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Wakefield CAMRA Homepage                                                                                Wakefield CAMRA Brewery Visits

Old Mill Brewery

Mill Street, Snaith, East Yorkshire DN14 9 HU  (01405)861813  www.oldmillbrewery.co.uk

visited by Wakefield CAMRA 11th March 2010

The brewery building is more than two centuries old and began life as a corn mill and maltings, later becoming a clog sole factory, British Clog Soles Limited one of the two largest in Britain, the soles then being taken by rail over to Lancashire to have uppers added for textile mill workers and miners to wear. The clog-sole pattern room still survives and can be seen on the web album.

The generously equipped brewery has occupied the premises since the 1980s. Beer produced here supplies the company's own houses across Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, of which the nearest are the Kirklands Hotel at Outwood and the Bay Horse at Great Heck. Old Mill beers are often also on sale at the Red Shed in Wakefield and are considered as LocAle in Wakefield City and the Eastern part of our district.

Old Mill Beers are also supplied across the country by major distributors such as Waverley TBS. To avoid the headache of retrieving casks, pay-per-fill "ECasks" are used. Locally, Old Mill, Great Heck and Brown Cow work together on cask recovery.

The new Head Brewer Kevin Mutch has been increasing the company's beer style range and availability to make use of the plant's generous capacity.

 

The nice man in his clean white coat is Head Brewer Kevin Mutch who's been in the brewing trade all his life. For the dozen or so years before returning to hands-on brewing at Old Mill he was in technical services with Coors in Sheffield.

Here Wakefield CAMRA members are being offered samples of pale  and coloured malted barley from Fawcetts of Castleford, along with some fairly unusual malted rye supplied by Simpsons. Old Mill is a big enough brewery to mill its own whole-grain malt.If you grind your own coffee beans you'll understand the thinking behind that.Pelleted hops are used because the looser structure of whole hops would clog up the drain ports of the brewery's big mash tuns.

Most of the brewery's fermenters are pretty big, and, as you can see, they do have one absolute monster plus a relative baby with which it's just about possible to make test brews of six barrels.

Many many more pictures of the brewery and its wonderful brewery tap, the Brewers Arms, can be viewed on this PicasaWeb Album