The Early Days.
The idea of Brass Castle was born in a Manhattan apartment and on the brewhouse floor of Triumph Brewing in Princeton, amidst the US craft beer revolution. Bad Kitty was the second batch ever brewed, in the garage of a Yorkshire house, outside Coastguard shifts – and went straight to York CAMRA beer festival, where it won champion Locale. We found out that the local Halifax Estate had an old copper brewkit that they functioned once a year – and permission was gained to use it.
The Garrowby Brewhouse needed a full clean up and redecoration – but by now Brass Castle had two owners rather than just one. As a 4bbl brewkit, Garrowby was a step up from the garage brewery but still rudimentary. The Hot Liquor Tank was also the copper/kettle, and the mash tun was also the fermenter. That meant one brew a week around Coastguard shifts and a hard-worked brewday. To achieve 5bbl batches for bottling runs, Brass Castle went on to brew occasionally at the Goodmanham Arms plant. Finally, a space was found in Yorkshire’s Food Capital, and today’s brewhouse was built into place.
THE NEXT STEP
With money cobbled together from family and friends, Brass Castle set up in Malton in 2014 with a simple PBC brewkit – manual but functional. Beer awards continued to come thick and fast, and the team began to grow. Over time, new tanks arrived and a Taphouse was established next door. The brewery turned its attention to making lagers and brewed the UK’s champion lager in both 2016 and 2017. With Bad Seed Brewery also down the road in Malton, the BEERTOWN festival was established. Brass castle began to work with NERAX in the USA and became a regular importer of American cask beers.
The brewery has always pushed itself to brew interesting beers, under the very deliberate constraint of doing so without the use of animal products. In turn, this caused Brass Castle to develop a house yeast strain and specialised processes that could guarantee the final product. From December 2017, every beer brewed at Brass Castle has been based on a gluten-free beer recipes – on the basis that beer should be made available to as many people as possible. In 2018, the brewery invested in canning line and carbonation tanks, to spread the beers further than they have gone before.
2018 - 2023
Our canning line installation in December 2018 couldn’t have come at a better time, as just over one year later, the world ground to a halt in an event unlike anything we’ve seen and are unlikely see again in our lifetimes – the Covid pandemic. Our business, like uncountable others, had to adapt and overcome hurdles we could never have anticipated to stay afloat. Without the unwavering support of our valued friends and customers both within our local community and nationwide, and the unyielding efforts of our team, we wouldn’t have made it through. We are forever grateful to our team and to our customers for continuing to believe in us, and we hope we continue to serve you for a long time to come.
In 2023 we took the plunge and revamped our brewhouse, selling our beloved old brewkit and replacing it with some more state of the art equipment – essentially doubling our brewing capacity and giving us the incredible opportunity to begin certifying all of our beers as gluten-free, not just our canned range and our kegged Hoptical Illusion.
Where are we now?
Brass Castle is firmly established in Malton, and in the UK as a leading provider of vegan and gluten-free beers, with customers in the furthest reaches of the UK and even overseas. We love what we do, and we’re very grateful to be cheered on our way by our local community. Like any small brewery, we’re bursting at the seams and could always do with more space – aquisition of a new warehouse space and a new brew kit has gone some way to relieving the pressure, but a sliver more space would never go amiss. We’re facing all the pressures of small UK breweries: undervalued cask beer, late payment from customers, diminishing value of the pound sterling, a saturated market, pub ties, fewer people drinking beer, not to mention still reeling from the after effects of the pandemic etc, etc. That just means that we have to work hard to ensure that our beer remains amongst the best out there, all the while continuing to remind people how fabulous beer is – its important community and nutritional role – and enjoying what we do. There are a lot of challenges out there and we’re often outnumbered – but rarely outgunned.
What’s next? Who knows! But we’ll have some fun finding out, and there will always be goodwill with us if the recent past is anything to go by. We’re constantly looking for new opportunities and challenges – and we always have our eyes on new spaces to grow into. Our recent brewery expansion has been a dream come true, but we would also very much like to enhance our Taphouse with food offerings and more space for community events too. If you think there’s an opportunity for a bit of fun that we’re not seeing – then please drop us a line.