A tour of a brewery would be a great way of teaching and hopefully imparting a bit of interest, but it would not be something you could feasibly arrange for every staff member as soon as they start working in a given pub, unless you happen to have a brewery on site. Also, that kind of training is unlikely to appeal to a publican who just wants to stock a tap or two of craft beer and a selection of bottles and would be difficult to arrange.
I was thinking of a kind of induction training that you could do in an hour. The kind of thing a publican could do with all of his staff if he has just decided to begin stocking craft beer and then repeat with new staff members as they join. It would have to be fairly brief, or it would end up being one of those things you just keep meaning to get around to.
The idea is that it would be a kind of intro to what craft beer is, why it is different from macro beer, what the individual styles are and what the answers to common customer questions are.
If I could figure out the kind of info that would really be needed and what kind of questions customers come up with, I could try to put together some kind of booklet which would be available to publicans who want to stock Irish Craft Beer. The purpose would be to allow them to train their staff to answer questions about the beer, rather than just put a tap on and have the staff as mystified about it as the customers.
