Yorkshire Heart is easily found just off the A59 around 15 minutes from the centre of York, though if you’re attending one of the Yorkshire Heart Brewery Tour events make sure to keep an eye out for the sign specifically to that rather than confidently telling your driver it’s another couple of hundred yards (oops). Unsurprisingly the event starts in the brewery itself, so decent footwear is wise as is a jumper if it’s chilly. Tim from Yorkshire Heart welcomed us with the first of the evening’s samples, a refreshing pale ale, and started to tell us about the history of Yorkshire Heart, with plenty of info forthcoming about both the brewery and vineyard’s operation and history. We then ascended to the second level of the brewery to have a nosey through some hops and malt, going through the proportions one might use to brew different styles of beer… accompanied by a second sample of course!

By this point, it was getting a bit chilly so we retired to the cafe for more beer sampling and supper. At £20 a head including 6 halves of beer and dinner I wasn’t expecting a feast so the hearty platter that arrived was a nice surprise and perfect for soaking up the beer. I’d neglected to forewarn the team at Yorkshire Heart that my companion for the evening was gluten free which, while sub-optimal for her, gave me free choice of the snacks while the team sourced something more appropriate for her.

The Yorkshire Heart Brewery Tour is a great fun, informative evening which features a good selection of quality beers and a window into the operations of the brewery. It also introduced me to some interesting beers outside of their more conventional range such as their 7% “Brut IPA” which benefits from a secondary fermentation with sparkling wine yeast. I couldn’t resist taking home one of those to enjoy as well as a “Pinot Porter”, each a bargain at £5 for a 750ml bottle. Yorkshire Heart have shown themselves quite able to run a brewery knocking out cracking beers and with the Yorkshire Heart Brewery Tour equally adept at running a p*ss up in it.

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3 Non Beards has been set up by friends Andy Aspin, Paul Marshall and Jason Simpson and will officially launch next week.  

The brewery is based in the basement of The Rook & Gaskill in Lawrence Street, making it the only brew pub in York and meaning customers can now enjoy beer produced right below their feet. 

Mr Marshall is also landlord of the pub, which will host the launch party next Wednesday evening. There will be four of the brewery’s first beers on the bar and competitions and giveaways. 

Mr Marshall and his wife Mandy have run the pub since 2013, and had The Waggon and Horses across the road for five years before that. They have won York Camra’s Pub Of The Year Award once at the Waggon and twice at The Rook and Gaskill, and Mr Marshall said he had long wanted to open a brewery as well. 

“Since we came here, I’ve known I wanted to do this as well,” he said. “I have spent days with some of the fantastic brewers who supply the pub and it became an ambition to be able to have beer on the bar that we had made ourselves right here.”

“Beer has advanced so much in the last ten years and people always want different things, and this will now be the only brew pub in York.”

The brewery will supply some beer festivals but the beers will not be available in other pubs in the city. 

Mr Simpson works for a software company that he had founded then sold, and Mr Aspin is a microbiologist at FERA at Sand Hutton. They began home-brewing together five years ago and wanted to progress, and said the opportunity to team up with Mr Marshall and go commercial was ideal.

“To be able to produce beer that we like and have it available in a pub that we like is fantastic,” said Mr Simpson. “When we put the first pilot beer on the bar and it flew out in three hours, it was a phenomenal feeling.”

Mr Aspin thanked companies that had helped them to establish, including local breweries Bad Seed, Brass Castle, Brew York and Turning Point, and ES Fabrications, who made the brewing equipment. 

The brewery launch event is in the pub from 7pm in December 18. The first beers include a pale ale called Misty Mountain Hop, a vanilla porter called Trade Winds, a cherry beer called Serendipity and a grapefruit IPA called Forbidden Fruit.

Mr Marshall said: “Come along for a unique evening, to try brand new beers from the smallest commercial brewery in York.”

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The new upstairs beer hall will serve 40 beers at a time and will also include the new Born To Lose Burger Kitchen run by street-food chef Mark Hill, known in York for his Street Cleaver business.

The venue will open to the public on Friday 24th August, following a private event the night before for some of the 661 people who invested in the brewery’s crowdfunding drive, which helped make the expansion possible.

At the public launch, there will be 60 beers: 40 in the new hall and 20 in the original downstairs bar. Half will be from Brew York, with the rest carefully selected from other breweries. There will also be live music from the Disco Daze DJ collective, customers will be able to try the new ‘hoptails’ (beer cocktails), and visitors will get a sneak preview of the Brew York shop, which will open at the front of the building in a few weeks.

Mark’s opening menu will have three main burger options: The Bourdain, The Big Cheese and The Reuben, with vegetarian and vegan options also available. His eclectic range of small dishes will include kimchi mac cheese, pig’s head crubeen donut, chicken skin tostadas, and a sharing platter of Korean-inspired dishes.

