Growing up, summer meant Ireland for Joseph Kilroy, whose family visited every year to enjoy the rolling hills of the country where his father and maternal grandfather were raised.
“Today, there’s so many distractions for a kid during the day. Over there, there was just the day itself,” he said. “You go fishing, play soccer with friends and relatives, or just hang out.”
Those visits also meant plenty of chances to enjoy an authentic bite of Irish sausage, with its mild flavor profile and light, meaty texture. Kilroy’s love for the Irish staple started there — and in 2022, he officially started a side business making his own.
Today, Kilroy’s Irish Sausage sells wholesale to grocery stores around the Cleveland area. The business “is growing, little by little,” Kilroy said. He attributes his success partly to the niche of his product.
“People are surprised that there’s an Irish sausage,” he said. “So it’s fun to be pushing something unique.”
Before leaving Ireland every summer, Kilroy remembers his family packing their luggage with plenty of sausage. Back home in Cleveland, they would purchase it at import stores like Gaelic Imports, which was originally located on West 25th Street and run by a man named Sandy Hain. But Irish sausages made on American soil are harder to find. Kilroy only knows of makers in places like New York, Boston and Chicago — and now Cleveland.
What is a banger?
Technically, Kilroy’s products are classified as “bangers,” a legality due to his preferred ratio of breading to meat. He settled on that recipe through plenty of trial and error, experimenting at his home in Chicago during the COVID-19 outbreak. After his day job brought him home to Cleveland, he continued refining the process until his sausages were ready for distribution.
“I tried to model mine after different butcher shops that I’ve gone to over the years in Ireland,” he said. “The breading absorbs a lot of the flavors and the fat, and it plumps out the sausage.”
Currently, Kilroy only sells one flavor profile, which retains those Irish flavors while keeping American taste buds in mind. “So it’s somewhere in between. It’s mostly Irish, but there’s some American,” he said.
A family that jams
That blend could also describe the seven Kilroy siblings, who keep in touch with their Irish-American roots through their band, The Kilroys. From the late ’80s through the early 2000s, the family group played gigs across Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan before family and life responsibilities got in the way.
“Back in the day, we had drums and bass and keyboards and all kinds of stuff,” Kilroy said. He plays the banjo and the mandolin. “Right now, we do more traditional Irish music. For someone that’s not familiar with it, it sounds like bluegrass.”
These days, they’ll perform some local gigs here and there, playing at the annual Cleveland Irish Cultural Festival and for céilí dances at the West Side Irish American Club. The next generation has also joined them, with some of the siblings’ children picking up instruments of their own.
Kilroy keeps that next generation in mind when it comes to his sausages, too. “Whenever I do taste tests, I can’t wait for a kid under the age of five to come in, because they don’t lie,” he said. So far, his sausages have been a hit with the kids — including his particularly picky young niece. “If they said they didn’t like it, I’d be like, ‘OK, I better get back to the drawing board.’”
