When you’re a stout-producing Irish brewery that isn’t the first one that U.S. beer drinkers think of on St. Patrick’s Day, you occasionally need a little help.

For Carlow Brewing Co. in the Irish town of Muine Bheag in County Carlow, the U.S. craft beer community has provided that help for a good, long time. Founded in 1996 by Seamus and Eamonn O’Hara, Carlow Brewing began producing its O’Hara’s Irish Stout during a time when Ireland’s Big Three dry stouts — Guinness, Murphy’s and Beamish — all had different owners and all dominated the Irish marketplace.

Seamus O’Hara had spent much of the early 1990s in the U.K. and developed a taste for cask-aged beers with a far more complex flavor profile than those found in the larger Irish breweries’ beers.

However, the Irish beer landscape was changing quickly. In 1997, a year after Carlow opened, U.K.-based wine and spirits company Diageo DEO, -1.92% took over the Guinness Brewery in Dublin. Dutch multinational brewer Heineken, which had already purchased the Cork-based Murphy’s Brewery in 1983, picked up Scotland-based Scottish & Newcastle and its Cork-based Beamish and Crawford brewery in 2008.

That put all three of Ireland’s premier dry stouts — so called for their distinct lack of sweetness, full body and roasted coffee bitterness — in the hands of multinational owners just as the nation was losing its taste for the style.

During Heineken’s buyout of Scottish & Newcastle, the Irish Competition Authority noted that stout had comprised 70% of all beer consumed in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. By 2008, that share drifted below 30% as light lager — including Heineken, Amstel and the Carlsberg and Budweiser brands distributed by Guinness — took hold. On top of that, Irish breweries that once numbered in the hundreds decreased to only 12 by 2008. Amid that climate, Carlow Brewing realized that its best chance for survival might lie in the export market.

It first brought O’Hara’s to the U.S. in 2001 and began opening up markets in cities like New York, Boston and Philadelphia, where established Irish pubs and a familiarity with the style worked in Carlow’s favor. At that time, however, craft beer was entering a bit of a slump that took its brewery count from 1,566 in 2000 to just 1,460 by 2006. Even that number was a bit deceptive, as nearly 990 of those breweries were solely brewpubs and 370 were microbreweries producing 15,000 barrels of beer or fewer. There were just 50 breweries in the U.S. producing more than 15,000 barrels in 2001, compared with 135 by the end of 2014.

As a result, Carlow and its O’Hara’s Irish Stout received their warmest welcome not from Irish pubs, but from craft beer bars and taprooms. The Publick House in Brookline, Mass., for example, has been serving it for roughly 15 years alongside West Coast IPAs and Belgian sours. Just down the road in Boston, Stoddard’s Fine Food and Ale has kept it on tap for much of the bar’s six-year existence. According to Stoddard’s bar manager, Jamie Walsh, O’Hara’s is on tap there from the middle of February until just after March and performs well around this time of year.

“They are good people, and that particular beer is fantastic,” he says. “I find that sometimes brewers try and replicate Guinness, which is a mistake. Somehow that brand took over that category and brewers followed suit.”

Frankly, Carlow has been wise to avoid that strategy. Its success at craft beer bars in the Northeast led it to employ the same strategy in other markets throughout the U.S. As a result, it began exploring U.S. craft beer styles, collaborating with U.S. craft brewers including Crozet, Va.-based Starr Hill and watching its production grow to nearly 16,000 barrels in 2015 (or roughly double its 2010 totals) — with half of the beer it produces sold outside of Ireland.

Meanwhile, Diageo-Guinness sales in the U.S. dropped from 3.3 million barrels in 2006 to roughly 2.4 million in 2014. While Great Britain and Ireland have always enjoyed more Guinness than the United States, now Nigeria also consumes more Guinness than the U.S. And stout-loving Cameroon and Kenya aren’t far behind.

In Ireland, however, Guinness has watched craft beer grow 180% since 2011, according to Euromonitor. Guinness still has a dominant 19% share of the Irish market, but that’s down from 26.6% in 2011 and 31% a decade ago. Though craft beer comprised only about 1.5% of all beer sold in Ireland in 2014, the stout-friendly U.S. craft beer market sees stout as only 2% of all supermarket craft beer sales and 3% of all bar and restaurant pours, according to IRI Worldwide. That’s a lot of room to grow, especially with a full-bodied stout as a flagship, a caramel-heavy Irish red and a hop-heavy “Irish Pale Ale” in Carlow’s portfolio.

