation, perhaps the biggest business challenge to Irish breweries has been the legal prohibition on selling beer directly to consumers.
At Rascals, Devlin and O’Donoghue tried to overcome the problem by securing a restaurant license. They set up a pizzeria inside the brewery and sold their beers to people who came to eat. But people asked to buy beers to take home after their pizzas, and that wasn’t permitted by the license terms. Devlin and O’Donoghue, and the rest of Ireland’s brewers, became increasingly frustrated.
“When it comes to opening and running a brewery, Northern Ireland is the most restrictive market in the whole world.”
In the Republic of Ireland, the Intoxicating Liquor (Breweries and Distilleries) Act 2018—colloquially referred to as the “Taproom Bill”—was introduced to address this gap. But during the debate stage, it became so heavily lobbied by the powerful publicans’ associations that restrictions were introduced which made it impractical. The revised version permitted brewery taprooms to open for just a few hours (only during a tour, and with closing time by 7 p.m.), and such a license could only be obtained by court application through a process which typically cost tens of thousands of euros.
In the North, it was worse. “When it comes to opening and running a brewery, Northern Ireland is the most restrictive market in the whole world,” says Boundary’s Matt Dick.
Dick and a cohort of brewery and bar owners in the North—including Owen Scullion of Hilden Brewery in Lisburn, Mal McCay of Heaney Farmhouse Brewery in Bellaghy, Erol Bucukoglu of Lacada Brewery in Portrush, and William Mayne of Bullhouse Brewing Company in Belfast—have come together to fight for changes to a proposed licensing bill, and to allay fears that pubs might suffer from brewery taprooms and to-go sales. “We love our pubs,” says Dick. “None of us would be here without them. The pubs in Ireland are famous across the world for the experience that they give. … Pubs will thrive off a market where their local breweries are world-renowned.”
The dominance of multinational businesses such as Diageo and Heineken, with their own distribution networks and more significant marketing budgets, has also hampered the growth of the independent brewing sector. Reports suggest that many of the island’s independent breweries are currently operating well under capacity. These factors together—the restrictive laws, the closed market, and the capacity gap—all suggest that the market share for independents might stall and the growth rate of new entrants is likely to slow considerably.
Delaney has never had to worry about any of this. Galway Bay owns its own bars in Galway (The Oslo and The Salt House), Dublin (Against the Grain, The Brew Dock, The Black Sheep, The Beer Market, Paddle and Peel, and The 108) and Belfast (Northern Lights). There was an effective route to market for everything he was creating. For the other small breweries in Ireland, however, it seemed that no matter which type of license you fought for, there were business-threatening limitations.
At the growing Galway Bay, Avery was adjusting to life in Ireland with his wife and two children, and was finding the task of managing a brewery expansion stressful. Alongside him in the brewhouse, Delaney was becoming more stubborn about the details of what they were brewing, and his obsession with quality control parameters often put the two at loggerheads.
After internal discussions in June 2017, Avery was given the title of operations manager, where he would be tasked with sales and distribution, scheduling, and the planning of packaging runs. Delaney was asked for a second time to be head brewer, taking responsibility for everything from grain to glass—recipes, wort production, and cellar operations—as well as a more consumer-facing role as a figurehead. This time, armed with more confidence and a renewed sense of purpose, he said yes.
During this period, the brewery team welcomed various high-profile brewers to participate in collaborations in their Oranmore facility, including Wayne Wambles of Cigar City Brewing in Tampa, Florida (whose trip involved both a visit to the famous Galway Races and a trademark dispute over the beer they were brewing), and Mitch Steele from New Realm Brewing in Atlanta, Georgia (a collaboration that came about because Steele was speaking about IPA at the National Homebrew Club’s annual conference).
