David Walsh-Kemmis, the owner of Ballykilcavan Brewery in Stradbally, has complained about not being able to sell his beers at the Electric Picnic
The choice for Electric Picnic goers was Heineken products, which has been an “official partner” of the festival for many years. To paraphrase Henry Ford, you can have any beer at Electric Picnic as long as its from the Heineken portfolio, which includes Heineken, Heineken 0.0, Birra Moretti, Orchard Thieves and Murphy’s stout. If you like craft beer, you are out of luck.
“I have to stand over the quality of our beer,” he says. “You spend years building up a business and then somebody comes in with a big platform, a lot of power and says he doesn’t like the beer. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t supply all of Electric Picnic. A concession with three or four beer lines would be enough, he states. “If we got 1 per cent of sales of Electric Picnic, I’d retire. It would be huge for us,” he says.
The David v Goliath nature of the tiny microbrewery against the big festival is a microcosm of the problems small craft beer brewers and distilleries have against the two biggest players in the Irish market, Diageo and Heineken. A Bord Bia report last year demonstrated that consumption of beer had fallen 2.1 per cent since 2017, but Irish craft beer sales climbed 13.5 per cent over the same period.
“It was a massive blunder to take up more space in pubs when every Irish brewery has at least one stout,” says Mr Donnelly. “Nobody was drinking it. Publicans couldn’t give away free kegs.” One pub in Cork had 19 of 21 taps from the same beer company. How could that be, he asked. A subsidiary of Heineken had been fined in Greece “in the tens of millions” for anticompetitive practices. Such practices should be investigated more vigorously in Ireland, he suggested.The Independent Craft Brewers of Ireland has set up a working group on anticompetitive practices headed by Richard Siberry of Black Donkey Brewing.