I had my first brewery aged 15 in the attic of my parents’ house, which I’m pretty sure they never knew about. So I’ve had a longstanding interest in brewing.
I’m originally from right smack in the centre of Dublin. We moved from there to Celbridge in Co Kildare when I was still fairly young, but I’ve lived in Westport, Co Mayo for 23 years.
I was a mixed-practice vet for 25 years before we started Mescan Brewery. I tell everyone that this was the result of a poorly executed midlife crisis!
The story is that I actually enjoyed my veterinary work and I never got to the stage of not enjoying the work, but I got very tired of the hours involved and the fact that it was so unstructured.
The practice here is very spread out as well. We covered from Kylemore Abbey in the south to north of Achill. So we did a lot of driving. It’s a beautiful part of the world to drive around, but not at four in the morning.
Bart Adons, who started the brewery with me, was working in another practice, but we shared an on-call rota. One evening Bart and I got to talking about this and decided that we might do something else. We decided that we’d start a micro-brewery.
That was 2010 when we came up with the idea. The plan was that within five years we were going to have a functioning micro-brewery and that was going to be our job. In 2013, we sold our first beer, so we actually opened three years later.
It started out with one foot in each job. I kept going for another five or six years, working part-time as a vet and part-time in the brewery, but gradually moving over towards the brewery.
Cillian Ó Móráin was a vet for over 20 years before he opened Mescan Brewery outside Westport. \ Philip Doyle
We called it Mescan Brewery. Mescan was a monk in St Patrick’s entourage and he was a brewer. The brewery is located on Bart’s farm in the foothills of Croagh Patrick. Our water comes from a spring underneath Croagh Patrick.
Bart is from Belgium and we brew in the Belgian style. In Belgian brewing the monastery breweries are the top-tier producers. The connection to a monastic brewing tradition seemed appropriate when we’re on the side of the holy mountain and St Patrick had his own monk brewer.
The brewery is on Bart’s farm in a converted sheep shed. We built the equipment ourselves. We bought milk tanks from our clients that had gotten out of milk. We built a steel framework to hold those and basically re-engineered them to work as brewing equipment.
The whole thing was done on a shoestring budget and that is still the equipment we brew on today. It has stood the test of time. The idea was that we were going to setup something that was simple and effective, because neither of us had any capital to put into it. So that’s how it began and it grew from there.
The range
We’ve six core beers that we keep available all the time. We’ve seasonal beers that we do occasionally too and we’ve just released a collaboration beer as well with Wicklow Wolf.
Mescan products. \ Philip Doyle
A lot of our stuff is sold directly through our own web shop. We’ve distribution around the country and it goes to off-licences, particularly independent ones. We sell a lot to pubs and restaurants that do food, because our beers are suitable for food pairing. We also do brewery tours and tastings.
Being near a town like Westport is actually perfect for what we do. Westport is a west of Ireland town with a very cosmopolitan set of attitudes.
We’re really lucky with the amount of food producers and food outlets that we have around us. Westport being a tourist town, that helps a great deal with the tourism part of our business. So it’s the perfect spot for us.
We have a particular way of brewing that makes our beers expensive to produce. We believe it has a massive effect on the quality.
Our process is extremely slow. It takes three months between brewing a beer and it being ready for sale. Whereas a lot of commercial breweries would be hoping to do that in three weeks.
If we are going to brew a beer I start at six in the morning and my help usually arrives around 10. We’re here until nine or 10 that evening. So the hours are just as bad as veterinary, but you have the satisfaction of knowing that in advance.
Cillian Ó Móráin. \ Philip Doyle
It fascinates me still, and we’ve been doing it for years now, when I arrive in the morning the day after brewing and you see the airlock bubbling. You see the carbon dioxide belching out of there. You know that is the result of billions of yeast cells turning sugars into alcohol. I still think that’s kind of magic.
Even by microbrewery standards we’re at the smaller end. I would say our monthly output would be about 5,000l. In brewery terms, it’s a drop in the ocean.
Cillian Ó Móráin. \ Philip Doyle
We’re planning to grow our production and also the tourism side of what we do. It’s not my ambition for the thing to become huge. It’s always going to be a boutique operation.
