How a Tipperary family is turning their craft beer into a community experience

In the heart of Templemore in Tipperary, a family-run brewery is preparing to make a bold leap from small-scale production to a full-blown visitor experience.

It’s not just a business pivot, it’s a blueprint for how rural Irish towns might re-imagine their futures through craft, culture, and community.

At first glance, the idea is simple, people will come for brewery tours and tastings and then they’ll stay for quick bites, live music, and community markets.

They will leave with bottles of beer, maybe a wedge of beer-washed cheese, and a deeper sense of what Tipperary can offer at its best: authenticity, creativity, and pride in place.

But this is not just a tourism initiative, Whitefield Brewery, long known for its commitment to flavour and craftsmanship, is evolving from a production-focused brewery into something much broader. It’s becoming a centre for experience; an events space; a hub for local food and drink and a platform for regional identity.

At the brewery’s heart is the Loughnane family, whose story stretches from Templemore to Canada and back again, threading through changing tastes, industry upheaval, and an unrelenting desire to create something meaningful.

“The brewery gets people in the door, but you need more than that now.” says founder Cuilán Loughnane.

“You need to give people something real, a good story, a proper drink, maybe some food and a reason to come back.”

Loughnane’s journey into brewing did not begin in Templemore, it began abroad, in the mid-1990s, when he left Ireland as a trained fitter and found himself immersed in the vibrant beer culture of Canada.

There, the idea of beer was more than just consumption. It was tied to tradition, experimentation, and a sense of place. Local breweries were popping up across towns and cities, offering beer that was distinct, full of character, and proudly regional.

He worked across different sectors, from engineering to pipefitting, but was drawn repeatedly to brewing. Eventually, on returning to Ireland, he got involved with one of the country’s early microbreweries.

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His education in the trade was hands-on, under the mentorship of a British brewmaster, he absorbed the technicalities of brewing.

When his mentor left, Loughnane stepped up, eventually running the brewery himself, but there were limits. The market in Ireland was still immature and infrastructure was lacking.

At one point, the only option for growth meant exporting cask beer to Britain which worked for a time.

Eventually, Cuilán was making daily train journeys from Templemore to Dublin to manage brewing operations, all while raising four young children, something had to give.

In 2008, during a family trip to Belgium, his wife Sally turned to him and said, “You can’t keep doing this cause you’re killing yourself.”

So Cuilán came back to Templemore permanently and built a brewery there.

He returned to Tipperary with a conviction that local brewing could thrive again. But it would have to be rooted in a broader vision of sustainability, community, and local pride.

He purchased a building in Templemore just as the recession took hold. The craft beer industry was surprisingly fertile ground. People were rethinking their spending habits and they started buying less but being more choosey about where they did spend their money. Local and independent products found favour and for a while, Whitefield Brewery or White Gypsy as it was known then, thrived.

The brewery gained traction with pubs and restaurants across Ireland. They began contract brewing for other producers, filling in gaps in capacity for a growing number of small breweries and the business model worked.

By 2012, they had established reliable distribution and steady production. Tours began happening informally, with curious locals popping in to see what was going on. The early years were full of improvisation and grit.

But then came the saturation. The Irish craft beer boom exploded, but the market remained relatively small. Larger players entered and then some of them were acquired by bigger entities. Loughnane noticed breweries around him being absorbed into corporate structures and with scale came cost advantages. Suddenly, Whitefield found itself competing against beer sold for less than it cost them to make.

Loughnane remained focused on quality. While other producers moved to shortcuts, Whitefield stuck to traditional methods. It made the product more delicate, but also more expressive. It was beer designed to be drunk fresh, close to where it was made and that, increasingly, became a guiding principle.

The realities of the Irish drinks industry quickly became impossible to ignore. For many publicans, the economics of selling local beer simply didn’t add up. Large multi-national brands were offering generous incentives to bars willing to exclusively sell their brands on tap.

At the same time, Ireland’s anti-alcohol policies were becoming more restrictive. Labelling laws, taxation, and licensing made operations increasingly complex. And while public health goals were understandable, Loughnane felt the small producer was being caught in the crossfire.

