Gary Oldershaw started brewing with beer kits when he was 17 and now, with his wife Diane, produces about 36,000 gallons of real ale a year. They supply pubs both locally and as far afield as Yorkshire, Norwich, Staffordshire and Hertfordshire.

The brewery stands adjacent to the family home in Harrowby just outside Grantham.

When Gary took a redundancy deal from BT in 1996 to set up the brewery with his wife Diane and two small daughters people said they were mad. But Gary using his expertise as a planning tactician with BT studied the market and contacted potential outlets and decided to take the plunge.

Brewing beer for a living had not been a lifelong ambition but was perhaps something which had spent several years fermenting in Gary’s mind. The final decision was made to set up a brewery after building a small full mash hobby brewery in an old wash house at the rear of a former home in Kimberley, Nottingham. Here Gary was making beer as good or better than other commercially produced beers.

With the ‘good life’ idea in the back of their minds, they used the £30,000 redundancy cheque and another £30,000 to set up the brewery from their new home in Harrowby rather than moving onto an industrial estate.

Much of the equipment came from Shires Brewery in Bedfordshire which by coincidence had also been run by two BT engineers on a part-time basis but it had become too much for them and they had decided to close down. The brewery was built during the middle of 1996 and after trials the first beers were sold in January 1997. The first two beers were called ‘First Edition’ and ‘Liberation’.

Over the years the plant has been improved and extended