His commercial partner, Oliver Hughes, was a larger-than-life character with a shrewd business sense and a booming voice. His former career as a barrister had equipped him with skill as a raconteur. Hughes had led the early charge for small, independent Irish breweries, setting up the Porterhouse with Liam LaHart in 1996 as a brewpub in Temple Bar, Dublin, inspired by the Firkin chain of cask ale brewpubs operating in England in the 1980s and 1990s.

Hughes wasn’t shy of controversy, and campaigned for the release of the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four, groups of wrongly convicted Irish people in the British court system; he also became embroiled in legal disputes with Anheuser-Busch and Carlsberg when Porterhouse released a Wheat Beer called Weiserbuddy and a Lager dubbed Probably. John Duffy, Irish delegate to the European Beer Consumers Union who blogs as The Beer Nut, describes Hughes as “one of the Godfathers of Irish craft brewing.”

Although she wasn’t aware of it until after the fact, Heslin’s timing for opening the brewery couldn’t have been better. In 2005, the Minister for Finance, Brian Cowen, had introduced a tax rebate for breweries that produced fewer than 20,000 hectoliters (17,000 U.S. barrels) of beer per year. West Kerry Brewery easily qualified. It was also part of what Caroline Hennessy and Kristin Jensen described in their book, Sláinte, as the “second generation” of Irish breweries. “After the pioneers came the establishers,” they wrote.

Oliver Hughes and Peter Mosley found themselves in County Kerry for the 2012 opening of their new project, a distillery in the town of Dingle that would produce whiskey, gin, and vodka. They decided to tour the area, and took the Slea Head Drive around the Dingle Peninsula. When they passed Tig Bhric in Ballyferriter, they remembered their conversation with Heslin at Farmleigh in 2008, and decided to call in for a beer.