Lee Grabham and Wayne Smith, co-founders of Brew York, are looking forward to welcoming existing and new customers.

Lee said: “We’ve had a fantastic first two years, and now we are building a venue that any city would be proud of. Places like Leeds and Manchester have some incredible venues, and this will be up there with those. To have been able to do this so soon, here in the city-centre, is a dream come true.”

Wayne said: “It’s going to be really different from anything else in York, and will be fantastic. Because we have direct relationships with lots of other breweries, we will be able to get hold of exclusive and very rare beers that people will really want to try.”

For the Friday and Saturday, admission is by ticket only, to manage capacity. Tickets are £5, which includes a glass and a £3 drink. To book, visit buytickets.at/brewyork

The beer hall will also be an evolving street art space, in collaboration with The Art of Protest gallery in Little Stonegate. Giant works will be painted on the hall walls, before eventually being painted over with new pieces.

Mark said: “This will be something completely fresh for York. I’ll be using local suppliers and ingredients and people will be able to see everything we’re doing. Venues like this are working all over the world but there hasn’t been one in York yet. But there should be no reason York should be any different to places from LA to Leeds, where you can get a great burger, amazing fresh food and a brilliant local beer. We will be working together and with other businesses to really get the best out of our industries and doing a lot of work to showcase the best beer and food pairings.

“We’ve worked hard to make sure this is the right thing for York as well as for us, and feel York really needs something like this. And we won’t be secretive about what we’re doing. If people want the recipes, they can have them.”

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I didn’t manage the smoothest start to the day, singularly failing to obtain anything for breakfast due to the (early for me) 8am start time. I appreciate this was an unusually late start to a brew day, but I make no apologies for enjoying my lie ins before the arrival of a baby disrupts everything! Thankfully there was plentiful tea on offer to combat the early(ish) start as we chatted about what the day would involve. The group of roughly twenty included a range of beer bloggers and lucky fans who were happy to take the opportunity to get hands on with their favourite brewers.

The new version of the Tonkoko Stout we were working on was destined to be bigger and bolder than the previous iterations, kicking over the 10% marker on its way to the pump. After we’d worked our way through many cups of tea, the day started with the depositing of a huge amount of grain into a hopper ready to mix with water. The two batches of grain we worked through over the course of the day came to around a thousand kilos so there was a lot of heavy lifting involved both immediately, and correspondingly later to remove the grain from the mash tun later.

Previous discussions with the brewers at Brew York have reinforced their scientific approach to brewing, ensuring that the water they use is of the optimum pH balance and has the right mineral content for the intended beer. After a chat about how they achieve this, we sat down to get to grips with the rest of the ingredients that would make up the flavours for the beer to be infused with. The group boldly proclaimed that there would be no short cuts and so the tonka beans would be individually crushed then chopped by hand. Tonka beans give a flavour that’s hard to articulate, reminiscent of vanilla, but with a much greater depth of flavour. It turned out that chopping 750g of Tonka beans takes quite a long time, but we were through them in just a matter of hours along with the vanilla pods that would also go into the infusion.

With all the success they’ve already achieved, it’s been great to read in recent weeks about plans to expand Brew York into the adjacent former boxing gym. The spaces that the guys are taking over are impressively large and will be a fantastic addition to the food, drink and social scene in York. There’s space for plenty of visiting street food pop ups, but the headline food offering will come from Street Cleaver, who’s certain to come up with something unique and intriguing.

The rest of the day took in plenty more shovelling, cleaning, heating and moving of liquid between vessels as is required in the brewing of beer. If you want to read a much more technical account of the day, The Drunken Goat (who joined the day) has written an exhaustive account that’s worth a look. We finished up by naming the brew Empress Tonkoko and contemplating tasting it when the brewery celebrates its second birthday in April. That’s not the end of the story for this batch though as the majority of it will be aged in whiskey casks for a year ready for Tryanuary 2019 – definitely one not to miss out on! It goes without saying that we ended the day by thanking our hosts over a beer. I can’t wait to check out the Empress Tonkoko in a couple of months’ time.

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Riley’s Fish Shack
After receiving praise from Michel Roux Jr and Jay Rayner, it’s no surprise to find a healthy queue at the door of this Tynemouth legend, despite the sign warning of queues regularly exceeding half an hour thoughtfully placed at the top of the stairs descending to it.

There’s a sense of confidence in the operation here that empowers the servers to stop taking orders periodically and hold the queue to make sure that the throughput remains at a level the seating can accommodate; that confidence is an understandable emboldening based on the standard of the food.

