about us

We began as home-brewers in 2018. Having moved to Edinburgh and finding ourselves with limited funds to go out for drinks with our new friends, the obvious next step was to try making it ourselves. It was from here that the brewery got its name (at least in part); from the closet in our first flat where we first began brewing.

Like many newer small businesses, we really began to find our passion during the pandemic. With plenty of time on our hands, nowhere to go, and renting a flat with a decent sized garage, Closet Brewing was born. Our Head Brewer, Lucy, is almost entirely self taught, so those days were filled with a lot of trial and error, some explosive fermentation and one very sketchy homemade conditioning chamber.

Although Lizzie had been helping with the brewing since Closet's cupboard days, it wasn't until 2021 that Closet Brewing became a 2-woman venture. Recently married and poised to buy a house, we started looking for somewhere with a space big enough to take Closet Brewing to the next level.

One short year of legal paperwork, kit upgrades and a switch from bottles to cans and the business, then known as Closet Brewing Project, launched to the public! Our house was legally licensed as a brewery and we were brewing twice a month. Having started in a closet, the brewery was soon taking over our entire home, with one memorable weekend where cases of beer were stacked so high they completely blocked the living room window.

We were brewing around 70L per batch, which felt so intense at the time (but looking back, was barely anything at all), and selling our beers at a strict 6-cans-per-shop limit when we suddenly started to get a bit of traction. Support from organisations like Women in Beer and OutBritain helped us reach new audiences, and we were able to start brewing more frequently.

In 2023, Lucy took the (somewhat terrifying) leap and made the brewery her full-time job. Alongside this move, we officially became Closet Brewing, dropping the "Project", as it wasn't so much a project anymore as a full scale small business.

Contract brewing and collaborations with some amazing breweries (shout out to those early collabs with Alphabet, Otherworld, Spookton and Wilderness) allowed us to scale up, bringing us to the most recent chapter of our story - coming out of the closet.

After a good few years of giving up every room in our house to Closet Brewing, it was time to take another risky leap into the unknown and scale the brewery up and into a proper industrial space. Now brewing 2000-3000L a month, 2025 has been a very special year for Closet Brewing. Since moving into our shared unit, we've been travelling up and down the UK sharing our beer and our story while being met with a whole lot of love and enthusiasm, reminding us the reason we started this all in the first place; to drink good beer with good people.