Put ‘em Under Pressure — How Irish Beer Got Whiplash
Early one morning in October 2018, Alex Lawes travelled to Renmore Business Park in the Irish town of Kilcoole in Co. Wicklow. Several beers he had brewed were due gravity readings, dry hop additions, and temperature adjustments in the space he was renting.
On arrival, Alex wasn’t able to enter the facility. He had been locked out. Without the beer sitting in those tanks, and with no production facility of his own, Alex—having recently just given up his day job at Rye River Brewing to pursue his own dream—didn't know how he would be able to continue. He called a solicitor. Within days, Justice Caroline Costello was presiding over the matter in the High Court of Ireland.
Alex is the co-founder of Whiplash Beer, a company he started with co-owner Alan Wolfe as a “side project” in 2016. In 2019, Whiplash was voted as Brewery of the Year by the Irish beer consumer’s group, Beoir. In the same year, Whiplash became the first—and to date, only—Irish brewery invited to participate at the prestigious Mikkeller Beer Celebration in Copenhagen. In 2020, it was regarded as Ireland’s Best Brewery on rating sites Untappd and Ratebeer. Of Untappd’s 50 highest rated Irish beers today, 18 are brewed by Whiplash.
Its beers are varied—True Love Waits Pilsner, Sweetsmoke Rauch Wine, Bowsie Nitro Brown Ale—but the brewery is perhaps best known for its hoppy ales. One of their most popular core offerings is Body Riddle, an American-style pale ale hopped with Lemondrop, Galaxy, Simcoe, and Ekuanot. It pops with the brightness of lemon rind and passionfruit but offers subtle notes of pine in the background. Body Riddle has found an ardent following because of both its juicy flavours and its crushability. When ordering the beer in Dublin off-licences, regular drinkers of Whiplash ask for “Riddlers.”
But while several beer enthusiasts may already be familiar with Whiplash’s growing reputation, few know of the challenging personal journeys of those behind the brewery. The story of Whiplash is one of self-reflection and self-discovery. It’s about dealing with incalculable loss and learning to live with creative imperfection. And it’s about striving to play with the best, despite coming from a place which has not always permitted the confidence to dream.
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As a child in the early 90s, Alex Lawes would spend weekends at The Barn Owl pub on Dublin’s James’ Street listening to his father, Gerard, playing guitar and banjo in a band of traditional musicians that worked together at Guinness. Gerard had started at the St. James’ Gate Brewery as a messenger boy, before working as a drayman delivering kegs to pubs around Dublin. Alex wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps, not at Guinness, but as a musician.
When Alex was born in 1988, Ireland was one of the poorest countries in Western Europe, with severe poverty and high unemployment. It was once famously described as “Albania with brutal weather” by prominent Irish economist David McWilliams.
“Irish people just never really felt that we were on an equal footing with the rest of the world,” Alex tells me. His mother, Dympna, worked as a civil servant at Ireland’s Law Reform Commission and on those family outings to The Barn Owl and other pubs in Dublin’s suburbs—Inchicore, Ballyfermot, Cherry Orchard—she would keep Alex stocked in bottles of Club orange soda and packets of King crisps.
“Life was growing up in pubs,” he says. “The ‘auld fell playing music, and my mother enjoying it.”
One of the songs that became a soundtrack to Alex’s childhood and teenage years was the official 1990 World Cup song of Republic of Ireland’s national football team. Put ‘em Under Pressure was produced by U2’s Larry Mullen, and featured a haunting vocal introduction, a rousing rock riff, an emotive Uilleann pipes solo, and authoritative soundbites from manager Jack Charlton.
The song was written to celebrate the nation’s first ever qualification for the World Cup, but for decades since, it has come to represent a new-found confidence among Irish people in sport, business, and the creative industries. Alex heard it all the time throughout the 1990s, in pubs, and at festivals, sporting events, and parties. It was the Celtic Tiger. Ireland’s economy was booming. The world seemed more accessible. Irish people began talking openly about their ambitions. Young Alex Lawes sucked in every word.
Then in 2000, when Alex was just 12 years old, his mother died after being diagnosed with cancer. He moved with his father Gerard and his sister Eva to Celbridge, 20 kilometres east of Dublin, where his father had grown up. But it took him from the city to a small commuter town in Co. Kildare which he says was “pretty isolating”. Gerard stopped working at Guinness on the back of early retirement packages offered to employees shortly after Guinness merged with Grand Metropolitan to form Diageo.
In 2009, Alex began studying for a degree in English, Media and Cultural Studies at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, but to earn money, he also worked at the Storehouse at St. James's Gate, Guinness’ “brewery experience” centre. On one occasion, he was offered the opportunity to take part in a small batch brew. Guinness’ pilot brewing kits—1 hectolitre and 10 hectolitre [100 and 1000 litre respectively] systems—involved processes Lawes had not seen before: mash solids were separated from wort not through a traditional lauter tun, with its perforated floor, but using a mash filter, a large press which separates grain and wort using pressure and cloth filters.
