Full tilt
A beer writer who decided to put money where his mouth is, Steven Barr, founder of Tilt & Pour is a rare breed indeed.
Robyn Gilmour
Photos:
Tilt & Pour
Saturday 04 April 2026
This article is from
Northern Ireland
issue 129
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Stories told from the throes of a fervent campaign to change licensing legislation can paint a grim picture of the beer industry in Northern Ireland. However, it's also important to remember that the passion driving this campaign was itself born of a deep love of beer and brewing. Talking to Steven Barr, a ray of sunshine incarnate, is a reminder of how disproportionately enthusiastic and hard-working Northern Irish brewers are. The Tilt & Pour founder doesn’t shy away from addressing the challenges of the industry, but blends them into a story about the country’s passionate and tight-knit brewing community. Equipped with an inextinguishable enthusiasm for beer, he’s seen the industry here from more angles than most, and has a unique appreciation for the people working within it.
“Tilt & Pour is kind of an extension of my own journey within the alcohol industry,” says Steven. This journey began when he moved from Derry to Belfast at 18, and got a job in an off-license. “It was a typical student job, selling all the usual suspects, by which I mean Budweiser, Carlsberg and so forth,” says Steven. “One night I was doing the stock take, and my manager asked me if I wanted to crack beer while I was at it. The only beers I knew then were Budweiser and Harp, so when he asked if I wanted to try something different back in those days, I thought, ‘why not?’ He gave me an Erdinger Weissbier, and it didn’t taste at all like the beer I was used to. It made me want to unravel what beer is and where it came from.”
Before long, Steven was a regular beer geek. “I’d go on city breaks and be looking out for different beers, and that’s where the interest really came from,” he says. “On the back of that, I asked my manager if I could use the off-licence to bring in new beers, and I'd write about them to see if it generates any interest. So, I started a simple blog, The Belfast Beer Blog, about the beers I was drinking, where I got them, and just some thoughts and opinions. That turned into people coming into the off license while I was working to ask ‘have you tried this brewery? Could you get access to this beer?’”
By inviting people into his own exploration of craft beer, Steven was creating a community, one that he wanted to be as broad and far-reaching as possible. A big part of what turned The Belfast Beer Blog into Tilt & Pour — a concept that has since evolved further to include beers of its own — was the addition of an interactive beer map, highlighting pubs, bars, breweries and bottle shops around Northern Ireland where craft and independent beer is made and sold.
All Tilt & Pour artwork and designs are by Steven's good friend @Warren_Curry
“I'm very data-driven, so I started collecting data from all these different producers and making a central repository of information for customers,” says Steven. “Because my biggest issue — and this is nothing against Untappd or anything of the same ilk — is that a lot of beer apps are not, in my opinion, very demographically orientated towards Northern Irish drinkers. What I came up with was pretty basic, just a list for anyone looking for places to go and things to do, but it was a turning point for me. I wasn’t just running a beer blog anymore; the focus shifted more to the community aspect of the sector. So, that’s what brought the name change from The Belfast Beer Blog to Tilt & Pour. I’d always felt Belfast was focused on as the centre of the Northern Irish beer scene, but I wanted this thing I was building to be about stories and narratives in Northern Ireland more broadly.”
Steven pauses here, noting how strange it is to reflect on Tilt & Pour’s journey, given that it’s been 13 years since the project really started to gain traction. “Since then I've worked all over the sector,” he says. “My thinking has always been that if you want to really understand the sector you need to get involved. So, I’ve helped breweries out at their taprooms and events, I’ve helped out on production days. I just ask questions. Tell me how to do it and I’ll get it done.”
It was through helping out at Boundary Brewing that Steven met Malcolm McCay, co-founder of Heaney Brewery who was then contract brewing at Boundary. In the years that followed, Mal would set up a brewery of his own, on the family farm in Bellaghy, county Derry, and offer Steven space to contract brew Tilt & Pour’s beers. It was around the 2019 mark that Steven and Mal seriously discussed the prospect — turns out that helping out here and there amounts to a pretty thorough understanding of how to make beer — but, between a full time job and life more generally getting in the way, it wasn’t until January of 2023 that Tilt & Pour released its first beer, a helles.
“That comes from my love of German beer, in particular, Augustiner Helles — it’s my desert island beer,” he says. “But beyond that, if I'm being very direct, my whole thing is about the accessibility of the product, not just the price point. As much as I love weird and wonderful, heavily hopped beers, to change the narrative around beer in Northern Ireland, we have to go incrementally. We can't go from naught to 90 and expect the local palate to change overnight.”
Since the release of Tilt & Pour’s first beer, Steven says he has been overwhelmed by the support of the industry. “Publicans I've met over the years, pubs I used to work in, they’ve all supported me from day dot,” he says. “The Sunflower, The Woodworkers, Northern Lights, Boundary Taproom, Bullhouse East — I could write a thank you note to them all. No matter what I put out — they’ll be the first to get in touch and say ‘we’ll get one in’ or ‘we’ll get a couple in’.”
This cyclical evolution, and pay-it-forward kind of growth — whether in the form of Mal offering Steven space to cuckoo brew, having come from a cuckoo brewing background himself, or pubs where Steven has put in a disco shift stocking his beer — is something Steven is deeply admiring of, and grateful for. He speaks about the strength of the connection between breweries, and the support they freely lend each other, as a hidden superpower of Northern Ireland’s beer industry. “I think they understand that by giving back you’re paying it forward,” he concludes. I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Check out Tilt and Pour’s Big Northern Irish Beer Map
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