TOPIC:

Interesting topic (and food for thoughts) emerging from the various tastings in Turin, this weekend: brewers around the World are more and more frequently sourcing local ingredients (SlowFood presidiums, but not just them), cooking methods, techniques, trying to narrate locality and history of their country through their beers.

I have been asked what is the "common identity" that characterizes the Irish Craft beer scene, and I struggled to provide an answer... Irish Red Ales come to mind because of the obvious style connection, but then, I'm not sure I can say it represents the industry in Ireland today...

Thoughts? Is Craft Beer in Ireland still too young to have developer a fil-rouge that sets it apart from the other countries? Or is it just victim of the cultural heritage from the UK and the US?

Bit of both, I'd say. With the exception of White Hag's Beann Gulban there's nothing being brewed in Ireland that isn't also brewed elsewhere.

"TheBeerNut":ny5nxygq wrote: Bit of both, I'd say. With the exception of White Hag's Beann Gulban there's nothing being brewed in Ireland that isn't also brewed elsewhere.[/quote:ny5nxygq]

See this list:
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If that's the case, how can we (consumers and Beoir) help? Beoir has the chance to work with the collaboration brews, we could propose some more Ireland-centric styles? I'm not sure I'm a big fan of "beer-cheology", but might be an interesting thing to work on...

Education- it's all comes down to educating the consumer.

Can you expand Andrew? I'm not sure that education (as I'm thinking about it at least) helps define a national identity in this field...?
That said, education is a key to so many other things that it can be bad [emoji14] but that's a completely different topic (might deserve a thread on its own <!-- s:P --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_razz.gif" alt="" title="Razz" /><!-- s:P -->) and although I think Beoir can definitely help more there, I would argue that other players of the industry would need to have a much bigger role...