North Yorkshire Brewing Co.

Sightseeing around North Yorkshire can make for thirsty work! So we have the perfect way to end the day, and it comes in the form of the North Yorkshire Brewing Co. (we thought you might like this one).
From the Best Bitter to Dizzy Dick, there is something we are sure will quench your thirst!


About the North Yorkshire Brewing Co.

The North Yorkshire Brewing company is an independent micro brewery which has been brewing speciality beers since 1989. It's based at Pinchinthorpe Hall near Guisborough, a privately owned Country House which is situated in the North Yorkshire Moors National Park, an area of outstanding natural beauty.

Our hand-crafted beers are brewed from the finest ingredients, we have over 20 varieties of beers including Cereal Killer, Crystal Tips, Dizzy Dick, Golden Ginseng, Honey Bunny, Love Muscle, Rocket Fuel, White Lady, Best Bitter, Blond, Fools Gold, Prior's Ale, Flying Herbert, Christmas Herbert, Boro Best, Ruby Ale, Lord Lee's.
Our bottles of fine beer make a great gift, or just to enjoy with friends and family.

The bottled beers have been bottle conditioned and therefore the beer is in contact with a greater percentage of yeast. This causes bottled beers and cask ales of the same name to have a different taste. It is a constant source of amazement how the same beer can have two entirely different flavours.

All of our bottled beers have a characteristic yeast flavour, not unlike some continental beers. The light coloured beers have a 'lager like' taste produced by using pale ale malt and because they sit on a slight yeast bed in the bottle. Our own yeast gives these beers a special and distinctively refreshing taste. The dark coloured beers are more rounded in flavour because the yeast character has been balanced by the smooth taste produced by the addition of chocolate malt.

The Brewing Process

Ingredients
Quality ingredients are paramount; we source the very best organic malt and hops available. The Malt is an old Scottish variety called Marris Otter ~ a dark chocolate malt is used for the dark beers. The Hops are varieties Goldings and Northdown.

Mashing
The Mashing process involves the crushed melted barley being added to the hot liquor gently paddled to extract maximum brewing sugars.

Sparging
After a short stand the first wort run is transferred to the copper dissolving vessel and it is then that the sparging process begins. Hot liquor is sprayed over the mash to extract the sugars.

Boiling & Hops
When boiling point is reached, a sample is taken to check the gravity which will determine the final strength of the beer. Hops are added at this stage to bring about bitterness and aroma to the beer.

Chilling & Transfer
After 1 hour of boiling the wort is transferred to the fermenting vessel via our wort cooler which cools the beer from 100°C to 21°C for fermentation.

Yeast
Yeast is added when the fermenting vessel is full. This converts the brewing sugars to carbon dioxide and alcohol. On the 2nd day the yeast is collected from the top of the fermenting beer and is stored for use in future fermentation. After 3 days the beer is cooled for a further 2 days before casking up.

Transfer to Holding Vessels
The beer is filled into casks straight from the fermentation vessel. These can be either 9, 11 or 18 gallons.

Brewery Tours!

If you want to know how it all happens, why not join us on one of our brewery tours, an informative trip round our brewing facilities, a tasting session, and the chance to buy some of our file ales.See how beers are produced using ancient traditions and the finest of ingredients! Tours include an informative and informal tour of our unique Micro Brewery and an opportunity to sample our freshly brewed beers!

If you want to know more about this fantastic brewery and day out, head over to their website at www.nybrewery.co.uk.

Thank you to the North Yorkshire Brewing Co. for supplying us with this content.

Ribblesdale Cheese

If you love cheese as much as we do and fancy a fun family day out, we have just the thing to make your mouth water!
Just up the road in the small market town of Hawes, lies a family run artisan cheese makers...

We are a small, artisan cheese makers, specialising in goats cheese.  We are tucked away at the bottom end of Hawes, North Yorkshire, on a small industrial estate: Upper Wensleydale Business park, next door to the Goodlife and adjacent to the new GTEC building.  It amuses me no end when people ask me: do you make cheese on your farm?  And do you have your own animals?  I am utterly honest and say not any more to both, which is true – my uncle started the business at his farmhouse, now where I live, but telling people that we make cheese on an industrial estate doesn't quite have the same cachet.

