Brewing in the hills of Donegal
Rick LeVert, managing director and head brewer of Kinnegar Brewing
Kinnegar Brewing is an Irish brewery located in Co Donegal, run by husband and wife duo, Rick LeVert and Libby Carton. From the very early days of brewing on Libby’s family farm by the beach in Donegal, Kinnegar Brewing has grown steadily to become the third largest independent brewery on the island in terms of output. Last year they produced 1.5 million litres of beer from their K2 Brewery in Letterkenny and grew turnover from €2.5m in 2020 to €4.3m in 2024. In fact, every year since year one, 13 years ago, they have made a profit and used that profit to expand the business.
To succeed as a brewery in Ireland today, Rick is adamant that you have to be able to do it all. You can’t just have a great brand or marketing campaign, or one or two great products or even huge distribution. It’s about having the complete package in order to survive, compete and most importantly grow. For Kinnegar, they are acutely aware that generations are changing and breweries in Ireland need to find ways to adapt. From low and no, IPAs, fruited beers and light flavoured sours, to their newest launch Jackrabbit – a premium Irish ginger beer – Kinnegar is constantly running trials and innovating.
Designer to brewer
Last year Kinnegar Brewing produced 1.5 million litres of beer from their K2 Brewery in Letterkenny
Kinnegar Brewing was created from, dare I say it, nothing. Neither Rick nor Libby had a background in drinks production. Libby studied visual communications in NCAD and Rick was working for a number of years in the design industry in the States and Germany.
“We actually started our own office back in the 1990s in Germany,” Rick reveals. “We shifted the design studio to Dublin and we eventually moved to Donegal. My primary degree is in economics and I have a Masters in Film and then I did a Master’s in Visual Communications as well.”
The couple currently reside in Rathmullen about 20 minutes north of where the brewery is in Letterkenny. After living quite a cosmopolitan life, you imagine that relocating to Donegal would amount to a slower pace but Rick assures us that this is not the case. “People think it’s a slow pace of life but in business, it’s the same as anywhere else and just as pressurised. There are probably fewer distractions in Donegal as opposed to life in a city. You’re pretty shattered from work so we tend to shut down for the weekends and there aren’t as many social distractions as there might be in a city so we take that as a positive. We certainly didn’t notice the first few months of the Pandemic as we didn’t see that big a difference in our social lives,” he laughs.
So what led to this life-changing idea of becoming brewers? “There wasn’t an epiphany moment,” Rick assures us. “I hate to sound flippant about it but my interest in beer originally came from drinking beer. We were in the States at the start of the craft beer movement and we saw things changing there. We were exposed to different styles of beers and different flavours and became more interested in that.
“When we were here in the early 2000s, we found that the beer landscape was not that exciting and the beers that were here weren’t particularly good, except for Guinness, which we both enjoy a pint of. The exposure to beer, coupled with curiosity and the fact that I was tiring with design meant I was starting to look at what the next stage of my career would bring. I couldn’t see myself in design for another 20 years.”
He believes that there is a strong correlation between design and brewing, as a lot of it comes down to problem-solving. “In the brewery it’s a constant process of troubleshooting, trying to figure out ways of adjusting and optimising. There’s a big overlap between the two. In the end curiosity led us to build our own brewery,” he says.
From the ground up
The biggest selling SKU is Skraggy Bay and accounts for 30% of what they produce. There are four other SKUs that are providing really good support for Skraggy Bay including Rust Bucket and Big Bunny
They started with a pilot activity in an outbuilding where they were living in Rathmullen by setting up a 50 litre facility where they learned how to brew. “We weren’t home brewers. We saw it in a way of developing skills and learning what beer was about and developing our own recipes and that ran over a two-year period but we were actually registered with Revenue and the HSC so it was a fully certified facility.”
Demonstrating how their original operation was particularly small, Rick recalls how Revenue were taken aback by the set up during their first audit. “It was quite funny when the Revenue officers came out and they weren’t that used to dealing with alcohol facilities, as there weren’t too many breweries in the country. Four of them came out and we had to take them into the facility one at a time because it wasn’t big enough to hold them all. They laughed about it as well. It was very small scale.”
