Wold Top Brewery: the Yorkshire farm that makes half its beer gluten free

In the first two weeks of the 2020 lockdown, Wold Top’s online beer orders went from around a dozen a week to more than four hundred. A good chunk of those new customers had one thing in common. They were buying gluten free, and they had finally found a brewery that made a lot of it.

That moment turned a sideline into a signature. Today Wold Top makes roughly half of everything it brews gluten free, which puts a small Yorkshire farm among the most prolific gluten free brewers in the country.

A farm first, a brewery second

Wold Top sits at Hunmanby Grange, high on the Yorkshire Wolds near the East Yorkshire coast. The farm has been in the same family for four generations. The family moved there in the 1940s from industrial Halifax, on a doctor’s advice, after a child fell ill and was prescribed clean air. They sold a coaching inn, bought the farm for about a third of the price, and the boy grew up healthy to run it.

Brewing came much later. By the late 1990s, farming was under pressure and the family needed another way to bring money in. They already had two of the four things a brewery needs growing and flowing on their own land: top grade malting barley from the surrounding fields, and their own water from two boreholes at the back of the farm. They started brewing in 2003. The same water and the same barley, batch after batch, is part of why the beer stays consistent.

Against The Grain came first

Wold Top’s gluten free story did not start with the pandemic. It started with a single beer, Against The Grain, brewed years earlier.

They were proud of it, and they said so. The first labels carried a gluten free claim right across the front. It backfired. Drinkers read it as a warning that something had been taken out, that the beer would be lacking, and it put them off. So Wold Top took the claim off the front and let the beer speak for itself.

The irony is that the early shout still paid off. It gave Wold Top a head start in name recognition for gluten free that the brewery has never really lost. Staff still meet people at the farm who have been drinking Wold Top for years without realising several of their favourites were gluten free all along.

Lockdown changed the range

Before 2020, Wold Top brewed seasonal specials in cask and sent them to the pubs and venues it supplied locally. Online orders were a quiet afterthought, ten or twelve a week.

When lockdown closed the pubs, the brewery had a year of cask specials in preparation and nowhere for them to go. So they bottled everything. A twelve strong run of specials, brewed that year, all made gluten free. And with the pubs shut, those bottles went out by post to the customers who suddenly could not get to a bar, many of them coeliac or gluten intolerant.

The brewery has carried on since. Every monthly special is now made gluten free, alongside the permanent beers. At any given time there are usually somewhere between six and ten gluten free Wold Top beers on sale.

What is actually tested

This is the part worth being precise about, because it is where a lot of gluten free beer gets muddled.

Wold Top brews with barley, then adds a clarifying agent that removes the gluten protein and clears the beer at the same time. That makes the beer gluten reduced, the same method most UK breweries use, rather than naturally gluten free.

Three beers form the tested core. Against The Grain, Scarborough Fair IPA and Marmalade Porter are sent for independent laboratory testing using the CODEX R5 ELISA method, which is what allows them to be legally labelled gluten free. Against The Grain goes a step further and publishes its actual result, 5.1ppm, on its own product page. Most breweries give you a threshold. Wold Top gives you the number, and that openness is rare in the UK market.

The wider range, including the barrel aged versions, the collaborations and the monthly specials, is made gluten free by the same process but is not individually sent for external testing. That does not mean it contains gluten. It means there is no published laboratory figure for those specific beers, so the honest thing is to treat the tested three as the certain choices and the rest as gluten reduced without a confirmed result. The one beer brewed with wheat stays outside the gluten free line up entirely.

For most people that distinction is reassurance, not a warning. For the most sensitive coeliacs, who tend to want a published figure or a naturally gluten free beer, the tested three are where to start.

Same beer, same price

One detail says a lot about how Wold Top sees this. The gluten free beers cost the same as the standard ones. There is no surcharge for the testing, even though testing costs money. Because the brewery sells gluten free in real volume, it carries that cost rather than handing it to the drinker.

That is the quiet point underneath the whole Wold Top story. Gluten free is not a niche product line bolted on for a premium. It is half of what a working Yorkshire farm brews, sold at the same price as everything else, with the best of it tested and the result printed on the bottle.

Browse the full range on the Wold Top Brewery page, or start with the tested core: Against The Grain, Scarborough Fair IPA and Marmalade Porter.