This Northern Irish Brewery Is Run by Cage Fighters, Punks, and Martial Artists

Eoin Wilson was driven to brewing by poverty. Well, not quite, but almost.

"I didn't like Carlsberg," he says, "and I couldn't afford anything else. I'd just finished as a student, and was broke. I remembered the big demijohns we used to keep under the stairs when I was a kid and decided to have a go at making my own."

These were the nascent days of what is now Farmageddon, the only brewery run as a workers co-operative in the UK.

No longer based in Wilson's attic, but on a farm in Comber, County Down, near the east coast of Northern Ireland, Wilson is now joined by six others in the production of craft beer. The brewery is part anti-establishment statement, part labour of love.

But back when Wilson was filling demijohns with his own fermentation experiments at home, he was also involved in Belfast's punk scene, running a martial arts club, and doing a bit of cage fighting on the side.

"I might have become a bit of a beer geek over time," he says. "But I would never be the beard and cardigan-wearing type."

When friends of Wilson's first tried his home brew, instead of smiling politely and saying nice things like most of us do when tasting the homemade concoctions of our friends, they said he should try selling his beer commercially. And so Wilson scouted around to see how it could be done.

"Some people are rich and can just do it," he says. "Some people crowdfund the money they need. Some go to the bank. But I couldn't avoid my punk roots and wanted to run it differently."

He persuaded his mates—a fellow punk John Cush and Mark Uprichard from the martial arts club he ran—to join him.

"The three got together and realised they might need more people to make it work if they wanted to do it completely together as a co-operative," picks up Uprichard's partner and co-operative member Susan Jackson. "I got hauled in as the bossy bitch, Eoin's wife Rose is the calming one in the background. We've got Mark's brother Andrew and Aaron Rainey, who's another martial artist."

As Jackson explains who everyone is, I feel like I need to draw a Venn diagram of where the punks, the martial artists, and the spouses overlap. Though it would appear that Wilson is the sweet spot in the middle, he's not the one in charge of Farmageddon. No one is.

"We have a completely flatline structure," explains Jackson. "Which can be a difficult model to follow, but we're three years in and it works. Everyone can do and does do everything in the brewery."

Wilson agrees: "I felt that there was no way one man or one woman could be the boss. Having someone at the top and people at the bottom doesn't mean everything gets done. If things need to be cleaned for example, it's better if everyone's doing it, than having one person stay up all hours. Because everyone has a stake in it, and everyone's involved in the process, hopefully that creates a more efficient way of making beer and a better drink at the end of it."

And when they say everyone does everything, they really mean it.

Wilson and Rose's wedding guests, for example, contributed to the brewery by buying 300 cider apple trees as a gift, to make what he describes as "a still strong scrumpy no one here in Northern Ireland has the balls to release."

Every part of the farm gets put to work, too. Hops were growing over the farmhouse for a white IPA until Rose objected to not being able to see out of the windows and they had to be moved to poles. Wilson and Cush keep pigs to eat the spent grains and if they need a piece of equipment, more often than not, the Uprichard brothers and Cush build and weld it together themselves.

"We can either pay thousands for it," shrugs Wilson, "or we can work out how to build it ourselves, which is generally what happens."

He points out the Farmageddon brew filter, self-designed and self-built.

"It's like the exhaust of a big truck," he explains. "If you say it's out of choice, it's really not. It's pure economics. But they do say that necessity is the mother of all invention."

Whether you can attribute necessity to the inventiveness of the beers Farmageddon produces, however, is open to question. As well as your standard IPA, stout, and golden ale, Farmageddon produce one-off specials every month, made with odd ingredients like wild gorse or coffee.

"I made gorse wine for my wedding and it tasted coconut-y," says Wilson. "There are some hops that taste pineapple-y and I thought it might be interesting to combine the two flavours to make a kind of pina colada beer."

So, one afternoon Wilson left Cush brewing the beer and went off to pick the gorse flowers.

"Have you ever seen it?" Wilson asks me, referring to the thorny plant. "It's lethal. Some of those spikes I'm still pulling out now, a couple of months later."

It was worth the effort. Cush called him back to the brewery at the exact moment, Wilson offloaded 21 kilos of flowers in right at the dry hopping point, and the result was so delicious they sold out in 14 days.

"When I was brewing at home, I learned how to use things I'd foraged and add them in," says Wilson. "The process of running the brewery is just the same. Just on a much bigger scale and with a lot more equipment, of course."

Their punk roots means they're also always up for collaborating, and they're planning a beer that's being aged in whisky barrels and made with Sumatran coffee from a local roastery.

"Instead of dry hopping with hops we used coffee, fermented it and then took it to the Echlinville Distillery, and filled some of their barrels with our Imperial porter," Wilson explains. "The idea is that instead of having a bottle of port on the table after dinner, you might have a bottle of this. It'll be 15 percent, which should raise a few eyebrows."

But then when you've got cage-fighting, head-banging martial artists brewing beer and living a 21st century version of The Good Life along the socialist principles of a worker's co-operative, I suspect it's not just the ABV that's raising eyebrows.