It’s all about the beer

Brewbot on the Ormeau Road in Belfast is the first craft-beer only brewpub in Northern Ireland. It’s also the Belfast headquarters of the design team behind the latest high-tech development in home-brewing hardware.

Many readers will already be familiar with Brewbot – a thriving, craft beer-only brewpub which opened its doors in June on the Ormeau Road in Belfast.

Brewbot, however, is only one element of a much larger and more intriguing business proposition.

Funded via Kickstarter in 2013 and developed by a Belfast-based team led by Chris McClelland, Brewbot is, in fact, an innovative robot brewery that can be controlled and monitored using a smartphone app. The software allows users to create, tweak or download new recipes and the hardware provides the perfect environment for do-it-yourself brewing.

The eponymous bar on the Ormeau Road is a Mecca for lovers of real ale and a useful platform for the considerable abilities of the fledgling Brewbot. Offering 250 beers from all over the world and serving craft beer from 10 rotating draught taps, Brewbot makes its intentions clear to patrons from the very outset.

“The only time that spirits are served here is when we make a beer cocktail,” bar manager, Gary Moran, explains to LCN.

It’s surely music to the ears of the craft beer crowd who, for long enough, have bemoaned the stranglehold they claim that the big breweries have maintained on local beer taps. The Brewbot team was able to secure Diageo’s support for its local operation by dedicating two draught pumps to its Dublin Porter and Hop House 13 products. And it’s an arrangement that Gary Moran says is becoming more common in bars around the city:

“I think the big producers are beginning to realise that people want variety and they want to be offered beers that have been sourced from somewhere else,” he adds. “The public certainly love what we’re doing here. They love that we’re bringing in all these different types of beers that aren’t easily sourced anywhere else in NI.

“They’ve had a limited range available to them for many years and the problem has been the distribution links. Now, however, because more people are looking for these products, we’re able to order pallets of beer and suppliers are willing to send them, so distribution links are growing.”

Currently, Brewbot is stocking a range of beers from countries all over the globe, particularly the United States, Canada, and Germany, not to mention a considerable number of British and Irish beers too, of course.

Brewbot only ever orders two kegs of any beer, ensuring a constantly rotating offering and some very satisfied customers:

“The big thing at the minute is sour beers,” says Gary. “These are sourced from the US and they are brewed in batches so small that they can be difficult to source outside the state in which they’re brewed. We are able to source them, however, and they are going down very well in Belfast.”

He describes the local reaction to Brewbot since it opened in June as “incredible”:

“We did think before we started that it might be difficult in the location that we’re in, there have been so many bars on this site in the last four or five years,” he adds. “But we are offering something different, it’s an experience and an education in an environment that’s perfect.

“We’re perfectly happy to spend time and allow the customers to try the beers. We offer tasting flights and we will take as much time as needed to help customers find the perfect beer, even if we’re busy. We believe that there’s a beer for everyone, some people just haven’t found theirs yet.”

There are no televisions or live music available at the venue. Instead, patrons are encouraged to enjoy their drinks, talk with each other and order from a versatile food menu that’s perfect with beer, including sandwiches, wraps and meat and cheese boards.

Currently, beer is brewed upstairs at the venue and then offered for sale downstairs. They never brew the same type of beer twice and according to Gary, “they can’t keep it in the taps”. They have produced between 20 and 30 different types of beer in the last eight months or so.

“It’s all from our own recipes and brewed by the staff here,” adds Gary. “Most of them are recipes that will be available in the Brewbot.”

As for the Brewbot itself, it will launch later this year. Designed and built upstairs at the Ormeau Road bar, the machine can brew 25 litres of beer at a time. The Brewbot team has collated a repertoire of around 80 beer recipes – more than 40 breweries submitted their recipes for inclusion including Irish producers such as Galway Bay and Boundary and world breweries such as Stone, Brooklyn Brewery and Russian River. Brewbot will launch with 30 of the best recipes on-board.

The long-term goal of the Belfast team behind the project is to see Brewbot become the largest distributed brewery with 7,500 units across the world. The Belfast Brewbot is the only outlet at present but a second bar is planned for San Francisco, where the development team is spending an increasing amount of time as they refine the technology behind the system.