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DESIGN WHIPSMART Fresh from Fidelity, their inaug
ural craft beer festival, Whiplash is set to open its own brewery and has exciting plans for experimenting, collaborating and ensuring substance always pips scale in considerations. We speak to Alex Lawes, co-founder of Whiplash. words Richard Seabrooke – How and when did you get into the brewing game? What sparked the initial interest over another path? I think like a lot of people in craft I came to brewing from a home-brewing obsession. I was working as a bartender at the time and wanted to teach myself more about what was going into beers I was serving so I took the leap when I was 21 and bought a basic brewing set-up and began cooking up beer in the kitchen. The internet is an amazing place and there was a wealth of knowledge online between publications and forums that you could understand what went into it and get the confidence together to do it yourself. About four years later, I was brewing a few times a week at home still trying to improve all my processes and made the decision that this is what I wanted to be working at full time. – What made you interested in making beer as your own business over just enjoying it or making it for others? A lot of brewers dream of having their own operation I think in the same way that chefs want their own restaurant. If I lived in a city that had a great and diverse beer scene like Portland, San Diego, Copenhagen or even London I’d probably be happy working as a brewer for others. At a point, we felt that Dublin wasn’t going to become one of those places unless someone took the step and did it themselves, so we took the leap last year to try to make it happen. – How did Whiplash come about? Does the name have a particular meaning to you? Myself and my business partner Alan met while we were both working at the same brewery called Rye River out in Celbridge. We joked that we had a pain in our neck (hence the name) from moving so fast growing that business and making so much core beer, that we wanted to slow it down and produce some one-off beers to shake the market up a bit and introduce a bit more innovation into our work week. – What’s your vision for the brand and business, what sets you apart? January of 2018 was our first month doing Whiplash full time and we haven’t looked back since. We’re building our facility in Ballyfermot at the moment and, once all the equipment is in, we’ll be a team of ten people there designing, brewing, packaging and exporting our beers “with brewed in Dublin” written on every can. We’ve made the decision to set a maximum amount of beer we hope to produce there too and as a result will always remain a small independent brewery that, hopefully, Dubs can be proud of. 16