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.
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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.