St Mel’s Brewery rolls out the barrel-aged beers

“The off-trade isn’t booming the way it did during lockdown,” says Liam Hanlon, co-founder of St Mel’s Brewery in Longford. “It has probably returned to where it would have been before. Most of our off-sales are local or mail order. Online customers are always looking for something new, so we have bought a 200-litre pilot kit that we are installing now. That will enable us to release small once-off brews. We did one large brew every month last year, but there was too much crossover between releases.”

“I have a whole list of new beers planned but it all depends on what is possible. We have a collection of barrel-aged beers — an extra stout and brown ale in whiskey barrels and a saison in wine barrels. We will brew fresh beers and blend them in with these beers. Barrel-aged beers by themselves can be a bit flat and the flavours too harsh, so this balances it out, brings down the ABV a bit, as well as making them more presentable. We are learning all the time and the blend depends on the condition of the beer and where the flavour is. Sometimes we add just a small quantity, so the beer is 90 per cent barrel aged, sometimes 50-50 or 60-40. The plan is to release the new beers from September onwards.”

For the moment the St Mel’s core range is available from off-licences nationwide. It includes five in bottles and four in cans — all different beers. “It keeps us busy,” says Hanlon. “Cans are only a small part of what we do; bottled beers are more popular for us.”