Edinburgh-based Closet Brewing places an emphasis on quality vegan beers, the queer community and keeping a local-minded, outgoing approach at the centre of their mission. The brewery, founded by Lucy Stevens and Lizzie Stevens use unique flavours and innovative techniques to create beers that are, at their heart, a lot of fun. Here, co-founder Lucy helps chart their journey to-date.

Seven years ago, I was brewing my very first beers in a large plastic bucket in the cupboard of my first flat in Leith.

It was this cupboard that would later provide my wife and I with the name of our brewery; Closet Brewing.

Fast-forward to 2023, through Covid, countless batches of good (and less good) home-brewed beer, and my own ‘coming out’ journey, I would finally leave my cushy nine-to-five to embark on the reckless (and occasionally misguided) journey of making “Brewer” my full time job.

The last two years have been a rollercoaster to say the least….

Growing the fledgling brewery has often involved late nights and long weekends, and we’re not quite out of the woods yet, but we’re finally starting to carve out our space in the beer scene.

Closet Brewing started, literally, out of our house in July 2022. After a good four years of homebrewing and a lot of googling about the requirements for starting a brewery in your home, and then several forms, and a surprisingly straight-forward visit from the council we were brewing.

Those first few batches were just 30L each, canned and labelled by hand, and sold to local independent bottle shops.

The learning curve was steep, and I will be eternally grateful to the bottle shops and pubs who supported us from the beginning, despite the various challenges we went through as such a small business.

Almost to my amazement, the beer was good enough to generate far more demand than we could manage on this small kit and six months later we scaled up to a ‘massive’ 70L kit, taking up most of our kitchen, conservatory and spare bedroom.

It soon became clear that increasing production again within the confines of our house was not feasible, lest we end up sleeping on sacks of malt.

After a lot of debate about contract brewing, and visiting several facilities across the country, we brewed our first 16HL batch with our friends at Otherworld just outside Edinburgh.

Though I wanted to avoid sounding overly sentimental when I wrote this, it is absolutely necessary to say that Closet Brewing wouldn’t have survived without their help getting our beer made and teaching me all the brewing tips and tricks I use today.

Real change in the industry needs to come from more than just us.
Lucy Stevens Closet Brewing

Contract brewing allowed us to build our fanbase without the overheads of capital and rent and test the waters for our growing brand, but it’s not without its disadvantages; the margins were much slimmer, we couldn’t build a significant range with the bigger batch sizes required, and we were heavily dependent on brewing in periods of lower demand.

My wife and the other half of Closet Brewing, Lizzie, will tell anyone who listens about the day the first contract brews arrived and, having not yet secured warehouse space, we stacked them in our living room, entirely blockin out the windows.

However, we didn’t have the funding available to lease and fit out a brewery, much less purchase a full brewhouse and tanks, so contract brewing allowed us to start growing our audience at a scale we just couldn’t achieve on our own.

Thus begins the latest chapter in the story, and our current set up; cuckoo brewing with our own permanent tanks at Stenroth Workers Cooperative.

We’re still tiny in the scale of things, and have kept our DIY mentality at the heart of what we do (although applying this to the brewery circuitry was perhaps not the best idea).

Sharing the space with two other breweries allows us to make the most of cooperation, splitting costs, sharing equipment, and helping each other out to make really good beer.

This shift away from the traditional business model of prioritising profitability has been refreshing; our brewery has never been driven by financial gain.

As queer brewery owners, in what is still quite a straight, cisgender, male dominated industry, we wanted to create a place of our own to operate outside of the bounds normally enforced by capitalist enterprise.

To be able to create things just so they exist, because we want them to exist, regardless of profitability, is a freeing approach to running a business.

Our goals are simply to make good, interesting, and varied beer; I believe there is a beer out there for everyone, and we strive to create a space where everyone can enjoy a nice pint.

Outside of the beer itself, we want to use our brewery as a platform to help other queer individuals, and small businesses; through donating beer and profits to LGBT causes, collaborating with queer artists to design labels, and lending a hand at local community events.

We strive to create a space where everyone can enjoy a nice pint.
Lucy Stevens, Closet Brewing

Creating spaces that welcome queer people and women is at the core of our mission, but without our own taproom this isn’t always as straightforward as we’d like.

We’ve had to find ways to foster this inclusive environment in pre-existing spaces; organising events where we are physically present and using our visibility to show people that they belong in these spaces.

We’re always looking for ways to connect in non-traditional spaces too; last year we held a pop-up ‘tiny taproom’ out of an old police box on Leith Walk, and used our digital platform to fundraise for the Good Law Project with an impromptu webstore.

Having our own taproom and community space is still very much our end goal, but until then we’ll do everything we can to create places where anyone can feel safe and welcomed.

Real change in the industry needs to come from more than just us. While there are many people doing inspiring work to push beer into a better place, (Queer Brewing and Women in Beer just to name a couple) these are still small steps in a massive industry that is often resistant to change.

Being an inclusive venue is about more than just putting up a pride flag every June and calling it a day, queer businesses continue to exist all year round and allyship involves supporting them and standing up for members of the community even when it’s inconvenient to do so.

This includes being deliberate about who you do business with, and making sure that those breweries or bars are also safe for women and queer people.

Our approach certainly isn’t all sunshine and rainbows though. It definitely comes with a healthy chunk of sacrifice.

Days off don’t exist at Closet Brewing- even when we aren’t physically brewing we are planning events, running social media, dropping off deliveries, fulfilling orders, designing labels, discussing future brews, troubleshooting issues together and realising we still haven’t ordered those damn business cards.

Holidays are planned with military-like precision around the brewery calendar, and every room in our house has, at one point or another, housed equipment, cans, kegs, ingredients and labels.

But,in spite of this, our slow and steady approach has allowed us to create an entity entirely our own, that reflects mine and Lizzie’s ideals, personalities and passions in every facet.

By rejecting the idea that rapid growth and huge injections of capital are the only way to build a brewery, we’ve managed to carve out a little spot in this busy, fluctuating industry just for us.