Evin O’Riordain, Kernel’s founder, started his working life with cheese at Neal’s Yard Dairy, and he, too, underwent an epiphany in New York. “I had my own cheese stall in Borough Market for three years,” he tells me in between checking the temperature in the brewing kettle, “but then during a stay in New York, in the evening we would go out and I would be taught about beer. It was amazing to discover that you could treat beer in the same manner as we treated artisanal cheese. One afternoon in the beer garden of a Manhattan bar, the thought occurred that I should make beer back home.”