PET peeve alert. When a shop assistant is asking you if you want to use contactless payment, they say ‘tap or swipe’. I’m sorry, but contactless payment doesn’t require me to tap the wee terminal: just hovering the bit of plastic over it will do the trick. However, the same action is no good for extracting beer from a keg – that's the occasion when it’s OK to ‘tap’.
That’s what will be happening in a number of breweries here over the next couple of months, and which happens on a regular basis down south.
While local craft brewers can be frequently frustrated at getting their beer into pubs as the macros ramp up their efforts to muscle them out with a combination of incentives for pub owners and their own, ahem, ‘craft’ lines, a taproom is the purest way for a brewer to get their product from their brewery to the mouths of their punters.
Though not a new thing here, with co-operative brewery Boundary holding regular taprooms, they are becoming more frequent as more brewers try and cut out the middle man (and frustratingly restrictive local legislation) to bring their beer to those who want it most.
Farmageddon dipped their toe – not literally thankfully – into the taproom world in February when they pulled their beers at Knockout’s premises. The Menagerie on University Street in Belfast is the venue for their Easter taproom, which kicks off on Good Friday and runs over the Easter weekend.
Boundary have their regular taproom the following weekend while their May taproom coincides with the brewery’s fourth birthday and they’ve invited a couple of friends in the form of Manchester beer giants Cloudwater and western wizards Galway Bay for a birthday bash across the weekend of May 17 to 19, with the Saturday celebrations taking place in The Sunflower bar in Belfast.
The thing about taproom events here is that breweries have to apply for temporary licences for them and abide by pretty strict guidelines. Beer drinkers in the north are poorly served in this regard, another thing to thank the mothballed assembly for.
In Britain, craft brewers can serve their beer on site and thanks to a bill which passed through the Dail last year, so too can brewers in the south.
Local brewers like Boundary, Farmageddon and Lacada in Portrush are fighting the good fight and meeting demand, but taprooms here are far too few and far between.
