GAVIN AITCHISON reports on the area’s newest brewery.

IT’S coming up for Christmas, and you’re off to visit your dear old mum. What do you take with you? Some flowers? A box of mince pies? Your dirty laundry? I bet you don’t take her a cask of beer – but that’s what Tony Rogers was able to do this week.

His mum Olive Rogers stakes a claim to be England’s longest-serving licensee, having had The Ferry Boat Inn at Thorganby since 1948. Now, Tony and his wife Jackie have set up their own brewery – and mum’s pub was one of the first on their delivery list.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that this would happen. Beer has been part of Tony’s life for as long as he can remember. He was raised in The Ferry Boat and in his spare time he is a Habitual Drunkard – or at least, one half of the York-based acoustic duo that bears that name.

Even his house in Ellerton once doubled up as a pub. It was the village forge from 1796 to 1968, but for 40 years or so in the 1800s, the then blacksmith George Huntswick also ran it as The Half Moon. It is in a nod to George’s efforts that when Tony and Jackie decided to open a brewery in an outbuilding, they called it The Half Moon Brewery.

Theirs is the newest addition to the region’s burgeoning beer scene, but it has been many years in the making.

As well as growing up in a pub, Tony has been home brewing for ten years or so, used to do Saturday shifts at Great Heck Brewery and undertook a training course at Brewlab in Sunderland. Jackie, meanwhile, has been learning the ropes for the past two years with Sue and Keith Simpson at Brown Cow in Barlow, near Selby.

“It has been a long-term goal,” says Tony, who has previously held various jobs with British Rail, Terry’s and in horseracing. “When I started home-brewing I really got into it. I like beer and have always been fascinated by it. I always wondered how you get so many complexities of flavour. I started thinking ‘how did they do that?’ – and making it was the best way to find out.”

He and Jackie moved into the old forge last month, after a lengthy restoration project. They toyed with brewing elsewhere but have a nine-year-old daughter, Olivia, and brewing beside the house guarantees them more time together as a family.

It also means they can check on the brews whenever needed, which appeals to Tony.

“When you make the beers, they are like your babies,” he says. “You are always checking on them.”

Tony and Jackie work on the recipes together and brew together, and although their preferences vary (Tony favours stouts and porters, while Jackie leans towards paler ales) they have come up with a varied opening range.

Gyle One, their debut beer, is golden with a strong hop flavour and a crisp biscuit bite. Their second brew, Winter’s Mild, will appeal to darker tastes, and the third – F’Hops Sake – promises to be a well-hopped pale ale. A classic Yorkshire bitter is next in their sights, but for now they are enjoying the feedback from the first landlords and drinkers.

Pubs selling Gyle One include The White Swan in Bubwith; The Boot and Shoe in Ellerton; The Volunteer Arms in York; The New Inn in Huby and its namesake at Cliffe; The Cross Keys at Thixendale and, at its festival this weekend, Suddaby’s in Malton.

F’Hops Sake will also be on sale at The Edinburgh Arms in York. The flagship venue and ultimate litmus test, however, is The Ferry Boat, the pub where Tony grew up, where his mum still holds the licence, and where his brother-in-law Phil runs the bar.

“It is nerve-racking putting it on,” says Tony. “But The Ferry Boat has a reasonably discerning core of real ale drinkers who will try different things.”

And as for his mum? “She will probably tell me off because I did not do a darker style,” he jokes. “But I don’t think I’ve got anything to fear – if I can get it past Phil and past mum, it’s a fairly good sign.”

Twitter: @pintsofview