“We’re not the problem. But we’re the ones paying the price.”

As an advocate for independent brewing, he also helped found the Independent Craft Brewers of Ireland, a collective effort to level the playing field but systemic change was slow, and many brewers found themselves constantly fighting uphill battles.
It was around this time that the idea of selling directly to customers began to seem more than just a backup plan. It looked like the only sustainable path forward.

Then came the pandemic. And with it, a strange twist of fortune.
As the on-trade closed, people started showing up at the brewery gates. Locals bought directly. The yard became a de facto off-license, families picked up bottles to share at home.

It was a reminder of what brewing could be: close to the customer, deeply personal, and rooted in place. Loughnane describes those early pandemic days as chaotic but invigorating. They were back to basics, brewing, bottling, chatting with customers through masks. It was human, messy, but joyful.

That experience, paired with a visit to Canada in 2022, reshaped everything. Loughnane saw how North American breweries had embraced a model based on direct sales.

Most weren’t in shops or bars, you had to go there and once you were there, the beer was just the start, food, music, conversation, community. That was the true product.

Whitefield Brewery decided to go all in.

They purchased land next to their current site and began planning a new visitor centre.
The new building will house tasting areas, a modest cooking area, and flexible event space. Crucially, it will remain scalable, enough to host a retirement party or communion, but not so large as to lose its sense of intimacy. The business will shift from distribution to destination. Beer will still be made, but the focus is no longer on reaching as many pubs as possible. It is on bringing people to Templemore and giving them a reason to stay.
“Trade is what keeps a town alive,” says Loughnane. “You need money to circulate. If we sell here, if we spend here, then the town survives.”

The project is already taking shape. Loughnane’s daughter Aoife has taken over much of the planning and event coordination. His son Rhys manages delivery and technical support while Cuilán’s wife Sally handles finances as well as being a Director in the business. While the team is small, the ambition is not.

They hope to open by 2028 and when they do, they want to offer more than beer. They want to offer a space, somewhere casual and affordable, but memorable. A place where you might hear a folk trio on Friday night, grab a pizza from a wood-fired oven, and wander through a Saturday market of local food producers.
Loughnane is clear about one thing: this will not be a flashy, over-designed tourist trap. It will be humble, hospitable, and grounded. It will reflect the pace and character of the town it serves.

Central to the Whitefield vision is the idea of a self-sustaining local economy.

Rather than chasing margins by importing cheap malt or hops, they pay more for barley grown by a farmer in Thurles. Their beer is used by local cheesemakers, chutney producers, and butchers.

They are even aging whiskey in barrels that previously held their own stout and red ale, a nod to pre-industrial Ireland when brewers and distillers routinely collaborated.
“It costs more but the money stays here. It creates jobs, it creates pride and it keeps the story alive.”
The brewery has also taken steps to involve other local artisans. They plan to host collaborations, from sausage-makers to bakers, all incorporating Whitefield beer into their offerings. It’s not just marketing, it’s an integrated approach to regional development, with food and drink as the common thread.

Beyond drink, Loughnane envisions the space being used for craft markets, small conferences, and heritage exhibitions. It will be flexible by design, not a rigid business model, but a stage for community expression.

For Loughnane, this is not about nostalgia. It is about rebalancing. Ireland’s beer history is long and varied, but much of it was lost during consolidation in the 20th century, pubs became homogenised and knowledge about brewing, storage, and service disappeared. Most drinkers now associate beer with one or two familiar brands.

The visitor centre will offer a different perspective. It will be educational, experiential, and social. It will tell stories, not just of brewing techniques, but of place, family, and change.

Cuilán says: “It is about flavour, yes, but also about understanding. When someone says they don’t like lager, what they usually mean is they don’t like the industrial version they’ve been sold all their life. We give them something different and it opens their eyes.”

This, ultimately, is the bet: that people are hungry for real connection, not just to products, but to stories, to people, to places and that a small brewery in Tipperary can offer that in a way no supermarket shelf can.
Whitefield Brewery is no longer just making beer. It is making something rarer: a reason to gather, a sense of belonging, and perhaps, a template for other rural towns in search of a future.