West Walls Brewing Co.

History

Opened Opened 2024

Opened

2024; brewing on site from June 2024

Was

The Twisted Wheel nightclub

Kit

1000L brewhouse, two fermenters, three unitanks

This one closes the circle. Carlisle was a brewing city. Caldewgate was full of breweries, the Carlisle Brewery Company owned pubs before nationalisation, and then the State Management Scheme took the brewing itself and ran it for fifty-seven years. After the scheme came the big brewers, and decades with no brewing in the city centre at all, until West Walls put it back in 2024 as Carlisle's first city-centre microbrewery.

It's in the old Twisted Wheel, so the building carries a lost-nightlife story of its own: the club, the Wheel, shut for good in 2008. Fergus and Joe took the lease in 2024 and opened the taproom on 29 June that year, brewing on site from that June, with exposed brick, a fire and the brewing kit in plain view, and it was Solway CAMRA's Spring Pub of the Season in 2025.

They brew, package and serve in the same room: a 1000-litre brewhouse, two fermenters and three unitanks, with every stage from mash to cask and keg done on the premises. Four real ales, twelve craft lines, pizza by the slice.

It doesn't stand alone. Its beers turn up at the Thin White Duke and the Scott & Brassey, and the wider revival includes Carlisle Brewing Co. and Great Corby, whose beers appear at the Beehive, the Griffin and the Wheatsheaf.

Widely repeated locally, but we haven't found a source for it yet. Know one?