TOPIC:

I got Trinity's bar to sell craft beer. Was helped a lot by Melissa down at Messr Maguires but felt the owners of Messrs had no real interest even though the bar nearly sold more kegs than Messrs itself did. Students and young people want something different,they are more open minded an not died in the wool Guinness,Heineken etc drinkers like older generations who were often brainwashed by the 80 90's advertising. Some of the ignorance about craft beer that I have heard from drinkers in their 40's and 50' is shocking and I don't think you would get it from people in their 20's
Anyway I digress
Why would people pay 3.50 for Guinness or Fosters when they can pay 1 for the same experience at home with 20 friends. On a college campus it is too easy to get a large crowd together in someones house and have exactly the same vibe as a bar. In my opinion Student bars will work if they are operated in an original way and have actual soul. but not if they are run like every other cookie cutter Irish bar.

Well said! Goes for the whole pub sector, not just student bars, IMO.

"a_friend_in_mead":rwecko8i wrote: [quote:rwecko8i]How about the brewing courses in the UK presumably some of them sell to the student population?[/quote:rwecko8i][/quote:rwecko8i]

Nope

"a_friend_in_mead":2xvj5hk2 wrote: The dutch society was set up as an excuse for some engineers to go to Amsterdam on the lash. Turns out the guys who set it up were really good at organising fun events. So next up was drinking dutch gold around campus. followed by loads of other things.
[/quote:2xvj5hk2]

Off topic but anyway the year we went to Amsterdam we were predominately Science, Ag Science, Arts and Commerce students and it was the third year. The trip was only lightly subsidised and that money came from the university. Pretty much every cent of membership money goes into buying cans for going on the knack around UCD and upsetting security. Or at least I hope it still does.

About the UCC beer/brewing. I never even heard of it until I got into beer late in my studying career. I even remember asking some of the veteran staff in the Old Bar (who would always give an interesting if not quite verifiable answer) if their beer was ever tapped in the Old Bar. None of them bar one guy had even heard there was brewing on campus. The one guy who had heard about it said it was as hush hush as UCC's other very hush hush project/department. I looked for info on it online years ago and saw no mention of it. I asked one of my Food Business lecturers about it in a class in third year and he gave the class a very stony faced non-committal answer. The only reference I can even half remember of it on campus was from when Beamish and Crawford closed and donated a load of equipment. And even then that could have been from my aunt who had the ground level inside track in UCC for years.

I think they try to keep the on-campus brewing very much on the down low for fear of a riot kicking off with students looking for cheap or free beer. Or more likely to prevent every Dutch Gold aficionado chancing their arm and applying for a place on the course. Sure, they even only advertise themselves as Cork Beer/Brewing at the Frank Well. And you have to ask them "Are you/is this beer from the UCC course?" to get confirmation if you look studenty at a Fran Well fest if they're even there.

Edit: As an example of how obscure this is. I've just browsed across academic departments, schools of the college and university facilities and I can find no mention of brewing. I had to do a search for brewing to find mention of it in the Book of Modules. (The BoMs is basically [i:1qlbpwdm]the[/i:1qlbpwdm] guide to modules in UCC. It has to state what goes on in each module, of each course and can't hide anything.) And even then the only mention of brewing is in some modules that talk about "Cereals." UCC are trying very hard not to publicise this course and it's only because the MoMs has to explicitly state certain learning outcomes that it even mentions brewing anywhere on the site.