Diversifying into brewing – the story of Ballykilcavan Farm and Brewery

David Walsh-Kemmis took over the family farm in 2004 - a multi-generational farm, which has been in his family since the 1630s. At the recent National Malting Barley Conference, he shared his experiences of setting up Ballykilcavan Brewery.

After previously completing a degree in computer science and working in Dublin for a number of years, David was keen to return home as he “didn’t want to be the last generation of the family to have farmed” there.

Telling his story on establishing Ballykilcavan Brewery, he said: “In terms of motivation, it was basically financial. If I had been able to make a living just out of farming, I would have stayed just farming. But I didn’t see that was going to be possible either in the near or long term. I looked at how much of my Single Farm Payment I was retaining in terms of the crop yields. There were plenty of years where I was only keeping 60% of what money came into me from Europe, so I was actually paying in those years to go farming.”

When subsidies were removed and the income from the farm was assessed solely on tillage production, David’s faming endeavours had returned a total of just €300 over the course of 12 years. This coincided with a time when future for subsidies for tillage enterprises looked to regress, so he began exploring alternative options.

“The brewery was the option”, he said, “because we have the ingredients, I was interested in brewing and we had the buildings. It went in 2018. We actually had been brewing offsite, using our own barley, for a year before that. We are brewing with our own barley and our own water. We have some hops as well.”

Consisting of a 1,000L brewery and 12 fermenters, David outlined that at maximum output, 3,000L of beer can be produced each week, with one tonne of barley producing approximately 10,500 pints of beer.

“I am the only brewer in the country that wants the malt price to be as high as possible because we grow a lot more barley that we actually use,” he commented. "Boortmalt are very kind to us. We send in a batch of barley to them and our brewery buys back whatever we think we are going to need. We might only go through 15t of malt in the year. The rest of it goes into the general brewing and distilling industry. We still have to hit the same quality parameters as everyone, as maybe 80% of that barley will end up with different breweries and different distilleries,” he said.

Marketing

With beer sold on domestic and international markets – including France, Italy and Czech Republic to name a few – David noted that differentiation in the marketplace is key.

“The quality of the product is very important. I’d like to think that we make good beer, but lots of other people make good beer as well, so you can’t rely on quality as a differentiation. There is obviously very large multi-national breweries and there’s 130 odd craft breweries in the country as well. There’s an awful lot of competition and, for us, the differentiation is really important. We are really basing that around two main factors, which is the story of the farm and the ingredient provenance.”

Sustainability is also key and he feels that embracing it now, when you can be rewarded or credited for you endeavours, is a better approach to take than waiting on to be told to do so. A low carbon footprint of the ingredients – given the relative short travel distance between his farm, the malting plant in Athy and back to his Brewery – combined with investment in solar panels are just two of the many sustainability practices being undertaken at Ballykilcavan.

Along with using home-grown malting barley for beer production, David has also diversified further and developed a small hop garden. This has created the potential to produce one beer with his own malting barley, hops and water each year – something he said “only a very few places in the world can do”.

Future aims and challenges

Increasing beer production as much as possible is one of the future aims of his business, as he aims to make scale work in his favour. The opening of a visitor centre in 2022 was also cited by David as a future opportunity adding it “has huge potential”. Although David is selling product on the domestic market, he noted the importance of the export market to his business, as challenges exist with distribution and licensing in Ireland.