Parallel to the piloting activity, Rick went off to Berlin to undertake a course on brewing science and technology in the Technical University there and subsequently travelled to the Centre of Brewing at the University of California to give him a broader understanding of brewing and beer production. From there, they were able to plan the leap from a pilot facility to a commercial facility over a two year period increasing production from 50 litres to 1,000 litres. They used a couple of beta testers in Dublin and Donegal, as a way to get feedback from the market and they incorporated that feedback at the next stages of production.
Craft beer is no more
There is a movement at present from the Independent Brewers of Ireland, of which Libby is the chairperson, to try to move away from the term craft beer. We asked Rick what was behind this change in the industry. He says that they have never publicised themselves as a craft brewery and that the term has become obsolete. “The reason we avoided craft is because for anyone that comes into our facility will see it’s a fairly high tech place,” he explains. “Craft tends to go with artisan. What you find in our brewery, is exactly what you would find in St James Gate. There’s a much higher level of automation in St James Gate but there’s not much of a gap between what they do and what we do in terms of scale.”
He says that craft is really a meaningless term especially since the bigger breweries started developing craft ranges by following the emerging trends. “A lot of the big macro breweries saw where the industry was going, and they were a little bit nervous about all these small guys popping up and so many of them started developing these sole craft ranges so suddenly there was this beer being made by a big international brewery but they are selling it as a craft beer and the consumer doesn’t really know what craft means so it’s a meaningless term.”
“Craft beer became an elitist term and the beers were very high in alcohol. It was a fad or a trend. There is nothing trend like about what we are doing,” he clearly states.
Trade and tariffs
Kinnegar’s latest addition is a ginger beer called Jackrabbit
Regarding the trade tariffs from the US, Rick is not overly concerned because they have never pursued the American market and don’t export anything to the United States at present. Even with their first commercial brewery they couldn’t meet the demands of their product on the island of Ireland so it made no sense for them to pursue export at all. “We didn’t have the capacity to engage in export. And then when we opened up the new facility in 2017, just after the Brexit referendum, and had some extra capacity where we could look into exporting and we thought that the EU is our natural back garden so to speak so we’ve always concentrated on export in the EU so that is France, Spain, Italy and Holland. Exporting to the EU is relatively seamless and there is a centralised duty system and so it makes sense for us. That said, we see ourselves as a domestic brewery and 90% of our product is sold on the island of Ireland.
Breaking it down, 80% of their product is consumed in the Republic, 10% in Northern Ireland and 10% to Europe. “There is some scope to grow that export market and we will start looking at the British market as there are some opportunities we see there but first and foremost we are a domestic brewery. Our customer base is across Ireland,” he says.
He says that brewing is a hard business with tight margins and if you can’t manufacture efficiently, it doesn’t matter how good your beer is as your business won’t survive. His background in economics has helped them stay out of debt even when costs were spiralling as they looked for savings internally and financed growth from profits rather than loans. “Our growth has been in manageable chunks. We didn’t overburden the company with debt. We finance our growth out of our operation profits,” he explains.
Varied range
Kinnegar has 12 products in the core range with a lot of diversity throughout this range. The biggest selling SKU is Skraggy Bay and accounts for 30% of what they produce. There are four other SKUs that are providing really good support for Skraggy Bay including Rust Bucket and Big Bunny.
Their newest addition is a ginger beer called Jackrabbit and that has taken off quite quickly. “We quietly launched it [Jackrabbit] last year but officially released it within the past month. It’s really picking up some traction and accounting for 10% of our output this year already.” Jackrabbit is 4% ABV and can be drank neat, on ice or as a cocktail mixer and is meeting the needs of changing taste profiles. They are also developing a non-alcoholic product but it has not been released yet so watch this space.
Lifestyle
Being a brewer has changed Rick and Libby’s lives in so many ways. One of them is how Rick socialises and relaxes. “If we go on holidays, I don’t drink beer as it’s a way to shut the brain down a little bit. If I’m drinking wine, I’m not thinking about the aspects of the wine so I can enjoy that!”
It’s evident from speaking to Rick that he is very passionate about brewing and it’s clear that he has found something that he is very good at and has dedicated his life to it. “My tastebuds have changed as my knowledge has changed. It’s enjoyable in a cerebral level. I love what I do and I especially enjoy talking with colleagues over different styles of beer or changes in hops compared to last year. The learning process never ends so that keeps it fresh for me.”
