O'Canada

In Ireland the beer market is dominated by a few big brands, which you tend to see in every pub you enter – Guinness, Smithwicks, Heineken, for example, are everywhere!

And when it comes to stout, Guinness certainly dominates supreme. However, it is worth noting a couple of nice offerings in the stout department, which are also Irish, though lesser known. One is Murphys, manufactured in Cork, and in that part of the world, Corkonians identify it as “the” stout. Beamish is another Irish stout, also hailing from Cork.

When it comes to microbreweries, Canada wins hands-down in the authors’ view. Microbrews in pubs are rarely found in Ireland, while in Canada they are common, and there is a huge amount of variety. The authors are most familiar with Ontario options, e.g. Steam Whistle, but Quebec, B.C., Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and many other parts have a fine selection to offer also. In Ireland there are a few pubs, like the Porterhouse Brewing Company in Dublin, that brew on premise, and sell food and microbrews on site, but microbrews simply don’t seem to have been allowed to penetrate the pubs in Ireland, and thus are a far rarer sight, than is the case in Canada.

This photo was taken in a pub in Castletownbere in Co. Cork, where Murphys is, simply put, "the official pint of us".	Shown here is a six pack of Steam Whistle, manufactured in Toronto, Ontario and seriously good beer! (Picture obtained on Google Images courtesty of a creative commons license).
Porterhouse Brewing Company is one of the few places you can go in Dublin if you want to enjoy a microbrew.	Moosehead, another fab tasting Canadian microbrew, manufactured in St. John, New Brunswick. (This picture courtesy of JcMaco's creative commons license on flickr)