Porterhouse lines up events for visitor centre at new brewery

THE Porterhouse Group is targeting the events market as the opening of its new brewery in Glasnevin in Dublin draws near.

The group is planning to open a visitor centre at the property next year.

Business development director Elliot Hughes said the project was first mooted around 15 years ago but was delayed as resources began to be diverted into the company’s Dingle distillery, which makes Dingle Gin.

The Glasnevin brewery will allow the company to increase production as it seeks to grow export sales.

The visitor centre will “probably be primarily events-focused”, Hughes said. The property is located near the Broombridge stop on the newly opened Luas line.

“We’re not going to get people queuing up at 10, 11, 12 o’clock in the morning like you do in the Guinness Storehouse... we don’t have the passing trade.

“What we do have is we do have a Luas line that will bring people to corporate events, that will bring people to a gig that we might be doing on a Friday evening, it’ll bring people in groups rather than individually.”

Hughes said around 95pc of the company’s business is done in Ireland and that it has recently hired someone to focus on growing the export business. The company has pubs in New York and London.

It has recently begun an investment drive via the Employment and Investment Incentive Scheme. “We plan to double our production of spirits next year and expand aggressively in the North American market. We also have advanced plans to develop a state-of-the-art visitor centre at the distillery in Dingle,” said Hughes.

“The investment will allow us to rapidly scale up our production capacity by several orders of magnitude to meet the enormous international market demand for our gin, whiskey and vodka brands,” he added.

Hughes’s father Oliver was one of the founders of the Porterhouse and a key figure in the business until he died last year.

Hughes, who started working in the business at events when he was still in school, said the company, which has a number of bars in Dublin, will aim to push its products into other bars around the capital.

Asked whether it may prove difficult to get rival pubs to take their products, Hughes said he believes pubs are happier to support local brands than they were 10 or 15 years ago.

“For me I’d hope people are happier to support Elliot and Liam (LaHart — Porterhouse’s managing director) down the road than they are to support a multinational,” he said.