The Irish Snug Podcast

What Irish Pub Culture Is Really Like (From a Guinness Veteran) | Des Roche

The Irish Snug Podcast

Show Notes

30 Years at Guinness, Rural Ireland, and Publican Stories with Des Roche Description: In this episode of the Pubs and Pints podcast, I sit down with my good friend Des Roche. Des is a true gentleman from County Galway, Ireland, with an incredible wealth of stories. He spent 30 years working for Guinness, starting as a merchandiser and moving into sales, giving him a front-row seat to the characters and culture of Irish pubs. A few years after retiring from Guinness, Des began driving tour bus...

More from The Irish Snug Podcast

Oct 21, 2026

Join Tim Grant on The Irish Snug Podcast for a conversation with Seán Ó Ocoistealbha, an Irish storyteller, historian, poet, and teacher of the Irish language. Together, they explore *the seanchaí tradition* and the stories, songs, poetry, and place names that carry Ireland’s history across generations. Growing up in Connemara, Seán learned Irish at home and in the schoolyard. He shares the tale of Oisín in Tír na nÓg, explains how folklore changes from place to place, and recalls the old ra...

Oct 6, 2026

Welcome to Golf Chronicles, a new series from The Irish Snug Podcast exploring the soul, stories and people behind Ireland’s great golf courses. In this premiere episode, host Tim Grant sits down with Gerry Maguire, chairman of Erris Tourism and one of Carne Golf Links’ great ambassadors, to explore the remarkable community-built links at Belmullet on County Mayo’s Mullet Peninsula. Gerry shares how local visionaries and farmers transformed dramatic Atlantic duneland into a golf course usin...

Aug 23, 2026

Planning a golf trip to Ireland? In this episode of The Irish Snug Podcast, Tim Grant sits down with Dennis O’Carroll a South Kerry native and founder of DOC’S TOURS to talk about creating custom Irish golf vacations that combine legendary links, local knowledge, music, food, pints, and the all-important 19th hole. Dennis grew up in Waterville, County Kerry—just a mile from Waterville Golf Links—in a family immersed in pubs, hotels, restaurants, live music, and Irish hospitality. He explains...

Aug 18, 2026

What really happens when you stop checking boxes and start experiencing Ireland? In this episode of The Irish Snug, retired U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer 5 and longtime aviator Chuck Rodda joins us for the first installment of “Back from Ireland”—a new series focused less on the itinerary and more on the stories that happen along the way. Chuck and his wife, Michelle, return from a 12-day Ireland road trip filled with Wild Atlantic Way hikes, spontaneous detours, traditional Irish music, f...

Aug 9, 2026

*How do you revive a craft that nearly vanished from Ireland? In this episode of The Irish Snug, Tim sits down with Killian O’Mahony —better known as Killian the Cooper—to explore the remarkable return of Irish coopering. When Killian began his apprenticeship with Irish Distillers in 2013, he was Ireland’s first apprentice cooper in roughly 40 years. Today, through his family-run O’Mahony Craft Cooperage in East Cork, he is helping restore the almost-lost tradition of household—or “white”—c...

See all episodes →