Three new craft breweries, set up by graduates of Taste4Success Skillnet’s General Certificate in Brewing course for job-seekers, scooped a number of awards at the recent Alltech International Craft Brews & Food Fair, Ireland’s largest craft beer festival. Craft breweries went head-to-head across several different categories in the second annual Dublin Craft Beer Cup, with local breweries and distilleries competing with the best from around the world. The competition gives Irish breweries a platform to increase the profile of their product in a competitive commercial market and is also an excellent opportunity to build brand recognition within the industry.
Sarah Roarty, whose new start up brewery N17 won a bronze medal for its Oatmeal Stout, shared her experience of the training she received through the Taste4Success Skillnet and its outcome. “I did the General Certificate in Brewing and also the two day course on Advanced Beer and one day course on How to Judge Beer...as a result of the training I then started my own business and won a medal for my stout out of 315 international beers judged for the ‘Dublin Cup’. I won the medal at the official launch of my beer range which was a wonderful and unexpected achievement.”
Four other graduates have also set up Irish breweries, with a potential high knock-on effect on employment. A recent study by economic experts Oxford Economics for the British Beer & Pub Association (BBPA) stated that one job in brewing generates one job in agriculture, one in the supply chain, one in retailing and 18 in pubs.
Pictured with Sara Breitenfeldt (centre), Beer Ireland, are Sarah Roarty, N17 Brewery, and Emma Devlin, Rascal’s Brewing, with the medals they won at the Dublin Craft Beer Cup.
This article was featured in our biannual newsletter (Skillnets News) in April 2014.
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