Departing the Europa Hotel at 2pm you will travel by coach to Brian & Ewan McCracken's Dairy Farm to start your tour. 

Tour Cost - £10

Brian, Lynne & Ewan McCracken farm just over 230 spring calving cows and followers on the Holywood Hills overlooking Newtownards and Strangford Lough.  The farm rises from 400 to 720 feet.  They farm 360 acres of owned and rented land. 

The philosophy on the farm is to try and limit any drudgery and to be as time efficient as possible.  There is a defined start and finish time (6am to 6pm) with cows mover to once-a-day milking in December ahead of being dried off for eight weeks in mid-winter.  Cows are milked through a 30 point Dairymaster swingover parlour.

The farm is in a dry area and the soils are generally free-draining but shallow, so it is will suited to spring calving.  However, it runs from 420 feet to 720 feet above sea level, so there is a limit to the amount of grass the farm can grow.  The farm also features a four acre constructed wetland which is used to treat yard runoff.  It as also become a haven for wild life.

Brian is well know figure in Northern Ireland dairying having been a past Director of Dale Farm Co-operative.  His son Ewan recently came home to the farm recently having completed Degree in Dairy Business at University College Dublin.  Ewan has been establishing more clover swards on the farm.

Ewan was recently awarded a Next Generation Nuffield Scholarship and will be presenting at the Conference in Belfast.

Departing the Europa Hotel at 2:30pm you will travel by coach to Bullhouse Brew Co, after a tour of the brewery you will jump back onto the coach and travel to Bullhouse East for some beer tasting. 

Tour Cost £40

Bullhouse Brewery was established by William Mayne (son of well the well know dairy and grassland scientist Sinclair Mayne) in 2016.  He got the idea during a road trip around the west-coast of the US in 2011 with his brother. Visiting Green Flash Brewery in San Diego was the epiphany moment. Drinking flavoursome beers on an out-of-town industrial estate on a Friday afternoon with a mix of local office and factory workers and seeing how beer and particularly breweries can be an integral part of the community was a real eye opener.

As the name suggests the brewery was started as a part-time enterprise in a 500sq foot outhouse (the old bull house) on the family farm just outside Belfast.  Working full-time and living at home to save money, over the space of 12 months he converted the Bullhouse into a small brewery, buying second-hand equipment from dairy farms and other breweries across Ireland, including a mash tun made from a converted catering fridge. Starting a commercial brewery for £600 doesn’t result in anything too pretty, but it was something, and it made some tasty beer.

Even before launching Bullhouse onto the market, the difficulties operating in Northern Ireland - the most restrictive beer market in Europe - became obvious. But the desire to put new styles of beer on the market and the idea of making a tiny dent in this ridiculous system overcame any doubts about the viability of the project.

Bullhouse launched in March 2016, with El Capitan being the very first commercial batch. For 18 months, everything was done in the evenings and weekends. Midweek brewdays resulted in a 2am finish, before heading to work for a plastic manufacturing company at 7am.

Before long, the weekends and evenings started creeping into the afternoons, and eventually, in September 2017, William took the plunge to pack in the day job and go it alone, brewing P45 for the occasion. One of the early successes was winning Champion Beer of Belfast at CAMRA’s Belfast Beer and Cider Festival in November 2017 with The Dankness.

Fast forward to September 2020 and backed by a Bounce Back Loan, the team (now grown to 3) finally moved out of the cramped Bullhouse to a 6,000sq ft industrial estate in south Belfast (which the business is rapidly out growing).

William opened Belfast’s first permanent brewery taproom (pub) (Bullhouse East) in June 2022, a pivotal moment of change in the local beer industry. He now sells his beer throughout Northern Ireland, GB, the Republic of Ireland, France, Italy and the Netherlands and employs 26 people across the brewery and taproom.