That’s Barry’s pint of view!

“I remember being very young and coming into the brewery on a Sunday morning with my father. He would take me down to the stables, where the office building is now, and that was where the horses for delivering the kegs were kept. It was an amazing thing for me to see as the horses were huge!”

The words of Barry Hosford, who is the fourth generation Hosford to work in Heineken, talking about his earliest memory of the brewery on Leitrim Street.

Barry was speaking to the Cork Independent ahead of Cork Heritage Open Day, which Heineken is taking part in again this year to showcase its history and links with the county.

There has been a Hosford on the payroll of Murphy’s Brewery since 1856, which is now the Heineken Ireland brewery. At one point in the 1960s there were five Hosford brothers working at the brewery at the same time, and what began as a temporary summer job for Barry, has become a lifelong career.

He said: “There have been many changes over the last 35 years. When I started first we were kegging a few thousand kegs a day and that was mostly Murphy’s stout. Today we are kegging nine different products and we have now moved into producing cider.

“I started on 1 May 1984. There was a transition taking place whereby the company was changing from aluminium kegs to the current stainless steel kegs. My first job was to remove the filling tubes from the aluminium and kegs and place them into the new stainless steel kegs. The aluminium keg was then sent for recycling. This went on for the whole of that summer. The jobs I have held during my time have been very varied from that to lab sample boy, utilities operator, racking operator and now production supervisor.”

Speaking about his time working for the brewery, he said: “I have many interesting and certainly funny stories about the brewery but unfortunately they cannot be told, well for now, but they may well become part of a future publication. One thing that has always made me laugh has been the nicknames that have been given to brewery workers over the years.”

Barry’s first cousin Donal Hosford is also an employee of the company and has also been working for the company since the eighties.

Asked if there was any chance of a fifth generation working there, he said: “Look I will never say never, one of my daughters may.”