The Whalebone Brewery 165 Wincolmlee Hull HU2 0PA, phone, 01482 327980 claims at the moment to be Hull's only brewery. It is housed in 2 small rooms at the side of Alex and Tina Craig's pub in the old whaling docks district of the city, alongside the River Hull. Whalebone itself isn't actually bone but the baleen (modified teeth) which hung down in the mouths of larger whales to act as strainers for the krill on which they fed. In Victorian times baleen was used for brushes and for the stiffening in corsets, indeed for a lot of purposes where today we'd use plastics.

The Whalebone Pub on a November night. The Quaffale website has a daytime picture. part of the L-shaped interior, occupying a corner site there are few right angles ion the building enough photos and lithographs  line the walls to make the place a museum of faces and places in the city's heyday
no new equipment is used in the making of this beer saucepan lids are the covers for the inspection hatches brewer Alex Craig proudly shows the presentation certificate from Wakefield CAMRA

Click on any photo above to see a higher resolution version.
Whalebone Beers at Merrie City 2004
Diana Mild 3.3% traditional low gravity Hull Brewery style dark mild: We now know that the Diana was a whaling ship that failed to return from Arctic waters before the Arctic winter - when she did get free the following spring less than half her crew had survived. The Diana was the first whaling ship to be fitted with an auxiliary engine . She was the last to work out of Hull and eventually foundered in 1869.
Neck Oil 3.9% a budget priced light brown bitter using 2 English malts & 3 English hop varieties: we now know that prime whale oil came from the blubber about the neck of the whale (no neck is externally visible if you think about it), as well as neck oil being what we always thought. Did you know that whales evolved from the ancestors of artiodactyls, a group that includes hippopotamuses, cows, pigs, and deer?

Wakefield CAMRA Homepage                                               Wakefield CAMRA Brewery Visits