There’s no question that this is sensational seafood at a price beyond criticism. I suppose the queue could be off-putting for some, but I thought it was a small compromise given the quality on offer. The mackerel wrap and tandoori monkfish kebab were the epitome of wonderful produce amplified by a lack of unnecessary additions. While they were stunning enough, the wood-roasted cod on puy lentil and pancetta elevated things to an even greater standard. The combination of white, smoke-touched, fish paired with earthy puy lentils and rich pancetta will remain one of the best fish dishes I’ve encountered for some time I suspect. When you take into account the fantastic sourdough and side salads too, that queue becomes no more than an opportunity to narrow down the menu to a manageable amount for a single sitting.

Alnwick Garden Treehouse
Alnwick Garden is a wonderful place to visit on a trip to Northumberland, which seems to add something new with each return, now featuring a poison garden, water sculptures, a bamboo labyrinth and a pleasingly elaborate crazy golf course. The headline food offering from the garden is the Treehouse Restaurant, a large wooden structure accessed by elevated walkways that exude personality. It’s a popular place, so we ended up with a reservation for Sunday lunch at the rather herenorthere time of half past three.

The Sunday roast menu demanded £19.95 for two courses, from which we selected a pickled vegetable salad and salmon and cod fishcakes to start to be followed by roasts of pork belly and lamb leg. The highlight of the meal came early with the salad that set pickled veg, crisp textures and pieces of beetroot to good effect. The remaining dishes ranged from average to pretty good, but it’s hard to be too critical in such a characterful building.

The Ship Inn, Low Newton
A charming pub that brews its own superb beer and serves brilliant crab sandwiches with great views. There’s really nothing more to say. An essential part of any trip to Northumberland.

The Jolly Fisherman, Craster
This was my first visit here and it’s unlikely to be the last. The crab sandwiches looked to be the match of those from the Ship Inn, but we opted for crab soup and a seafood platter. With plenty of salad and hunks of bread, the platter gave ample opportunity to enjoy the prawns, various pates, smoked salmon and herring rollmop which gave rise to discussion on who’d eaten their fair share first. The crab soup pulled off a neat trick by being comforting, warming, subtle and light all in one.

The Dirty Bottles, Alnwick
Named after a local legend attached to this building, the Dirty Bottles offers slow cooked meats, iPad ordering and a self service beer wall that all appeared popular on the Monday evening we visited. Having misjudged our appetites, we went for a sharing platter that we knew would give ample scope for a doggy bag after we’d polished off the mac’ cheese, sweetcorn and a selection of the meats, amongst which the only disappointment was a rather half-hearted cheese burger. The ribs and chicken kebabs were particularly well cooked. This was plenty of food for two at £20.

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Bad Seed
After meeting in the Tap we took the familiar buzz up the A64 to Malton and made ourselves welcome at Bad Seed. Our host Chris leapt into super enthusiastic action, giving plentiful info on the brewing process, that would remain relevant through the subsequent stops, alongside the brewery’s history and ethos. The commitment to flavour above all else shone through along with a strong desire to work with the outlets they supply. We sampled several beers, including their marvellous pales and bold stouts, before some experimental (and rather divisive) sours, the only one not to my palate being a Seville orange IPA reflecting my dislike of fruit beers. I was already well aware of Bad Seed’s reputation and now will be on my shortlist whenever on offer.

Breworks in the Black Swan
Our next destination was the Black Swan in Pickering. Having recently come into new ownership, this historic building now also has its very own microbrewery in an outbuilding, with ‘micro’ being the operative word as we huddled in twos and threes to be taken round the brewing equipment. The family running this spot had a stint brewing in Turkey which they reference in the name of “Istanbul” Pale Ale. It’s early days for these guys as they focus on producing consistent, quality and marketable product for their own pub but the samples we went for all hit the spot, so I’m looking forward to seeing where they go with future brews.

Brass Castle
The last port of call before once again hitting the road for the return journey was the newly opened tap room at Brass Castle back in Malton. An unexpected bonus when we arrived was the presence of a mobile canning operation. Clanging away in the brewery, this tremendously effective and slightly Heath-Robinson looking contraption was a unique insight into the workings of a brewery this size. Being familiar with Brass Castle’s beers, it wasn’t a surprise to find the product up to their usual high standards as we heard passionate arguments for the vegan, un-fined and largely gluten free nature of their beers. Slightly more surprising was my enthusiasm for “Polish Champagne”, a smoked white beer made with Polish hops that proved more accessible than expected with a tremendously well-balanced flavour.

As we made our way back down the A64 toward York, the reflections in the comfortable vehicle were on the breadth and depth of quality we’d seen through the afternoon. All three breweries offered passionate, unique and quality-led views on how to brew beer that came across in both the tours and the tastings. I’ll be astonished if we don’t see this group of breweries continue to prosper and gain even greater reputation for superb beer.

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