About us
West Walls Brewing Co. is Cumbria's first city centre microbrewery taproom. We brew our beer and we serve it in the same room, a few feet from the tanks it came out of.
Why we did it
Carlisle didn't have this. We spent years travelling to Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester and Glasgow, seeking out taprooms and breweries that took hospitality as seriously as they took beer, then coming home to a city with nothing like it.
We asked ourselves why this was the case and quickly learnt about the State Management Scheme. From 1916 the state owned and ran Carlisle's pubs and breweries, the only place in the country where it happened, and it lasted into the 1970s. Independent brewing here all but disappeared. We like to think West Walls is part of the city getting its beer culture back.
Who we are
We are Joe and Fergus, two life long friends who grew up in and around the city.
Joe grew up in hospitality. His family ran a catering business and later a restaurant, bar and events business in the city, and he was working in hospitality and events himself as a teenager. Fergus was a captain in the army for four years. We both learned to brew at Borderlands Brewery, which Fergus's dad Stuart started in 2019. That's where the beer side of this began.
Fergus wanted a brewery. Joe wanted a hospitality business. Putting the two together gave us a taproom led brewery, which is what West Walls is. The taproom isn't a bolt on to the brewery. It's the heart of the business.
The building
We're in the former Twisted Wheel, a Carlisle nightclub that closed in 2007 and then sat untouched for seventeen years. When we took the lease at the start of 2023 there was no power and no water. Daunting, but also a blank canvas.
We laid the parquet floor ourselves. The scaffold board ceiling, the rustic plaster on the walls, all of it done by hand over about nine months. We opened the doors in June 2024 and the rest is history as they say.
Bringing that building back has been a real honour. It makes us proud to see what's been done with the place.
The team
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Head brewer
Tim Hughes is our head brewer. He spent years at Corby and then Ennerdale before he came to us, and he was the first person ever to email West Walls when we set the company address up in 2024. The email congratulated us and offered to help. He's been here with us since March 2025.
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Bar manager
If you have been into the taproom you will surely have met Josh. The life of the party, the heart of the bar and the one making sure everything runs smoothly. Josh also spent the last ten years touring the world as a drummer with Dub Pistols, so ask him for a story.
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The rest of us
Since opening we have built an amazing small team of bar staff who make sure you are looked after. If you have visited you will know this but we are a friendly bunch, we like a chat so please do say hi.
The beer
We currently brew on a 1000 litre Dave Porter brewhouse and mash in by hand. Every part of the kit is manual, which makes it a labour of love and slower than most modern breweries. It also means we can't rely on the equipment to do the job for us, so we have to be careful and specific about how we brew.
All our malt is from Crisp Maltings and our hops come through Charles Faram, a mix of American, New Zealand and British. Being taproom led means we can put quality first instead of worrying about margins and efficiency, so we don't cut corners.
The range moves around. Too Easy, Gold Fool, Nitro Man and Texas Sun are the constants. Beyond that, if it's good beer and we like it, we'll make it - so expect lots of fresh one off batches.
What's next
We've taken on the unit next door to us to expand our taproom and brewing operation, and open a flexible events and live music venue. Opening soon.
Come and see it
We're open Thursday to Sunday. Hours, directions and how to reach us are on our contact page, and if you need to know about access before you visit, we've written that down on our accessibility page.
See you at the bar.