Queer Brewing delivered an impassioned revelation this week, on the brink of Pride month, stating plans to close the business.
Speaking on video on social media, Queer Brewing founder Lily Waite-Marsden said: “This is the announcement that I never wanted to make, but this is the end of the road for Queer Brewing. We have reached the decision that it is just no longer viable to continue operating. We know that there’s a certain irony to making this announcement just before Pride month, our busiest time of year. But, unfortunately, our last day of trading will be 31 July.”
Achievements
Queer Brewing was founded in 2019 as the UK’s first queer- and trans-owned brewery and has fundraised for LGBTQ+ charities all over the world, raising the scope and breadth of equality, visibility and representation via collaborative brews, merchandise and events across the beer sector. The business has created space for the LGBTQ+ community within what has long been an arena dominated by cisgender, heterosexual male voices and perspectives.
Giving understanding to how the news might hit the brewery’s many supporters across both the beer and LGBTQ+ communities, Waite-Marsden said: “We realise this may come as a shock. We’re busier than we ever have been. The beer is tasting better than ever. We’re exporting to countries that we could only have dreamed of a few years ago and, you know, everything seems like it’s working, but behind the scenes it has been really really difficult.”
But, Waite-Marsden explained: “Unfortunately, none of that gets us to where we need to be. For a number of reasons we have not been able to make ends meet. As much as we push and try and squeeze as much beer out of the brewery as we can and as much as we try and sell every drop and do everything that we can we just can’t do it anymore.”
‘Going out on our own terms’
Approaching the question of why the decision needed to be made, Waite-Marsden highlighted the burden that had been carried by the team at Queer Brewing in doing everything it could to continue to battle the challenges and disclosed that this “leaves us with is two options: one – to just desperately try and fight. Try and make it through, putting our team at risk of burnout, further stress, exhaustion trying to chase something that in reality we know is unattainable or we can call time”. Or to choose “option two” and recognise that “it is just the right time to go”.
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Waite-Marsden insisted: “We are going out on our own terms, doing it our way and saying goodbye to Queer Brewing.”
Describing what closing its doors on its own terms would look like, Waite-Marsden highlighted that Queer Brewing has “got a couple of months left” and stated that this means “we can do what we want to with the dying breaths of our brewery. We can brew the best beers imaginable”.
Although the future shape of Queer Brewing’s legacy has not yet been written, Waite-Marsden went on to reiterate that while things were “still relatively fresh” and “really painful” and “difficult” there was every intention to offer transparency when things were less raw and “tell you everything in due course in terms of what we are making, what we are doing, anywhere we might be and any parties we might be throwing”.
‘Thank you for letting us make a difference’
Waite-Marsden added: “It just falls to me to say thank you. Thanks for seven years. Thank you for all the support over the years. Thank you for buying our beer, wearing our merch. Coming up to us wherever and saying: ‘Are you Queer Brewing? We love what you do’. Thanks for keeping a bunch of queers in employment in an industry that has, historically, not been hospitable to us. Thank you for letting us make a difference and telling us about the difference we make. Thank you.”
Queer Brewing began as a collaboration project prior to becoming a contract-brewed line of beers and then culminated in opening its own production brewery and taproom space in Leyton in East London in September 2024.
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