In these days of environmental health regulations, this is the best place for us where we can make cheese in the right space, with the right equipment and services, safely and hygienically even if the location is not too photogenic.  My uncle used to have a small herd of goats, but these days, we buy in the region of 180,000 litres of goat milk a year, so we would need over 1,000 goats to satisfy those requirements.  It is a shame that we find ourselves in Wensleydale as opposed to Ribblesdale, where we started, but realistically, there isn't any commercial space big enough for us in Horton in Ribblesdale – and we have already outgrown our space in Hawes and we only have about 2,200 sq. ft!

Ribblesdale Cheese was formed in 1978 by my uncle, Iain Hill, a tall, charismatic Yorkshire man through and through, who moved up to the Yorkshire Dales after engineering a redundancy payment from Lewis’ where he was a store manager.  His initial idea, after buying a dilapidated farm house was to start an outdoor centre for inner city children.  This did not work out.  He tried a few other ideas with little success until his mother, my grandmother who was by then living with my uncle and his children, gave him some money with strict       instructions to ‘do something useful’ with it.                                                      

So, (much to Grandma Hill’s dismay) he bought a pair of goats and named them Victoria and Maude after his mother.  He did not realise that they were in goat as they shortly afterwards produced two fine offspring and milk.  His drinking buddy, the local vet suggested that he make cheese and that is how we started.  Iain built up the herd to around 50 -100 that lived in a barn opposite the farm house, though they were very naughty and kept escaping, causing much chaos and  mayhem around the surrounding fields and annoyance to neighbouring farmers.

Iain perfected his cheese and built a local following which included selling frozen goat milk to Andrew’s girlfriend’s father for his orphan lambs and progressed to local and then national wholesale outlets.  Goat cheese was a relatively new and different phenomenon in the 1980s where cow’s cheese was the norm and many people – and still to this day – won’t eat goat cheese as they are reminded of the sometimes smelly rustic style goat cheese available at French markets; fortunately, public taste is changing and many  now appreciate the health benefits associated with goat cheese.

Eventually, due to arthritis, Iain sold the goats and bought in the goat milk and started to make it at other cheese maker’s premises as his initial home dairy became too small until eventually he contracted out the cheese making process.  Sadly, Iain died in 2006 and was succeeded by his niece, Iona, (that’s me!) who knew absolutely nothing about cheese or cheese making.  It was a steep learning curve!

In 2014, we are a very different business but without losing sight of our  humble and very authentic beginnings.  In 2008, we became cheese makers once more and moved from Horton in Ribblesdale (hence Ribblesdale!) to Hawes to larger premises to create a new dairy and now make hard goat, cow and sheep cheese.  In 2013 we made our first soft goat cheese.

Everything we make is by hand: the milk is stirred by hand, the curd is hand cut, hand shovelled.  Yes, you get big muscles!  A vat takes as long as it takes, there are no set times or schedules.  All of our cheese is made in a long, slow and traditional way to recipes that I have developed.  Many people do not appreciate the time and physical effort involved in cheese making – we can be in at 7am, setting the pasteuriser off and finish washing down at about 4.30pm and if we are making 2,000 litres, we make just 100 cheeses at a time.

Our average make is 1,900 litres of goat milk twice a week throughout the year.  We are busier from January to March when we also make sheep’s cheese and we make like crazy in September and October for Christmas sales.  We make cow’s cheese between once and twice a month and we run cheese making classes which have become very popular and have a waiting list.

We specialise in goat cheese: about 90% of our sales are goat cheese, but we also make award winning sheep cheese, the odd bit of Wensleydale cow’s cheese and, in 2013, we made our first sortie into soft goat cheese making and won a Gold at Nantwich 2013 for our new Goat Curd.  We make about 23 tonnes of cheese a year, not a huge amount, but enough to satisfy our customers.

Our goat’s milk comes from a single herd that are located about an hour and a half away from us, in Lancashire as there are no milking goats available to us in N Yorkshire.  It is single source and excellent quality.  Our ewe’s milk comes from Simon Stott at Laund Farm, Chipping, just over the border in Lancashire who has 400 Friesland sheep and again, this is single source.

Our cow’s milk is from a single pedigree herd of Friesian, Ayrshire and Shorthorn cows just 16 miles away from us.

