BrewDog Carlisle

Built

Opened 25 January 2019

Gone

Closed March 2026

There now

Bees Knees

Address

36–38 Botchergate

Where exactly

The site of the present Bees Knees.

Seven years, start to finish. BrewDog took a fifteen-year lease on the ground floor of 36-38 Botchergate from 20 September 2018, at £20,000 a year; the building is a three-storey commercial block, given as 1911 in the sale particulars. It opened on 25 January 2019, the company's first new UK bar of that year and its forty-third, with room for 240 and twenty-two draught lines, and with the co-founder James Watt namechecking the city's brewing past: Carlisle, he said, had a long history of brewing, and the Great Border City had been in their sights for some time.

The lease had a break clause in 2023 that BrewDog did not use. It closed at the start of March 2026, when the company went into administration and the administrators, AlixPartners, shut thirty-eight bars at once; the brewing side went to Tilray Brands for £33 million. The fitted-out bar sold in August 2026 for £205,000 and is being refitted as Bees Knees; the new owners found it much as the last shift had left it, with beer still in the fridge.

Also lost on Botchergate

• The Albert Hotel
• The Midland Railway Tavern
• Deakin's Vaults
• The Albion Tavern
• The Earl Grey
• Mood
• The Las Vegas Strip
• Buzz Bingo
• The Crown
• Terminal
• The Hare & Hounds
• The Queen Adelaide
• Talk of the Border
• The Robin Hood Inn
• The Albert Tavern
• The Golden Quoit
• The Waggon and Horses
• The Northumberland Arms
• The Saddle Inn
• United Services Club

29 other lost pubs stood within 250 m of here. See them on the map

Still serving, near where it stood

• Bees Knees

  City Centre
  0 maway

• Footloose

  City Centre
  10 maway

• Woodrow Wilson

  City Centre
  10 maway

• Thirty Two

  City Centre
  20 maway