Excited by both technical intricacy and creative spirit, he enquired about becoming a brewer at Guinness. “I was told that’s not really how it works,” he says. It was made clear that the path to a career in production at Guinness involved first attaining a postgraduate qualification in chemical engineering. Alex would have to find a different way to become a brewer.
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In July of 2009, as Alex was finding his feet in a new town, his father Gerard died of suicide.
Alex was granted personal leave by Guinness for a period of several months, and began searching for something to occupy his mind in an attempt to process the shock of his father’s death. He was drawn to homebrewing, perhaps because of Gerard’s history at Guinness, possibly because of his own experiences at St. James’s Gate, or maybe because homebrewing is an activity that tends to be all-consuming. For months in his Celbridge kitchen, he homebrewed alone, and he did so obsessively.
He started with a recipe for “Cincinnati Pale Ale” from John Palmer’s seminal book How to Brew, then a clone recipe for Anchor Steam he found on the internet. When he stumbled across an online forum for homebrewers posting hundreds of recipes for beers, he became infatuated.
“I realised it's just something in my head,” he says. “If I want to do something, I have to know everything about it before I move on.”
Alex dropped out of university and started going to homebrew club meetings, getting involved in brewing projects with other hobbyists, including Declan Nixon of Otterbank Brewing and Blending, now based in Co. Donegal, and the beers for Brewtonic, the drinks arm of Dublin’s Bodytonic events company.
In so many parts of his life, he had lost control. Perhaps with his own business, he thought, he could shape something the way he wanted. He decided to establish his own brewing project, one he would call “White Label” after the mysterious underground music records his father had passed to him, the producers of which remained unknown. He liked the idea of anonymous beer that stood on its own merits. But then he heard of a job opening for a production brewer at Rye River Brewing in Celbridge, the town where he was living at the time, and where his father had grown up.
In August 2014, Alex met Alan Wolfe, a manager at Rye River who had also previously worked at Guinness. Alex explained how he had plans to start up his own project and told Alan that he would be happy to commit to Rye River for one year if they could remove the non-compete clause from his employment contract. Alan appreciated the honesty and admired the ambition, agreeing to the amendment.
It was the beginning of a close friendship. They travelled to beer festivals around the world together. When they went to Mikkeller’s Copenhagen Beer Celebration, they chatted to brewers from all over Europe. The pair joked that if they were ever invited to pour at the festival, they’d retire.
“You get these people once every now and again that can transform a business without even realising they're doing it,” Alan says. “Alex was just a shining light of unfaltering fucking standards. I was like, if I get this guy for a year and I fine-tune some of the shit we do, we’re gonna benefit from that, and he’ll get a bit of experience.”
When Alex signed on he was an inexperienced brewer committing to shift work in a production role. Within a year, he was committing to staying on at Rye River, only this time, as head brewer.
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During Alex’s time at Rye River, the team grew in morale and dramatically improved its beer quality. Rye River was recognised at the Dublin Beer Cup, US Beer Open, International Beer Challenge, World Beer Awards, and the Brussels Beer Challenge. When Alex started, Rye River was producing 3,000 HL per year. Within two years under his stewardship as head brewer, it reached nearly 23,000 HL per year on a 2,500L kit, hitting 8 brews a day.
“It was soul-destroying,” Alan tells me. “The pace was horrific.” The production team was moving at such a break-neck speed that the friends joked they had a pain in their neck; Rye River had given them Whiplash.
In the meantime, Alex had lodged an application to trademark the name “White Label” for his own project, but very quickly a solicitor representing Bacardi—who held the trademark on the name for spirits—informed him that the multinational brand would fight the application. Alex hadn’t even started his project yet, and he was being threatened by lawyers. He decided to drop the application and start afresh. But this time, he would ask for help.
Alex approached Alan—an experienced commercial operator who had worked in various roles at Guinness and then Molson Coors—to see if he wanted to get on board with the side project. Travel in Alan’s previous roles had opened his eyes to the changing beer market around the world, but it had also taken its toll. Alan has four children, his most recent born last year.
“I didn’t see the first three of them,” Alan says. He had taken the role at Rye River, one which combined European Strategy and Commercial Management and Sales, because he wanted a change. “I was sick of corporate. It’s soulless and lifeless. Not necessarily the individuals, just the nature of that business. Traditional shareholders have to have value. There’s no long term strategy.”
When Alex asked him to be involved, Alan tentatively said yes, with the condition that if things got too busy at Rye River, then he would have to step out.
