Beer History: Keily's Ale - St. Stephen's Brewery, Waterford

(Tweet-to-Blog-Conversion-Project)

Back in 2017 I posted a reply to an old photograph put up by Waterford History that showed a window of a pub in Waterford with a sign for Kiely's Pale Ale...

'Here's Keily's - 1865...'

(The Carlow Post - 1865)

My next Keily's post in that thread was this...

'...Here's another one from 1866...'

(The Carlow Post - 1866)

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As you can see from these advertisements, St. Stephen's brewed a wide range of ales ... East India Pale Ale, Strong & Mild Ales, Double (XX), Medium & Single Stouts (I'm assuming that these were porters and not just stout (strong) ales, which wouldn't make sense to my mind if categorised in this way?)

I've mentioned the brewery previously in a post about an exhibition in Cork in 1883, where they were then exhibiting an XXX Ale as well as their India Pale Ale (Brewed with malt from Perry's in Rathdowney, Laois.) and an XXX Stout...

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Last week I came across this nice write up about the brewery in the Munster Express from 1895, which originally came from the Irish Mineral Water Journal:

I'm unsure who the author of this passage was but they were seriously impressed by Keily's well hopped and flavoursome ale!

It's interesting to see how many of their comments echo similar points being made about our present beer revival, as to why we need to import so many foreign beers when we have such good ones here? I presume the answer is something to do with keeping breweries on their toes and giving a reference point as to how good is good? The same argument was, and is, given about food too, but surely without this foreign influx of different styles and products our own produce would be a lot less interesting and diverse, and our palates all the poorer too? (Having said all of that I do appreciate the sentiment of their tirade!)

And although I don't really know, I would think that when the time came for Keily's to finally stop brewing ,that foreign imports didn't play a huge part in that decision...

Part of my Tweet-to-Blog-Conversion-Project to give a slightly more permanent and expanded home to some of my previous Tweets.

(My original thread is here)

With thanks to my Local Library's Local Studies room.