With Irish craft beer sales growing 50% annually and Carlow’s export footprint stepping into France, Italy, Croatia and other European countries, Carlow and its O’Hara’s brand not only don’t have to take on Guinness on St. Patrick’s Day, but they can give the big Dublin brewery a pass entirely.

Last week, we got Seamus O’Hara on the phone to discuss building his brewery around traditional Irish dry stouts, bringing that beer’s recipe to its fullest strength and using the lessons of U.S. craft beer to avoid picking fights with the folks at Guinness for two decades:

How has your reach expanded since you first opened the brewery 20 years ago?

O’Hara: When we first started, at least with our business plan, we were looking to be domestic. A couple of things happened that made us interested in export very quickly.

Number one was that we realized that the market [in Ireland] was pretty closed. There had been no new breweries for quite a while — a few generations — and all that made it tough to bring a new product out for somebody like myself who’d traveled abroad for a while and got the idea to set up the brewery. For most people, it seemed crazy to be bringing out new beers and a new brand.

It was tough, but in 2000 we won a prestigious award for stout at the International Brewing Industry awards in the U.K. and that generated interest from people abroad to import our beer. We started in 2000 with two or three export territories, and we’re up to now about 25 export territories. The last four or five years has been a lot of our growth, where the first 10 years were slow progress before things started to take off.

The domestic market for craft beer here has really started to open up, and we’ve had some great growth over the last five years. The same is true for export, and now export is about 50% of our volume.

A year after Carlow Brewing was founded, Diageo took over the Guinness Brewery in Dublin. Also, just before Carlow found its footing in Ireland, Heineken purchased Scotland-based Scottish & Newcastle and its Cork-based Beamish and Crawford brewery (and its Beamish stout) in 2008. Heineken had already purchased Cork-based Murphy’s Brewery in 1983, which put all three of Ireland’s premier stouts in the hands of multinational owners. Did this present an opportunity for Carlow and O’Hara’s, or did you face similar challenges as stout lost ground to lagers?

O’Hara: We were probably facing some of the same challenges, as we weren’t really a lager brewery.

When we started, stout was about two-thirds of the market in Ireland. Today, it’s about one-third. That’s mainly because it’s been taken over by lager. For a few years, it was very much about big-brand lager, but that’s kind of slowing down and there’s an interest in Ireland in traditional stouts and ales, and discovering more flavorful versions of those products.

Partly what the lager growth did was it almost led to a kind of dumbing down of stouts and ales as well. Lager was chilled very cold with little flavor and that was winning all the market share, so it was kind of a trend with stout and ale to reduce flavor by serving it more chilled as well. To my mind, it lost its way a bit.

That was partly what Irish craft breweries like ourselves were starting out: We were part of the reaction to that, in that we were looking to bring flavor back into stouts and ales. Particularly stout, with it being of great interest to us.

Thinking back to 1996, though, Irish craft brewing was primarily yourselves and Porterhouse Brewing Co., which was founded in 1989, but only opened its Dublin brewpub in 1996. What was it like trying to convince new accounts and exporters to take your beer at that point?

O’Hara: We probably went in a little bit wide-eyed and naive.

Like a lot of guys who come into craft brewing and are just interested in beer, we were very excited about the possibilities of brewing our own beer and bringing new variety into the marketplace. I suppose what we didn’t fully appreciate was that the market was dominated by a couple of major players and all the channels into the market were pretty closed.

It was tough, but Porterhouse had their own bars and that was their model: It was a brewpub with their own interest. I often envied that because we were, on the other hand, an independent brewery looking to sell into the trade. It also meant that the bar was pretty high for us, so it imposed self-discipline on us to brew really good beer and provide really good customer service and technical service. We really had to perform up to a high level to survive, so there was a strong culture for us that evolved out of that: A culture where we had to execute well across all aspects of the business. It wasn’t just about brewing the beer.

