Craft Beer and low: the rise of Dublin’s Innovation tradition

Gregory T. Huang

Seamus O’Hara made the career bounce from life sciences project capitalist to full-time craft beer brewer. A more lucrative business? most likely.

O’Hara’s brewery is in County Carlow, about an hour south of Dublin. He started the Carlow Brewing firm along with his brother in 1998, while working in the biotech sector. again then, ireland’s handiest other unbiased brewer used to be Porterhouse, which received began in 1996. nowadays you will find O’Hara’s and Porterhouse beers in lots of pubs and stores, including some in the U.S. (mostly on the East Coast).

in case you care about innovation, the story of Irish craft beers is a familiar one of underdogs breaking into an entrenched industry—suppose Guinness—and disrupting business and culture alongside the way in which.

The prior couple of years have viewed an explosion in Irish microbrews, from a small handful to 40-bizarre brands now. That growth mirrors the upward thrust of the native innovation neighborhood in Dublin, which is anchored via technology firms and startups. And the modifications speak to a burgeoning inventive classification, as well as the broader financial system of jobs and products and services that helps make stronger it.

For his section, O’Hara studied biotech and molecular biology at Dublin city university within the mid-to-late ‘80s. Out of school, he worked in R&D and manufacturing at AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline. Then he spent 10 years at enterprise eire, working in tech switch and business development for Dublin-area universities and analysis facilities.

In 2001, O’Hara co-founded Seroba BioVentures, a Dublin-based totally VC firm. He served as a accomplice—it was renamed Seroba Kernel existence Sciences—and is still a director there. The agency, which runs one of only two biotech project money in Dublin (the other being Fountain Healthcare partners), has invested in corporations such as Opsona Therapeutics, Covagen, and Xention. It has about 100 million euros beneath administration.

O’Hara’s information of yeast and bacteria from his biotech days came in at hand as a brewer. “i know the method,” he says in his understated method. but Carlow Brewing’s early years have been relatively slow going. When industry picked up steam round 2011, O’Hara determined to head full-time on the beer entrance.

“The brewery had been making good development for a number of years,” he says. “shall we see the market growing very strongly. It wanted hands-on attention, and we needed to extend our capability.” Carlow Brewing had considered roughly 20 p.c annual boom previous to 2010. because then, O’Hara says, growth has been extra like 50 p.c yr over yr. a lot of that has been fueled by using in a foreign country gross sales, as exports make up roughly 1/2 of O’Hara’s trade.

just like the VC world, he says, “opportunities for corporations come and go. There are windows of possibility, and you need to strike—you need to transfer your small business when the chance is there.”

Dublin’s growing tech business has helped pressure that chance. Multinational firms like Google, facebook, and Twitter—and quick-rising outposts of Airbnb, Dropbox, and others—are changing the consumer demographics of the town, partly by using bringing in additional younger individuals who wish to drink totally different types of beers. (I also heard about a couple who worked at Amazon and Microsoft in Dublin who just lately opened their very own brewery.)

“It’s onerous to quantify,” O’Hara admits, however “the kind of people who are normally working in [information technology] are adventurous and outgoing, go-in advance more or less individuals. It’s been useful. The individuals and the culture they create are becoming more influential in Dublin.” He provides, “Google is excellent for us.”

briefly: techies like craft beers.

in addition they are usually heavy users of social media. And social media “has been a leveler” for small breweries, O’Hara says, serving to them compete with the marketing budgets of the big boys.

but more basically, he sees a “revival of pastime in flavors,” a “more adventurous spirit,” and a “less insular society.” “All those are certain adjustments for eire,” he says.

all of it adds up to a new personality for the Irish capital—one in which an appreciation for various tastes … subsequent page »

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