Brewery Corner & Irish Craft Beer
I found out about O'Hara's Brewery Corner while researching last year's post about O'Hara's Stout. Thanks to GPS, finding the real thing on bustling Parliament Street in Kilkenny was almost as easy. Note the bustling residents reflected in the window.
Brewery Corner is owned by O'Hara's - you can see the sign in the upper-right corner of the picture. It seems that roughly the same rules apply as apply in England: Tenanted, Managed or Free House. Although BC is tied to O'Hara's, they bill it as "Ireland's only pub to serve exclusively Irish craft beer on tap" including beers not brewed by O'Hara's/Carlow. Methinks the website is a bit dated, since we did find other pubs with a similar line up of taps. Nevertheless, they did have a nice selection of Irish craft beers.
OK, this is not a good picture, but it depicts the craft beer tap handles you see all around Ireland.
And it includes a sloth - why not? That is a Cosmic Cow Stout by Soulwater Brewery in the foreground; I found it to be quite delicious. I rated it 4.25 and earned the So Udderly Sweet badge on Untappd (Milk/Sweet Stout style - get it?)
Maybe it is due to the ownership structure of the pubs, maybe it is due to the ubiquitous glowing tap handles or maybe it is due to the relative newness of the craft beer industry in Ireland, but the breweries' line-ups seem to be undifferentiated. Make no mistake, they are good beers and they have a decent range of styles, but somehow they seem to all be coming from the same source. Strangely, this picture, painted on one of the walls in BC, somehow sums up my feelings:
I noticed that my Untappd check-ins tended to be higher in Ireland than back home. Could it be that the beer was fresher, or maybe it was due to being relaxed and on my dream vacation? Or maybe, although undifferentiated, the Irish have stepped up their Craft? Whatever it was, the craft beer in Ireland was Udderly tasty.
