Hardknott OnTrack - open for business - Beer Reviews

With the official opening of Hardknott On Track things have come full circle for Hardknott Brewery, The brewery originally started in the Woolpack Inn, berfore Dave and Ann sold up and moved the brewery to Millom so that they could focus on making great beer.

4 years on and with the new brewery site in full swing including a new bottling line and a couple of new additions to the Hardknott Team, Dave felt the time was right to dip his toe back into the water and get back behind the bar.

The bar, situated on Millom train station has been a rollercoaster ride with all sorts of hurdles to overcome but the bar is now ope . It serves the full range of Hardknott beers plus a good selection of interesting beers from Europe and further afield, so there should be something for everyone.

Dave told us:

“We’ve been looking to open a bar for a while. There are many reasons for doing so. Some reasons are for purely business motivations, however, that is not all.

There are aspects of having our own place that we miss from our days at The Woolpack. Sure, there are quite a few things we don’t miss, but the chance to directly talk to customers about the beer, and the great report we had with many of our favourites is something we miss.

Equally, with the many great and varied drinking places, like Euston Tap, Sheffiled Tap and my favourite, The Rake, I miss the quality, variety and pure beer geekiness available in the cities. I wanted to bring a little bit of that to my home town. I wanted somewhere that I myself would be happy to drink, and that was within walking distance of home.

Moving onto business motivations, the biggest single driver is cash-flow. I’m not candid about this. As a stan alone brewery outlets often buy beer, sell it at retail markup and then hang onto the cash for several weeks leaving us with a huge cash-flow gap. Long after we have paid the beer duty, the staff, electric and gas bills, maltsters and hop merchants the bigger pub chains still have our money. The bar gives us a little bit of positive cash-flow.

But softer business benefits is the ability to control how our beers are presented. Gain customer feedback on particular products. Gives us the ability to direct people to a guaranteed outlet where they can find more than one of our beers at any one time. Although we have partnered with some outlets to try and achieve this, it has never quite succeeded in creating the much more direct customer focused outlook that we would like to achieve.”

For more info and opening times check out www.hardknottontrack.com