The cheese we make ourselves includes: Superior Goat, Smoked Superior Goat, Original Goat, (Booths take this cheese), Smoked original Goat, occasionally an unpasteurised goat cheese, a traditional bandaged natural rinded goat cheese, Wensleydale cow cheese, a traditional bandaged Wensleydale, an unpasteurised Wensleydale, our own sheep’s cheese and a soft goat curd.

Other than Booths, we do not sell to supermarkets, only to fine food, deli's and farm shops via our loyal network of wholesale customers.  Good times!

Ribblesdale now do 'one-day' cheese making courses! For more information please go to their website at www.ribblesdalecheese.wordpress.com/the-little-cheese-shop

With thanks to Iona from Ribblesdale Cheese for kindly supplying this content.

Lonely Planet Best in Travel 2014!

We could talk about our love for Yorkshire endlessly, but we are glad our beautiful county has been more widely recognised in a recent guide by Lonely Planet! Lonely Planet was established 40 years ago with the aim to share exciting new places and experiences with the rest of the world, and to give insight in to what the world has to offer to those who perhaps have not yet had the chance to visit these places. The well-known travel guide has now gone on to worldwide success, and therefore we are delighted for Yorkshire being in their Best in Travel Guide.

The recent travel booklet has named Yorkshire as one of the top 3 places to visit in 2014!
The rugged moorlands, heritage towns and 'cosy pubs' were highlighted alongside the arrival of the Tour de France in July as some of the main 'sights to make you feel small'.
The success of some of Yorkshire's most famous athletes was also outlined in the guide including Jessica Ennis, cyclist Ed Clancy, and boxer Nicola Adams who all did incredibly well in the 2012 Olympics - securing 7 gold medals for Great Britain! In addition to this, the North Yorkshire town of Harrogate was also voted the happiest place in Britain, and the county now celebrates Yorkshire Day on August 1st each year.
If you're a self confessed foodie (like us) you will be pleased to hear that Yorkshire offers more Michelin-starred restaurants than any other county outside of London.

So our next question to you is - when are you coming to stay? Here at Cedar Retreats we offer luxury lodges in a natural retreat surrounded by the beautiful North Yorkshire countryside. We offer 2 and 3 bedroom lodges suitable for the whole family, with a whole host of activities right on your doorstep! And for those of you who have already fallen in love with the area like we have, we now offer you ownership of land and property on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales. There are three options of ownership ranging from an attractive investment through renting out your lodge, a holiday or second home, or a mix of the two! As an investment property you can expect a 7% return, and a dedicated management team available 365 days a year! For more infomation please call us on 01677 470284, or you can send us an e-mail to enqueries@cedarretreats.co.uk, or visit our website at www.cedarretreats.co.uk.

Castles of North Yorkshire

North Yorkshire is filled with diverse heritage sites,  many of which boast some of the UK's most magnificent castles that offer a great family day out with lots to explore! And here we have compiled a quick list of some of our favourite sites.


So first on our list is Scarborough Castle which boasts an impressive 2,500 years of rich history!
Take in the fantastic views of the Yorkshire coast from this spectacular royal settlement which was once a fortress turned battle scarred ruin.

Richmond Castle is situated above the river Swale and dates back as one of the oldest stone fortresses in Britain! The castle has undergone 9 centuries of development and now stands at 30 metres high. The market town of Richmond also offers some great Georgian architecture if you fancy a stroll.

Ripley Castle is located 3 miles from Harrogate and is open to visitors year round. The castle also holds numerous events through out the year such as archery, falconry and boasts magnificent grounds with lakes, deer and extensive walled gardens. The village of Ripley is a model town with pretty little shops and museums.


Bolton Castle is situated in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire and originated as a very grand family home completed in 1399 and is still under the ownership of Lord Bolton. With almost all rooms open to the public you will get a real feel of the life of past inhabitants.

Skipton Castle is a medieval settlement built in 1090 by Robert de Romille and still stands preserved over the past 900 years! The castle once served as a protecting gateway to the town with two watch towers looking over the high street.

For further information on any of the castles mentioned in this post, please visit the Welcome to Yorkshire website at www.yorkshire.com/what-to-do/heritage/castles-and-ruins where you will find all visitor information and guides.