100 YEAR OLD BEER?
Billy will be on the Ray D’Arcy tomorrow morning talking about and sampling what he hopes is a 100 year old beer – tune in around 10.30am. Story: A 19th or early 20th century brown glass bottle was found in Curracloe, Co Wexford a few weeks ago. It was washed up at the Raven’s Point, […]
IRELAND’S PATRON SAINT OF BEER
Today marks the festival day of Imbolc, a pagan Gaelic festival celebrating the beginning of Spring. The date has been Christianised as the feast day of St. Bridget, one of Irelands better known Saints, who has inherited much of the folklore associated with the Goddess Brigid. The word Imbolc probably derives from the Irish ‘i […]
NEW PORTO-FULACHT
Just taken delivery of our new free standing, distressed beech mini fulacht for use at #Inishfood in two weeks, and for future events. Des Burke & Tony O’Reilly of Freeform in Headford constructed it and we tested it yesterday – it’s a great piece of work and we’re looking forward to giving it it’s first run out […]
BREWDAY BOTTLING
Yesterday Billy and I bottled out first keggery beer. It’s a basic beer with some added cascade hops, bog myrtle and yarrow using an american ale yeast, and, of course, some hot rocks. We also had a little early morning taste. The bog myrtle was surprisingly overpowering. We had thought that the hops would balance […]
Inishfood
Here’s a few pic’s of last weekends brewday in preparation for the Inishfood festival in Donegal later this month. Saturday was the first use of our Keggery/Keggle brewery and the first time we’ve used hops, so we’ve moved forward in brewing history by about 3000 years.. Still using hot rocks in the kettle so we’ll […]
THE OXFORD COMPANION TO BEER
The beer swilling blogeratti are in the throes of some rather vigorous debates online about the recently published ‘Oxford Companion to Beer’ with two distinct points of view emerging about beer writing in general, and particularly the approach to the history of beer (see here for Nazi’s, here for Pete Brown’s view, here for a […]
EARLY IRISH ALE 2
Continuing our series of old posts (to mark our 10th year in business), ones we feel were good, prescient or elicited some good conversation or debate, this post was first published in February 2008. Continuing our research on ancient beer, Declan spent a long evening reading and searching the Annals of the Four Masters for […]
EXPERIMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY SEMINAR UCD
Experimental Archaeology in Northwest Europe: Principles and Potential Declan, Billy and Nigel will be presenting on Friday in UCD at 2ish as part of a Seminar on Experimental Archaeology. Here’s the outline from UCD: Experimental Archaeology has recently re-emerged as an approach enabling us to think about the past in practical ways, while it also […]
OKTOBERFEST
Given that Moore Group has now survived ten years, and we’ve been blogging 4 years, we thought we’d share a ‘best of the blog’. Over the next few weeks we’ll post some of the better (in our mind) posts from the past few years. Our first blog post was in August 2007 and the count […]
HOT ROCK BREW IN OKLAHOMA
Thanks to Merryn Dineley for pointing this one out to us.. Some Oklahoman (is that what you call people from Oklahoma?) home brewers have embraced Fulacht Fiadh brewing techniques – and added their own modern twists. But the basic technique remains the same.
IRISH HOSPITALITY
For those of you who have always wondered what Ireland was like for the early Christian inhabitants of the place, and let’s face it, we all have at some stage, here’s a slightly distilled version of P.W. Joyce’s excellent introduction to his (1905) “A Smaller Social History of Ireland” available in full on the interweb here. […]
FULACHT BEER PRESENTATION
Two years ago Billy and I (Declan) gave a presentation at the National Roads Authority’s annual archaeology seminar about the fulacht beer theory. Now that I’ve figured out how to post VIMEO videos to wordpress – here’s a video of the presentation… Note the Erratum: Dr. Patrick McGovern, sometimes referred to as the Indiana Jones […]
How to make a ‘Viking’ Ale in 4 easy steps
Here’s a short comic we made about how to make the ‘Viking’ Ale, which has been reported widely on, to our surprise.. (see here, here, here and here). We spent Sunday bottling and experimenting with another variation (which didn’t quite succeed – more on that some other time). Our ‘Viking Ale’ has turned out to […]
EEA Beer Session & a wee competition
We were briefly excited by the news of an alcohol and beer session at the upcoming European Association of Archaeologists conference in September. Here’s the session description with a ‘find and replace’ done. See if you can spot the difference. The original is here. During the last twenty years the anthropology of formica table top […]
Reinventing the wheel
Paul Rondelez in Cork drew our attention to a paper from the Journal of the Royal Historical and Archaeological Association of Ireland from 1886 which spoke to us through the centuries. A kindred spirit and direct descendent of Daniel O’Connell, one Gabriel Redmond M.D., musing on the function of Fulachta Fiadh in the aforementioned paper, posited […]
Naked drunken fat ladies?
Here’s a slide from tonights presentation to the GMIT Heritage Society. We’ll be presenting a talk on the beer experiment and Fulachta Fiadh at 7pm tonight in Rm. 940. We’ve been busy reading Pat McGovern’s ‘Uncorking the past’ which is where we encountered the Laussel Venus pictured here. Pat posits a paleolithic origin to alcohol making and […]
Comments on the beer at YouTube
To date there have been 10, 650 views of the fulacht video on YouTube (produced by BigYes). Later this week we’ll be attending the launch of ‘Dining and Dwelling’ – the 6th monograph in the NRA monograph series, which will see the formal publication of our beer theory. Here’s a flavour of the comments from […]
Ancient Egyptian Barley
Via our daily Google Alert email we learned of some interesting research into ancient barley at the University of Warwick, where ‘boffins’ have recovered significant DNA information ‘from a lost form of ancient barley that triumphed for over 3000 years seeing off: 5 changes in civilisation, water shortages and a much more popular form of […]
ICB Beer of the Year 2009
Congratulations to Aidan and Ronan at Galway Hooker on being awarded ICB Beer of the Year 2009. From the Irish Craft Brewers website: “Galway Hooker has featured in the ICB awards since their inception in 2007. This year it returns to its place as Ireland’s supreme champion, as voted by the drinkers. Members of Irish […]
Beer
This arrived to us via Max Nelson in Canada – we made the January/February edition of ‘Beer’ Magazine – The USA’s ‘Newsstands #1 selling Beer Magazine‘. Thanks Max… Here’s a gratuitous scan of the Cover Girl: Here’s a snippet of the editorial from Beer ‘History 201’ – ‘The Luck of the Irish’: And a lovely […]
