Down on the farm

High House Farm is a microbrewery and working farm in rural Northumberland. Ted Bruning went there.

Steve Urwin never really planned to become a brewer. He was quite happy running the 200-acre family farm at Matfen on Hadrian’s Wall, which he was just taking over from his dad, Geoff, and where he grew wheat and barley and ran a small beef herd and a flock of sheep.

But in 2001 foot and mouth disease struck, and Steve realised that he needed another string to his bow if the family’s future at High House Farm, which they had owned since 1966, was to be assured.

At the time the Hadrian’s Wall Walk had just been completed, so the Urwins were quite used to casual visitors and serious ramblers hiking past their farmyard in the rolling Northumbrian hills. Something in the tourism line, was the obvious direction in which to diversify.

But how to create something different in a district already awash with farm shops, farm B&Bs, farm campsites, petting farms, and every other known variant on the farm-based tourist attraction? Well, Steve liked his beer. And he had a pretty shrewd idea that visitors to the region liked their beer, too, and would be keen to add a farm-based brewery to their itineraries.

So High House Farm Brewery was planned from the first not just as a brewery but as a brewery with visitors’ centre, bar, shop, tearoom, function room as well – everything for the tourist, in fact, except perhaps a campsite.

And local residents welcomed the plan too, because it offered them a year-round social centre in an area where many facilities close in winter.

English Heritag.....

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By Ted Bruning

Section : Beer Micro

Page number : 56