We had to make sure that the service was good, we delivered on time, the technical support was there all the way to the glass.

Here in the U.S. in 2001, part of that technical support was the use and upkeep of a nitrogen tap instead of the standard carbonated taps. They weren’t exactly prevalent here at the time and, in the bars where they were, Guinness was on them. How were you able to establish regular positions on nitrogen taps here?

O’Hara: Probably slowly.

There would’ve been some Murphy’s and Beamish, but most bars would have one or two nitrous taps. Nitro wasn’t as popular as it is today, but we were able to pick up a number of taps in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. We got a little foothold, and I suppose it wasn’t massive numbers of beer accounts in those days, but it was enough.

What we found is that we had a lot of customers who took in our product and stayed with us. That was the biggest success for me, that every time we found an account, we were able to hang on to it and grow a lot of customers. It meant that the product must have been good and that the customers of that bar must’ve liked it. While we weren’t an overnight sensation in terms of the number of customers we were getting, we were building up a loyal customer base. Even nowadays, with all this rotation in craft brewing, we still have customers who go back with us for years, which is something we’re kind of proud of.

A good number of those bars you’re alluding to are craft beer bars. How helpful has the U.S. craft beer community been to Carlow’s growth here?

O’Hara: It’s been really important, because a lot of people think that, as an Irish beer going to the U.S., that we’re just looking at Irish bars.

Certainly we have some Irish pubs that have been good supporters, but those kind of bars would have the more traditional lineup. Whereas, as an Irish brewery hitting the U.S. with what I would say is a more flavorful stout, we found good traction and good support from craft beer bars. That’s probably been the mainstay for us over the years, to be honest.

We try not to go up against Guinness. That hasn’t really been our thing, and we don’t really succeed at it. We automatically, I suppose, as an Irish brewery with a stout are compared to Guinness, but we don’t really go out there going after Guinness accounts or even to compare our products. We tended to look for beer bars, generally, and we’ve found that they have lots of appreciation for the products.

That comparison has to be tough around this time of year. How does Carlow Brewing approach the U.S. around St. Patrick’s Day, and how helpful are craft beer bars in keeping you from overlapping with Guinness events?

O’Hara: It is a time of year when we can get attention in what’s obviously a very competitive market in the U.S.

It’s an important time of year for us to work with and support existing customers who are year-round supporters, but to also look at bigger opportunities. It’s a time of year when people are looking for products coming from Ireland, and there are a lot of event opportunities. The heightened interest in Irish products around this time of year opens the door for new placements, partially in the Irish bars, but in the beer bars as well.

We’re starting to see a bit of change in the Irish bars where you have new managers and ownership coming into the market and are looking for a more contemporary feel to the Irish pub. Typically, it’s no longer just the standard lineup that you would think would be in Irish bars. There’s more of the American domestic crafts, but there’s a certain degree of room behind the counter for Irish import crafts. I think we’ve seen that in all of the cities we’re in.

Do you find that the new generation of managers is more receptive to your entire portfolio, as opposed to just your Irish stout?

O’Hara: We do more than one stout as well. We have our nitro stout, which is the mainstay, but we also have our extra Irish stout, Leann Follain, which is also in the U.S. mainly in packages but not on draft. We’re hoping to change that.

Those kinds of bars are open to those kinds of products, and that’s where I think they’ll get good traction. They’re open to more flavors and a greater variety of beers. Back in Ireland, we do quite a wide range of beers, hoppy beers. We have our Irish Pale Ale, which also goes to the U.S. and is one of our most popular beers in Ireland.

We all get inspired as craft brewers by the American craft beer industry as well. Pale ale, IPAs ... we just released a seasonal red IPA that I don’t think will get to the U.S. What we hope to do more of this year and in years going forward is bring more of those seasonals in as well, so we can have more variety for those customers that are more interested in that.

Your 4.4% O’Hara’s Irish Pale Ale has a lot lower alcohol content than the typical U.S. IPA. While U.S. brewers have just latched on to low-alcohol “session” beer in recent years, Irish pub life is built around them. Is a lower-alcohol IPA just a better fit for your Irish customers?

