Go West for Cask Beer in County Fermanagh

78 miles west of Belfast’s heaving fleshpots and multiple murals lies the quiet village of Lisbellaw, 5 miles outside Enniskillen in County Fermanagh’s Lake District.

Go West

On the main street at the Dog and Duck a treat for beer lovers awaits – the most westerly sightings of hard to find Irish cask beers. The driving force here is Margaret, whose commitment to real ale has helped persuade local breweries to produce their beer in cask for the first time. On our visit four hand pumps held two ciders, an oatmeal stout and a session pale ale. She acquired a taste for proper cider after living in the Bristol area for over 20 years.

Margaret in action

Both cask ales were in top form. Sprocker is a session citra beer brewed for the pub by local Inishmacsaint while the Rough Brothers Oatmeal Stout (6.5%) is a good example of the style. It was so smooth it should surely have been called Rough with the Smooth.

The Dog and Duck opens Friday to Sunday and has earned a reputation for fine food and beer, meriting a place in the Good Beer Guide. It now also has Glenwinny, its own distillery. On these trips we tend not to eat much but we’d heard rumours that eating can be good for you, so we (over) indulged. My hake was beautifully cooked.

It was actually so good we might decide to eat on future trips, though agreed the breakfast Ulster Fry needed to be treated with caution (more in next post). Before going to our digs in Enniskillen we took in a game at the mighty Ducks, Ballinamallard United, which completed visits to all the grounds in the Northern Irish second tier.

Enniskillen is a regional hub in an area that attracts tourism but it surprised us how quiet it was on a Friday night. We were the only customers in Granny Annies – the former Wetherspoons – and mistaken for fishermen. It must have been the beer induced ruddy cheeks. That or the flies. There is a classic old pub in town that was quite busy, William Blake’s – It’s Diageo owned so there was nothing interesting on tap – did have some tasty bottle-conditioned IPA from Inishmacsaint.

Inishmacsaint is an island in Lough Erne with the remains of a monastery that was originally founded in the 6th Century. The monks brewed beer hence the name. The brewery’s web site describes County Fermanagh as “the most beautiful county in Ireland”, qualifying it with “in a beautiful but damp kind of way”.

Last year the Dog and Duck in Lisbellaw held the Outpost beer festival with 22 beers, nine of which were on cask. It’s on again on 17 August 2024. The surrounding area is beautiful, the people welcoming and the beer excellent. Change your holiday plans now.