Others in Ireland began to embrace the collaboration brew, too. YellowBelly from Wexford and Rising Sons Brewery from Cork brewed a Session IPA together called Grand Parade. DOT Brew and 12 Acres Brewing Company brewed a Rye IPA together, aptly called 12 Dots. Most notable on the collaboration front was Whiplash, one of Ireland’s most decorated modern breweries, despite the fact that it had only existed since 2016. Whiplash has a spate of juice-bomb collaborations to its name, not only with other Irish breweries like Galway Bay, but with breweries in Spain (Garage Beer Co.), Sweden (Beerbliotek), and the U.K. (Wylam Brewery, Northern Monk, Gipsy Hill Brewing Company, Lost and Grounded Brewers, DEYA Brewing Company, and Track Brewing Co.).
Following his promotion, Delaney became frustrated with the halted progress on his wild side project, and even more disheartened when he tasted Lambic-inspired beers from larger breweries that he felt were lacking. “If breweries of their scale and resources can’t make a proper go of it, what chance do I have?” he thought. Maybe Ireland just wasn’t mature enough as a beer market to attempt such beers. He decided to continue with mixed fermentation in his wild project, but to forget about spontaneous fermentation. “I’ll leave that to the Belgians,” he said.
As a mental and physical break from both Galway Bay and his side project, Delaney traveled to the United States in March 2018. He visited Allagash Brewing Company in Portland, Maine, best known for its Belgian-style Witbier, Allagash White, but which was now producing small quantities of spontaneously fermented beer as well. Allagash’s Irish engineering director, Sean Diffley, had studied in Galway at the National University of Ireland and volunteered to take Delaney around.
At the end of his tour, Diffley produced an aged bottle of Coolship Resurgam, Allagash’s blend of its one-, two-, and three-year-old spontaneously fermented beer. It was dry and spritzy, with aromas of candied fruit and Brettanomyces, and soft acidic flavors of apricot and lemon zest. Delaney couldn’t believe how good it tasted and how close it was to an Oude Geuze from Belgium. “It was a lightbulb moment,” says Delaney. “I came home from that trip buzzed about giving it a go. I was like, ‘You know what? If they can make it this good, then surely it’s possible.’”
When Delaney returned home from his trip to the United States, he immediately repurposed an old milk tank into a coolship for his side project. On March 30, 2018, he began doing cooling rate tests. The following week, he completed his first turbid mash, filling his new coolship with a wort made up of a high proportion of raw wheat, vigorously boiling for two-and-a-half hours, and hopping with four-year-old Kent Goldings.
Delaney’s visual brand for his side project was a series of woodcut impressions of a bearded brewer, with his foeder, his malt, his bacteria, and his yeast. The designs were rustic and natural. They conveyed a sense of imperfection, the romance of grain and oak, a respect for the slow dance of spontaneous fermentation that so contrasted with the control and speed of production at Galway Bay. Delaney decided to name the side project Land and Labour.
The typography was a depiction of two letter “L”s, serif and cursive and old world and beautiful. The interlaced “L”s were reminiscent of the symbols Lambic breweries chalked on their barrels to identify provenance, like the four stacked squares containing X shapes on Lindemans’ barrels and the flat “G” with a cursive “L” that appears on Girardin barrels.
On Aug. 29, 2018, Tom Delaney and his girlfriend Niamh O’Sullivan had a baby girl. Delaney and O’Sullivan decided to call her Lúna, to mark the time of year she was born—during the traditional Irish festival of Lúnasa—held halfway between the summer solstice and autumn equinox. Lúnasa symbolizes change in the calendar, from hopeful planting to grateful picking, and is often celebrated with mountain pilgrimages, the crowning of wild goats, and ritual dances. One of the main activities during Lúnasa is the offering of “first fruits,” mostly associated with a wild European blueberry with an intense sweetness and acidity. When she was old enough to eat solid foods, Lúna developed a taste for fruit. Together with her father, Lúna Delaney would devour punnets of Galway-grown blueberries.
To honor his daughter, Delaney decided to release a special Land and Labour beer. He had macerated 200 grams per liter of local blueberries for two months on 16-month-old mixed-fermentation foeder beer before bottling it in October 2019. The blueberries were grown by the Sullivan family in Barna, a coastal village in Connemara, west of Galway. He described the beer as a “foeder aged wild sour ale with blueberries” and named it “Lúnaberry.” The beer was fruity and relatively dry, with a soft acidity, subtle notes of oak, and with a complexity in its fermentation flavors. On the label was a woodcut image of little Lúna, sitting amidst her father’s barrel room, hand stretched over a tub of blueberries, smiling.
