Irish Cheese Awards 2019

It is not often that I can mix my love of cheese with my passion for creating events but the Irish Cheese Awards 2019 made it happen. I was hired by CAIS to create a black-tie event to celebrate the winners of the biannual cheese awards and I think I delivered a great event looking at all the comments.

What makes an event great is, of course, the venue, the food, the drinks but also a lot of fine details that you might not see or feel straight away. For the venue, we chose The Metropole Hotel - an easy decision for the CAIS committee with its city centre location and a very good reputation. For me, it was an easy choice - not only because of the history of the place but also the fantastic team behind The Metropole. Head chef Stuart Dardis translated my vision onto the plate with an exciting menu while Raymond Kelleher, Sales Director of the Trigon Group was always on hand when I had ideas or needed something sorted.

Pallas Foods was one of the sponsors for the event including the wine and I was extremely happy that my grape recommendations for the menu were well matched with the wines that Paul Savage, Business Developer at Classic Drinks chose for the menu. Guests loved the paired wines and one guest even took photos of the bottles to ensure she would be able to purchase them at a later stage. Instead of a cheese board, we opted for the Supreme Champion of 2017 - Mount Leinster Clothbound Cheddar. While head chef Stuart was pairing the cheese with three relishes - apple remoulade, tomato chutney and fig chutney - we paired it with Changeling Pale Ale from the Rising Sons Brewery who also sponsored the beer. Guests who normally wouldn't go for a beer, commented on well the beer went with the cheese.

For the small, fine details, I created individually named menu cards, named the tables with cheese types rather than numbers, made mini pyramids with a chocolate each and the CAIS logo, wrote and bound little booklets where guests could see what awards were coming up, who the judges were and more.

Choosing AVC Hire for our sound and video was the best decision of all and it paid to have such a professional company at my side as each slide and each sound effect was delivered perfectly.

So, I am sitting here while writing the 'post-mortem' of the event, being very content and happy to have delivered a great event. Forgotten are the hours I spent finding the perfect venue, printing 150 single menu cards, making sure the names are spelt correctly, cutting and folding 150 pyramid boxes (menu was tight so needed to improvise), glued 150 little logos on each box and tied them all, writing tasting cards for a cheese display, creating slides, putting them in the right order, writing, printing and binding 50 booklets with 3D logos etc. etc. etc. .... to be honest, I enjoyed every second of it.