Whitby Brewery initially began life on Larpool Industrial Estate but after three years, moved to its current site at the home of a former dairy farm.
Apart from the wide range of beers, you can also enjoy live music as well as the Made in Whitby Festivals which showcase local independent businesses and their products.
And on the day we visited to take a look behind the scenes, an eerie mist shrouded the abbey, making it barely visible for an hour or so before finally lifting and offering the stunning panoramas that prove such a magnet to visitors.
Director Richard Wells said: “We’re busy and all’s going well, we’ve had a lot of support from the local community and people seem to like the gigs.
“We have the Made in Whitby Festival, an initiative to support local makers.
“Making things grounds you in reality, it goes deeper than making things – it’s healthy for the soul, so we’re trying to encourage that.”
The brewery is blossoming but as Richard admits, it started as a hobby “that got out of hand”.
“I wanted to build canoes and brewed in my spare time,” he said.
“I did home brewing in Sleights in my shed and The Plough pub in the village started buying it.
“It just evolved from there.”
Richard said people are often surprised at how many processes are involved in brewing the perfect pint.
In simplistic terms, it’s extracting sugar out of grains and fermenting it with yeast – but that wouldn’t be doing their hard work justice!
Malted barley and wheat goes into the mash tun, where sugar is refined.
The sparge process sees sugars rinsed into a kettle which boils the solution with hops, before the mixture is cooled down in a heat exchanger.
Yeast is added into a fermentation vessel where sugars are fermented into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
It is chilled then either packaged into traditional casks, or chill-filtered at -2C and packaged into bottles, cans or kegs, completing the process (the beer is chilled before it is packaged).
Richard said something else many people aren’t aware of is just how much beer is produced, with an overall capacity of 90,000 litres – equivalent to the amount of liquid used in 450 car washes.
"People see the two tanks and think that’s it but most of it is round the back,” he said.
“We produce more beer than Cantillon Brewery in Brussels – and that’s a big brewery!
“We do everything in-house and that’s something not every brewery does, but we do all the canning, kegging, bottling, filtration and quality control which sets us apart.”
So what are the favourites among the brewery’s drinkers?
”Abbey Blonde is popular,” said Richard.
“We recently released Whitby Black – a dry Irish nitro stout – and Whitby White – a Bavarian white beer – are also proving popular.
“The aim for us is to continue to grow, really, trying to improve efficiency and keep going.
“Four new tanks are arriving soon to cater for supply.”
This weekend’s gigs
Friday, February, 20 – Jet Blax, 7pm to 9pm
Saturday, February 21 – The Yabbas, 7pm to 9pm