While Delaney is one of many brewing Session IPAs and Imperial Stouts in Ireland, he is one of very few producing wild beers. The emergence of Land and Labour is a sign that the market is maturing to a point where the public is tentatively curious about, if not enamoured with, acid in beer. Rascals has had some success with its Flanders Red, and Kinnegar with its mixed-fermentation Phunk Bucket. Farmhouse breweries such as Heaney Brewery, 12 Acres, Canvas Brewery, and Ballykilcavan Brewery have popped up in a re-engagement with Ireland’s agricultural past.
The “Holy Trinity” is no longer the only option for breweries. Ireland now has flavorful Pilsners, such as Larkin’s Brewing Co.’s Curious Society, Whiplash’s Blue Ghosts, and O Brother Brewing’s The Wanderer. With better dry-hopping techniques, enhanced whirlpool extraction, and improved recipe formulation, there is a more nuanced deployment of hops in Irish beers, both in old classics such as Of Foam and Fury and newer creations such as DOT’s Pursuit of Juicy and Boundary’s What A Time To Be Alive. There also remains a strong culture of Stouts, most notably Carlow Brewing Company’s classic Leann Folláin, but also Lineman’s Astral Grains Foreign Extra Stout, and Wicklow Wolf’s Dry Stout, Locavore.
On Feb. 29, 2020, the first case of COVID-19 was confirmed in Ireland. On March 12, in order to combat the virus, the Irish government shut down all schools, colleges, childcare facilities, and cultural institutions. St. Patrick’s Day festivities were canceled. By March 24, almost all businesses, venues, facilities, and amenities had been shuttered. The Garda Síochána, Ireland’s police force, was given special powers to enforce lockdown measures and ensure people were social-distancing. Every bar on the island of Ireland was ordered to close by the respective governments, including all those owned by Galway Bay Brewery on both sides of the border.
“These beers are hard to make. They’re even harder to sell. They take years of your life.”
Confined mostly to their house in Galway, Delaney and O’Sullivan, now married, prepared for the arrival of their second child. The brewing at Galway Bay continued, albeit in a severely reduced capacity, with most staff on temporary unemployment benefits. Just before the pandemic had taken hold, Delaney had brewed a batch of coolship-inoculated wort which would mark the end of his third season of brewing using spontaneous fermentation. He now had batches of spontaneously fermented beer spanning three seasons, dating back to April 8, 2018. Delaney had registered Land and Labour with the Méthode Traditionnelle Society, which doled out different classifications showing that beers bearing them had been produced in the same way as traditional Belgian Lambic.
“These beers are hard to make,” says Delaney. “They’re even harder to sell. They take years of your life. The process and lack of intervention is the soul of these beers. It’s the main reason why I started brewing them. Their impermanence is such a beautiful thing, the antithesis of modern production brewing. It’s cathartic.”
After just a few releases, Land and Labour is currently ranked as the Best Brewery in Ireland on Untappd. Some time later this year, Delaney will release Ireland’s first-ever blend—inspired by the Oude Geuze of Belgium’s Payottenland—of one-, two-, and three-year-old spontaneously fermented beer. “It might be the first in Ireland, but hopefully we won’t be the last,” says Delaney. “We need diversity in our brewing landscape.”
At the end of July last year, O’Sullivan and Delaney welcomed their second child, Finn, named after a famous warrior of Irish mythology, translating as “fair-haired” in Irish. The Ireland that Lúna and Finn Delaney will inherit might be suffocating in political and social uncertainty and fragile in its economic health, but their father has shown them that it’s a place where dramatic, positive change is possible. For now, two-year-old Lúna Delaney is at home in Galway, oblivious to the pandemic and bemused by the arrival of her new sibling, and eating Galway blueberries with her father on the Wild Atlantic Way.
Words + PhotosBreandán Kearney