That year, Whiplash released their first two beers: Scaldy Porter, which is all chocolate and liquorice and toffee, with a back end roasty bite; and a double IPA called Surrender to the Void which displayed the vivid patchwork of fruit notes from its Citra, Mosaic, and Columbus hop additions. They released another three beers in 2016. By April 2017, demand was such that they were releasing three beers a month. Purchases from Whiplash became known in Dublin as a “Big Huge Bag of Cans”, Irish slang for a plastic bag packed to the brim with beer or cider, usually for outside consumption.
The Whiplash beers quickly assumed a strong visual identity thanks to designer and photographer, Sophie De Vere, who grew up in England but now lives in Dublin. Alex wanted the branding to look like the covers of old records his father had shared with him. Sophie understood the creative intention and delivered with aplomb. Her style has a bold, nostalgic vibe, based on “analogue” collage, mixing quirky centrefold cut-outs of satirical Irish magazines with original mixed media compositions.
“We wanted it to look like a record,” she told AJ Kierans on the 16oz Canvas Podcast. “Or a piece of art.”
Whiplash soon became too big to manage as a side project. Alan left Rye River in June 2017 to work full-time on establishing a distribution channel for the Whiplash beers. Alex followed in December 2017.
“We’re shitting it,’” Alex wrote in a blog post at the time. “We’re excited. But we’re shitting it.”
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Without a facility of their own, Alex began brewing Whiplash beers in a range of different facilities, choosing different brewing systems for their suitability to particular beers.
They travelled to the Swiss Alps, where their friend Chris Treanor and former head brewer at Galway Bay Brewery, had been involved in the start-up of WhiteFrontier Brewery. The Braukon kit there was well-positioned to reduce issues such as DMS [Dimethyl sulfide, a compound responsible for a cooked corn aroma, typically in lagers] in their kettle, and so Alex would fly over and take the train down along Lake Geneva to the skiing resorts of Martigny to brew lagers such as their German-style Pilsner, Blue Ghosts.
He would take a red-eye Ryanair flight from Dublin to Gatwick to brew with Gypsy Hill in South London, getting in and out of the English Capital in one day. In Ireland, he brewed at Dundalk Bay Brewing Company in Co. Louth, a subsidiary of stainless steel fabricators Spectac International, and in Co. Wicklow at The Dublin Lager Company who were trading as Larkin’s Brewing Company.
It was an intense period for Alex, who had given up the security of his job to lead what was effectively a nomadic life. He was up most days before dawn to catch 6am flights, working long hours, brewing two batches per day to maximise his visits. He would be working at three different facilities in the space of a week. He learned the opening patterns for the airport car park off-by-heart, became adept at identifying which queues were the fastest through security, and discovered the best spots to plug in his laptop at the departure gates. He wasn’t eating well, and not getting enough sleep, sometimes just two hours a night if he had to deal with issues in the brewhouse.
“My health dropped through the floor,” says Alex. But he had to keep going to make the finances work. In his bag, he carried extra clothes, some brewery textbooks, and a laptop on which he started speccing out his own brewery.
At the time, Whiplash was selling its beer through wine wholesaler Cassidy’s but it was inevitable that they would need a distribution partner in beer. Through a mutual friend in the beer industry, Alan was connected with Paul Maher of Four Corners, one of Ireland’s specialist beer wholesalers. Paul had worked in Irish beer long before independent breweries started coming online with US-inspired, hop forward ales.
Paul had actually been holding back on taking new brands into the Four Corners portfolio. He was especially sceptical about those without their own facility as he felt there were parties investing in breweries with “quick buck” motivations. However, within a few minutes of tasting Whiplash’s beers and eyeing up its can art, his mind was made up.
“I saw Alan’s absolute passion for what he was trying to do and where he was trying to get to,” says Paul. “It was clear that this brand was going to be something special.”
Paul and Alan agreed that Whiplash would transition to Four Corners as their main distributor in Ireland. Both parties now had to deliver.
And then, on that early morning in October 2018, Alex Lawes discovered he had been locked out of Larkin’s brewery at the Renmore Business Park in Kilcoole where Whiplash beers were due attention in tank space they were renting from Larkin’s. According to reports of the dispute in the national media, Larkin's accused Alex of being a bully, an accusation which he denied. The matter went to Court, and both parties waited for a decision.
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The lock-out dispute underscored to Whiplash the importance of securing their own physical brewery. Alex re-focused on designing a brewhouse. It would be small—a five hectolitre capacity—to allow flexibility and experimentation but engineered to be one of the highest specification breweries in Ireland. Features inlcuded a widened whirlpool with a three-to-one ratio that would not only allow bigger hop additions, but also multiple temperature stands.
