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I would imagine the best place to get one would be from an ex brewer, maybe someone here has a contact? Sounds like you already tried this though...

Being able to taste a beer and dinstinguish what ingredients were used and in what proportions requires a very developed sense of taste and smell. Folk might think they have the prerequistes but this takes time, experience and effort, effort being the main one I think. Popping a beer, indentifying what aromas they smell. Tasting it and identifing the flavours. If you can taste a beer and name 10 aromas and 10 flavours then you're on your way to cloning a beer, and in the process becoming a beer connoisseur youself. But as I said, you need to do this often, with every new beer you try. I don't.

At the same time, you need experience using the various ingredients used in brewing, the malts, the hops etc. This also takes time and experience.

This is why I like clone beer recipe books...they help you understand the ingredients and what is necessary to produce a particular beer that you're familiar with. You can then use this knowledge to produce something similar, at least on paper!

I've heard of people formulating a particularly good recipe of a beer and then spending years tweaking various aspects of it, looking for the perfect combination of ingredients and process. This is the art of brewing. Long live the brewer who can perfect his recipe, but his passion is over when he does...

well i kind of got onto them late on...i had just brought some friends to the cobble stone and had all the d.b.c beers. rating them etc and then doing the dog on them...tried to arrange another day out and a brewery tour...no probs they told me...two weeks later that was it.game over. met a driver a few weeks later in dalkey of all places....was doin a gig out there...i asked him the usual q's and he said they just couldnt survive and the b.u.l's they were doing just kept them above water and they were just distributing the last of what they had...at the same time all their bottles went cheap in the offo's. then that was that. nothing. blankidy blank....and here we are lamenting it.

As far as I'm aware, if you produce say 1000 litres of beer, you have to pay the excise on it regardless of whether you sell it. Any alcohol that is produced at that kind of volume is taxed. You can store it in a bonded warehouse where you pay a bond to the value of the excise within the warehouse. Once you remove it from the warehouse excise is due. If the warehouse burns down and your beer goes with it, the revenue walk away with your bond. They always get their pound of flesh. So I don't think the idea of giving away your brew free with food will get around the excise payment, if you're producing at micro brewery volumes.

Poking around the web I found this 2003 report from An Bord Pleanála[/url:130pso3p] (MS Word document) where they reject an attempt to stop a microbrewery being set up in Clifden. One of the grounds the objectors have is that such premises inevitably have public bars/tasting rooms attached and "Clifden is not short of pubs and does not need another one". The objectors note that the Irish Craft Brewers' Network has made a submission to government requesting that breweries be allowed special licences for serving their own beer on the premises. If that went ahead, it could certainly change the economics of running the old DBC HQ as a brewpub. In the end, An Bord Pleanála simply attached a condition to ban public access to the site, but let it go ahead.

Secondly, I was wondering if anyone knows anything about this operation in Clifden. Does it exist? The applicant was one Barbara-Anne McCabe, who also shows up on Google as the spokesperson of the ICBN. Question three: does the ICBN have a web presence? They certainly don't seem to be shy about their lobbying. It'd be odd not to have a site for information on their campaigns.