'There’s nothing better than watching people buying your beer' - East Yorkshire farmer who turned his hand to brewing

“Back in the 70s and 80s, I always had a notebook and calculator in the tractor with me. It’s a very undervalued and good use of your time, when you’re alone and can just process thoughts and go down rabbit holes, metaphorically. It’s a time when you can explore daft things without explaining to others.

Tom and Gill took over the running of the farm in the mid-80s, marrying in 1983, and while Hunmanby Grange has always been predominantly a crop growing farm they had several incursions into livestock, but it was the use of what the farm already had that led Tom to pursuing brewing.

“In the late 90s agriculture was going through a rough time, wheat was being sold at just £63 per tonne, which had been £124 when we’d married fifteen years previously, everyone was looking at converting barns into things like holiday cottages, farm shops and caravan parks, none of which appealed to me. The girls (Tom’s daughters) will tell you I’m a grumpy old thing and that I didn’t want to deal direct with public, but over the years since I’ve certainly done the hard yards behind stalls in food markets and farmers markets.

“We had boreholes for our water and grew barley. I found a brewing consultant, David Smith in York, and my fellow farming friend Derek (Gray) went with me to see him as I valued his opinion greatly and said if he thought I was barking up the wrong tree I’d put it to bed.

Derek and his wife Katrina joined with Tom and Gill in the early years that saw them take on and rename the pub in Thwing as The Falling Stone after a meteorite that had fallen on Derek & Katrina’s farm.

“I remember the first night we sold beer in local pubs and the amazing reaction. There’s nothing better than watching people buying your beer, actually there is, when they go for a second pint. It has such an effect on your mental wellbeing. Derek wouldn’t have gone into it without me, but I couldn’t have done it without him.

After years of having alternately or concurrently, pigs on bed and breakfast accommodation, free range hens producing eggs, and a suckler herd, plus the brewery growing from strength to strength Tom decided, on advice again, this time from agricultural consultants Brown & Co, to rationalise.

“I was a typical farmer, trying to do absolutely everything and ending up doing most of it not as well as I could. Brown & Co did an appraisal and as a reult we decided to go out of livestock.

“Our farm machinery was getting tired and we knew we had to concentrate on grain and that allowed us to concentrate on taking the brewery to the next level with my daughter Kate and her husband-to-be Alex Balchin having joined us.

Wold Top Brewery has since won countless admirers and produces a fantastic range of beers; and Tom went one step further with his malting barley and water when the first release of Filey Bay single malt whisky from Spirit of Yorkshire, Yorkshire’s first single malt whisky distillery, had its first release in 2019 and is now run by Tom’s former rugby playing mate David Thompson ably assisted by Tom’s youngest daughter Jenni as marketing director.

“The brewery and the distillery were originally there to underpin the farm,” says Tom. “But they are much more than that now and mean such a lot to many people and with both businesses running very successfully, I have been able to return to concentrating on farming. The girls took a lot of weight off my shoulders by running the brewery and distillery when Gill was very poorly and I wasn’t in a rush to go back.

“We farm across around 575 acres and we currently have 80 acres of winter barley going in, 100 acres of winter wheat, 110 acres of two year legume fallow and 200 acres of spring barley, with rest down to grass.

“We deal with local maltsters Muntons at Flamborough directly as we have for the last 10 years sending everything over to them during autumn. They ringfence it, to keep it separate, so that we can assure that it is wholly our own barley being used in our beer and whisky.

“It gets delivered back to the farm. We require around 400 tonnes of malted barley (malt) which equates to 500 tonnes of the barley that goes to Muntons. Any surplus goes commercially somewhere else. We grow Laureate spring barley and SY Vessel winter barley. Up until three years ago no winter barley was approved for malt distilling but Vessel has been proven to work really well for single malt whisky.

“That’s why we now grow 80 acres of winter and 200 of spring barley instead of 280 spring. It’s risk management. If the winter barley is good and spring not quite then we can bend with the weather.

Tom says he’s made changes to his cropping system in recent times.

“We’ve been putting cover crops in, between successive spring barley crops, and we’ve managed to cut down almost completely on artificial fertilisers of phosphate and potash. Our soil structure has improved incredibly and soil organic matter has gone up by 3 per cent.

“Unless absolutely necessary we don’t invert the soil. I reserve the right to plough. We are following regenerative principles and I’m passionate about that but it is important that we can react when needed.

“We shallow ploughed one field last year, the only ploughing in five years, because we found it was starting to get grass weed probs, but we don’t have any blackgrass problems on the farm, no ryegrass either. We do have some sterile brome proving incredibly resilient and we are trying all sorts of ideas. I bought a direct drill in 2019 and that gets me out for a period during autumn and spring, but I have a mobile phone now rather than a pen and paper.

Tom has recently been considering his next big decision.

“We advertised for someone to run the farm and have recruited somebody to take over soon. I’m hoping to have an 18-24 months handover and then the new farm manager will run the farm in conjunction with meetings with myself and the girls.

“Any kind of succession planning is about trying to get it right. I’ve taken advice. It’s important to stress that the girls are well capable of taking it on but they already doing a great job running businesses.

“My aim is that the new farm manager drives the farm forward as part of the brewery-distillery-farm triangle.

“Personally, I want the grazing of livestock again to be one of the remits, which fits with our regenerative principles.