“We want to flash off more volatile compounds in hops at different temperatures,” says Alex, who believes this process maximises oil extraction and enhances the shelf stability of hop flavours.
Another major engineering decision was to forgo a traditional lauter tun and opt for a mash filter, the large press he had seen in those early days on the Guinness pilot kit. The mash filter would reduce the level of polyphenols extracted from the grains and therefore minimise potential hop burn from heavy dry-hops. It would also allow them to work more efficiently with high proportions of flaked cereals such as barley, wheat, and oats—key ingredients in the production of New England styles.
When the bespoke kit arrived, Alex and Alan tentatively tried the mash filter with a mash of 100% malted rye—a notoriously gelatinous, and difficult to work with grain—to see if it could cope. The wort that came out had the consistency of caramel and looked like the slimy ectoplasm from Ghostbusters.
“It freaked everyone out in the brewery,” Alex says. “We were laughing and pouring it over our hands.” But the viscous wort fermented. The mash filter worked like a dream.
At the High Court of Ireland in October 2018, the Judge recommended that the lock-out matter should go to mediation, and eventually, Whiplash and Larkin’s reached a settlement. The case was struck out. No details of the settlement were made public. When asked to comment for the purposes of this article, both Whiplash and Larkins declined to comment on the outcome. But both breweries were on the rise. Larkin’s was named by Ratebeer as Ireland’s best new brewery in February 2020, and its Morrigan imperial stout is one of the top-rated Irish beers on Untappd. In particular, Larkin’s has garnered a strong reputation for their Lagers, as well as for a Single Hop series of beers they released during 2020.
With the legal proceedings behind them, Whiplash began brewing and packaging from its own facility in the Cherry Orchard area of Dublin one year later, on the 4th November 2019. It immediately began pushing the new brewery system Alex had designed, brewing up to six times a day and recruiting ten staff; nine directly in production and one part-time on marketing and social media tasks. Not only were Alex and Alan fully in control of all processes from raw materials to packaging and storage, but it slowed the pace of their demanding nomadic lifestyles.
“Everything's here,” Alex says of the new premises. “It's been transformational coming to work in the one place every day.”
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In Copenhagen to pour at the 2019 Mikkeller Beer Celebration, the occasion meant so much to Alex and Alan that they went out in the city the night before the festival and somewhat over-indulged. They were found the next morning at 7am drinking red wine in the hotel lobby, shoes and socks discarded, Alan hunching over to vomit. It was the first day of a five-day festival and Whiplash was due to start pouring at 9am. “We had the time of our lives,” Alan says.
To celebrate the opening of their new brewery and to bring their international brewing colleagues to Ireland, they decided to organise their own beer festival in collaboration with The Big Romance vinyl bar. It took place on 13 July 2019 at the Mansion House in Dublin.
Fidelity Beer Festival put Irish breweries such as Rascal’s, Boundary, and Yellowbelly alongside some of modern beer’s most high profile international breweries. Other Half and Jackie O’s travelled from the United States. The UK contingent included Wylam, Northern Monk, and Deya. Mikkeller and To Øl travelled from Denmark; Lervig from Norway; Beerbliotek from Sweden; Garage from Spain; and Puhaste from Estonia. Even the Mayor of Dublin, Paul McAuliffe, attended in an official capacity. The all-in ticketed event was a sell-out.
Towards the end of the festival, Alex asked the DJ, Steve Manning to play “Put ‘em Under Pressure.” Moya Brennan’s haunting vocal introduction created an audible ruffle of anticipation amongst attendees, one of whom was Paul Maher of Four Corners. An authoritative soundbite from 1990 Irish football manager Jack Charlton interrupted the track, before the juicy, hard-rock guitar riff, performed in one-take by Anto Drennan, blasted the song into its familiar rock pop groove. The Irish crowd at the festival went crazy, taking off their shirts, dancing on tables, and grabbing each other in hugs and embraces.
Paul had been involved in the Irish beer industry for decades, and had been attending events like Mikkeller’s Craft Beer Celebration for years. Here he was now, at a successful Irish beer festival that had attracted some of the best talent in modern beer from around the world. Four Corners had assisted air freighting in some of the beers from the US, and had helped with the logistics. He was tired and emotional when the crowd bounced and jumped and hugged and sang that they were all part of Jackie’s Army. All of a sudden, as the crescendo of the day’s energy culminated in the chorus—"Olé Olé Olé" set to the tune of “God Save Ireland”—tears began to flow down his cheeks.
“It was just the emotion of the whole thing,” he says. “It was phenomenal. This just shows who Whiplash are.”
Visiting brewers came up to Alex Lawes to ask him about the track that had caused such bedlam amongst the Irish attendees. “Nobody thought we were going to win,” Alex explained of the song’s significance. “What changed is we were good enough to compete.”