Laois beer company brews up international Gold medal

There was great delight this week at Ballykilcavan Brewery as three of their beers won medals at the prestigious Concours International de Lyon beer competition in France, including a gold medal for their Brickyard red ale.  

The Stradbally-based brewery has previously won nine medals in the Dublin Craft Beer Cup, but these are their first international medals.

Brewery founder and owner David Walsh-Kemmis explained.

"The Lyon beer competition is one of the most prestigious in France.  This year they got over 9,000 entries from 17 countries, so to pick up three medals there is really exciting and a great credit to Joe and Dave in the brewing team.  We’ve always been very happy with our beers, but it’s good to get some external validation of their quality as well.  

"We’ve been exporting to France for about a year now, and these awards will be a big help in marketing the beers to French consumers.”

Having already been exporting beers to La Rochelle, many of which end up in a bar in the Vieux Port area of the city owned by Portlaoise native Noel McNulty, Ballykilcavan are now also working with a new distributor who took their first order in February.   MORE BELOW AWARD.

“Our new distributor has two bases in France: one near Paris and one near Toulouse, so our beers are now on sale in the North, West and South of France, as well as Northern Italy and shortly in the Czech Republic.  Export sales will take up 30% of our production this year, and we’re looking to expand that to 50% by 2025,” said David.

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Ballykilcavan Farm has been the home of the Kemmis famil for 13 generations since 1639. David took over Ballykilcavan from his late father in 2004 with a motivation to sustain it so that someone else would it stay in the family for the further generations.

After farming here for 10 years he realised that growing barley would not realise this ambition. That's where the brewery idea came in and the Ballykilcavan beers have gone on to become  some of the best known brews from the micro-brewing sector in Ireland.