Yorkshire Craft Beers: The secret pub inside a historic flour mill

Queen's Mill Castleford may be home to the world's largest stone grinding mill but it is also the home of an independent craft beer company.

Transcript

00:00So we started five and a half years ago, just got made redundant, decided to do something

00:07completely different. And this probably couldn't be further away from what I was doing before, but

00:12yeah. What were you doing before? I was a data and planning manager. So as I would call it a

00:17spreadsheet monkey. So we did lots of sort of big numbers on spreadsheets. And yeah,

00:23Excel makes you look very clever, but if you know the right order to put things in,

00:26it's yeah, straightforward. What inspired you to set up Yorkshire Craft Beers? I used to do

00:32a beer festival with a brewery called Revolutions Brewing that were based in Castleford.

00:37And I liked their world, didn't really know much about craft beer, but wanted to, like I say,

00:42do something that was completely different and just thought, you know, step out of the comfort

00:48zone. There's never a good time, but you know, so I got made redundant and thought, just give it a

00:54go. And what is the history of where you are now? So this is a, you know, the mill itself,

01:02the Queen's Mill is owned by the Castleford Heritage Trust, who are a local charity.

01:06There's been history of milling in and around this area since Roman times. This mill itself

01:11was rebuilt after a fire during Queen Victoria's Jubilee. I'm not sure which one it is, but that's

01:18why it's, you know, was renamed the Queen's Mill. It was Allenson's Mill sort of originally,

01:25which was, you know, a big Yorkshire brand of Allenson's, you know, when we're now taken out,

01:30as they used to say, ADM Milling bought it, decided they didn't want an old fashioned mill,

01:37they wanted modern mills. So they returned it back to the Canal and River Trust, who were the

01:42owners at the time, who then sold it to the Castleford Heritage Trust. But quite confusing,

01:48but yeah. And how did you come about renovating? Because it was a former forklift store.

01:52The shop itself was a former forklift store. So I, about 11 years ago, I got a bit poorly.

01:59My job felt sort of quite, it was all numbers and money and money, money. And I wanted to do

02:03something that felt like it meant something. So I got involved with the charity that owned the mill.

02:09I've been here for sort of 11 years. And then like I say, five, six years ago,

02:13got made redundant and decided to do something different. I wanted to stay connected to the mill

02:19and thought what better place to set up a business. And what's business like now?

02:24Yeah, it's good. It's like everything, it has its highs and lows. You know, we've been going for

02:29nine months when the world went crazy. But we had what people wanted, which was interesting

02:34things to drink at home. So we sold a lot of beer. But this was only part time at the time. So

02:39luckily, it meant that it could sustain sort of like the family. And then we reinvested the,

02:45you know, the money that we'd made into, you know, creating the sort of like the bar side of things.

02:50We were just a shop initially. You know, we have a full mobile bar business. So we build bars in

02:55fields for smaller, large sort of events and organizations and culprits and weddings and

03:01birthdays. And, you know, some months are good, some months are bad. But overall, you know, we

03:08do our thing.