Read more
An Italian man living in the Gaeltacht with fluent Irish
Journalist turned sheep farmer stuck in the middle with ewe
I had my first brewery aged 15 in the attic of my parents’ house, which I’m pretty sure they never knew about. So I’ve had a longstanding interest in brewing.
I’m originally from right smack in the centre of Dublin. We moved from there to Celbridge in Co Kildare when I was still fairly young, but I’ve lived in Westport, Co Mayo for 23 years.
I was a mixed-practice vet for 25 years before we started Mescan Brewery. I tell everyone that this was the result of a poorly executed midlife crisis!
The story is that I actually enjoyed my veterinary work and I never got to the stage of not enjoying the work, but I got very tired of the hours involved and the fact that it was so unstructured.
The practice here is very spread out as well. We covered from Kylemore Abbey in the south to north of Achill. So we did a lot of driving. It’s a beautiful part of the world to drive around, but not at four in the morning.
Bart Adons, who started the brewery with me, was working in another practice, but we shared an on-call rota. One evening Bart and I got to talking about this and decided that we might do something else. We decided that we’d start a micro-brewery.
That was 2010 when we came up with the idea. The plan was that within five years we were going to have a functioning micro-brewery and that was going to be our job. In 2013, we sold our first beer, so we actually opened three years later.
It started out with one foot in each job. I kept going for another five or six years, working part-time as a vet and part-time in the brewery, but gradually moving over towards the brewery.
Cillian Ó Móráin was a vet for over 20 years before he opened Mescan Brewery outside Westport. \ Philip Doyle
We called it Mescan Brewery. Mescan was a monk in St Patrick’s entourage and he was a brewer. The brewery is located on Bart’s farm in the foothills of Croagh Patrick. Our water comes from a spring underneath Croagh Patrick.
Bart is from Belgium and we brew in the Belgian style. In Belgian brewing the monastery breweries are the top-tier producers. The connection to a monastic brewing tradition seemed appropriate when we’re on the side of the holy mountain and St Patrick had his own monk brewer.
The brewery is on Bart’s farm in a converted sheep shed. We built the equipment ourselves. We bought milk tanks from our clients that had gotten out of milk. We built a steel framework to hold those and basically re-engineered them to work as brewing equipment.
The whole thing was done on a shoestring budget and that is still the equipment we brew on today. It has stood the test of time. The idea was that we were going to setup something that was simple and effective, because neither of us had any capital to put into it. So that’s how it began and it grew from there.
The range
We’ve six core beers that we keep available all the time. We’ve seasonal beers that we do occasionally too and we’ve just released a collaboration beer as well with Wicklow Wolf.
Mescan products. \ Philip Doyle
A lot of our stuff is sold directly through our own web shop. We’ve distribution around the country and it goes to off-licences, particularly independent ones. We sell a lot to pubs and restaurants that do food, because our beers are suitable for food pairing. We also do brewery tours and tastings.
Being near a town like Westport is actually perfect for what we do. Westport is a west of Ireland town with a very cosmopolitan set of attitudes.
We’re really lucky with the amount of food producers and food outlets that we have around us. Westport being a tourist town, that helps a great deal with the tourism part of our business. So it’s the perfect spot for us.
We have a particular way of brewing that makes our beers expensive to produce. We believe it has a massive effect on the quality.
Our process is extremely slow. It takes three months between brewing a beer and it being ready for sale. Whereas a lot of commercial breweries would be hoping to do that in three weeks.
If we are going to brew a beer I start at six in the morning and my help usually arrives around 10. We’re here until nine or 10 that evening. So the hours are just as bad as veterinary, but you have the satisfaction of knowing that in advance.
Cillian Ó Móráin. \ Philip Doyle
It fascinates me still, and we’ve been doing it for years now, when I arrive in the morning the day after brewing and you see the airlock bubbling. You see the carbon dioxide belching out of there. You know that is the result of billions of yeast cells turning sugars into alcohol. I still think that’s kind of magic.
Even by microbrewery standards we’re at the smaller end. I would say our monthly output would be about 5,000l. In brewery terms, it’s a drop in the ocean.
Cillian Ó Móráin. \ Philip Doyle
We’re planning to grow our production and also the tourism side of what we do. It’s not my ambition for the thing to become huge. It’s always going to be a boutique operation.
Read more
An Italian man living in the Gaeltacht with fluent Irish
Journalist turned sheep farmer stuck in the middle with ewe
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