Queer Brewing is the UK’s first queer- and trans-owned brewery, making queer beers and beer queer since 2019. Founded by beer writer, editor, photographer, and ceramicist Lily Waite-Marsden after recognising a significant lack of LGBTQ+ representation in the beer world, she set out to take up space in an industry dominated by cisgender, heterosexual, male voices.
Starting as a collaboration project with UK-based and international breweries, Queer Brewing has now grown into an empowering brand and fully operational brewery in its own right. Producing a wide range of beer styles with evocative branding to provide visibility and representation for LGBTQ+ people, we’ve raised tens of thousands of pounds for LGBTQ+ charities—first from funds raised from collaboration beers, and as of 2024 by donating 10p from every pint and can sold.
Between late 2020 and early 2025, we produced all of our beer via contract production: Lily wrote the recipes and sent them to our friends’ breweries to be brewed. In early 2024, we came to realise that model no longer worked for us, and we were faced with a choice: call time on Queer Brewing, or dive in and build our own brewery.
In September 2024 we took on the unit next to our warehouse in Leyton, East London, and commenced building our very own brewery.
We installed a 30hL refurbished (and probably slightly overengineered!) brewhouse from Gravity Systems, with six 30hL new fermenting vessels (and one enduring and time-worn 20hL tank from our friends Pressure Drop via our neighbours Square Root Soda), a gorgeous canning line, and a reverse osmosis water treatment system—all to give us the capability to brew the best beer we possibly can, and to allow us to explore and execute any style we’d like.
After so many years, Andy and Lily are now brewing Queer Brewing beer in our own home, and making everything a little more us.
It’s been a long, and hard road to where we are today. We’ve faced some difficult challenges, but we’re where we want to be: with a passionate and hard-working—and, as one of the only breweries in the world where this is true, 100% queer!—team and our own brewery, we can at last begin to realise the potential we’ve long seen in Queer Brewing.
