A look at the Messrs Maguire brewery

Pin It Now! A while back I mentioned that Messrs Maguire has started brewing on their premises again, instead of having former brewer Cuilan brew at his White Gypsy brewery. Melissa is the new brewer and he first beer brewed on the Messrs kit (she brewed an APA on Cuilan's kit already) came in the from of a rather lovely brown ale. As Beernut mentioned, it has all the qualities of a good Mild and I thought that if someone handed it to me and claimed it was a Porter, I would not even raise an eyebrow. Needless to say it was full of roasty goodness and I enjoyed it. I will report more on the Cask version when I try it in Cork at the Winter Ale and Cask Festival.

I can't profess to have had a proper taste of the brown ale because I instantly ordered Mel's APA and the hops destroyed my taste for the rest of the night. That was fairly stupid of me.

After a lot of beer consumption and free samples of the brown ale, we headed (beer in hand) in to the brewery. We went through an impressively tidy looking keg room with well labelled beer lines and valves running all around us.

The first thing I noticed was how large the fermentation tanks were. For a brewpub, they are rather large and I reckon they are larger than the Galway Hooker kit. They are similar in size to the Trouble Brewing kit. The other interesting thing was how they got them down there? It looks like they had to build the pub around the brewery because the walkways, doors, corridors etc are all far too small to bring these fermenters in. The only possibility was a window that may have been removed. On the other side of the window is a built in bench so that would have had to been taken out as well (or added later).

Melissa is showing us how she is using a simple electric blanket to keep the fermenter warm because she is currently conditioning the Haus lager. In fact we got to try the cloudy lager while it was only a couple of weeks old and it was rather nice. I look forward to trying the finished product.

The brewery itself is up some stairs and two ladders and a corridor and visible from street level. I was humming the Crystal Maze tune in my head as it felt like I was in the game my way to next challenge. It contains a HLT, Boiler (copper) and Mash Tun. Sorry I somehow neglected to take a picture.

It was a fun and informative brewery tour. I look forward to more Messrs Beer in the years to come.