O’Hara: The origin of our Irish Pale Ale was traveling in the U.S. and really enjoying the West Coast IPAs and pale ales but finding them, at 6% or 7% ABV, just a little bit too high for the Irish beer culture.

We developed a product that was inspired by U.S. craft culture, but was more designed for Irish bar culture. We drink by the pint, and you don’t want to drink something that’s 6% to 7% ABV by the pint, so we were probably one of the first to produce a session-type IPA for that reason. We didn’t call it a “session IPA,” but a couple of years later we started to see some of the U.S. breweries producing lower-ABV beers and calling them session IPAs.

We started out wanting to produce a beer influenced by American IPAs but suitable for the Irish market where sessionability is a fairly big deal. Happily, that product is available in the U.S. now and is working very well for us as an Irish Pale Ale for those Irish bars that want to have that option.

Beyond alcohol content, what elements of U.S. craft beer work well, and don’t work well, in Ireland?

O’Hara: I think ourselves and lots of the other Irish craft brewers take inspiration from what’s happening in U.S. craft: the whole confidence to experiment, push the envelope and not be stuck within a certain set of boundaries.

From our point of view with O’Hara’s, nowadays we’re interested in exploring the traditional stouts and ales — more malty types of beer — but we’re also interested in more hoppy beers and starting to look at sour beers. That kind of culture of passion and experimentation where everything is possible in the U.S., that’s something we’re looking to take back here.

Right now, I think that wave of American craft has come across the Atlantic, and it’s a hot category [in Ireland] now with various imports, so it’s quite an interesting time to be a beer drinker in Ireland now. We have a whole bunch of craft breweries that are active and a whole lot of import crafts coming in from the U.S., where traditionally we would have a lot of European beers coming into the market.

Don’t get me wrong: It’s still very much dominated by the big guys, but there’s a good growing momentum in that specialty beer space.

Has that made it easier for Carlow to make itself available in more places, or is it tougher to have those new breweries around you?

O’Hara: I wrestle with that one myself a little bit. I think, so far, I have a glass-half-full attitude on it.

It’s good. It’s created a buzz around what we do. When we started out, the biggest thing was to explain to people what we do and what this thing is, this new beer that became craft beer, whereas now that’s not the issue at all. There’s a lot of new interest and excitement about the space, but then there’s the new challenge of competition, so I’m not sure which I prefer.

But it’s helped to grow the interest and grow the market share, I suppose. Also, in Ireland, a lot of the new breweries are dotted around the country, so we’re all quite spread out, actually. Everyone is doing their own best to bring new people into craft beer, which we’re spreading around to everybody. Even the new imports are helping bring people into craft. That variety is part of what is getting people interested and forcing more bars and restaurants to the point where it’s almost necessary to stock craft beer, which is a huge change from even five years ago.

Overall, it’s all been pretty positive. A year or two down the line, maybe I’ll have a different answer, because it’s going to get to the point where the competition improves. We’ll have to see how that develops.

Let’s talk about your beer for a moment. When I first sampled your stout here in the U.S. about 14 years ago, it had a body and almost espresso flavor to it that not a whole lot of stouts shared at the time. What brings that full, semi-bitter malt character forward for O’Hara’s?

O’Hara: The way I think of it, to brew a stout is to be malt-dominant with the roasted barley and the other malts. We’re trying to capture that flavor, and we aren’t really afraid to have that flavor.

If you’re a big brewery bringing your beer out to the mass market, you can’t have too much flavor. You try to make it more widely acceptable and appealing. But, I guess, like typical craft breweries producing more hoppy beers and more flavorful beers on the hop end, we’re trying to get more flavors from the malt and the roasted barley, the cara malts and to get back what we think stouts would have been 20, 50 years ago. They’re wonderful flavors, and they’ve kind of been lost along the way.

It’s not rocket science, I suppose. It’s what we call “brewing in the flavor” and trying to recapture those really interesting malt and roast flavors. A lot of breweries look at putting in things like coffee and coffee beans. I’m more interested in seeing how you can get those flavors from the actual barley and the malt. There’s a wide spectrum you can reach before you have to start bringing in other ingredients. That’s kind of the tradition of Irish brewing.

Jason Notte is a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Esquire. Notte received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University in 1998. Follow him on Twitter @Notteham.