The team

Catrin, Dafydd, and the chapel.

Cousins who grew up three streets apart in Graig and ended up in the same chapel: one brews, one pours, and they argue about the board. Two more in the brewhouse, six behind the bar on a Saturday, and a van. The qualifications and the paperwork are below because a brewery should be asked for them.

Catrin Morgan

Co-founder and head brewer. The recipes, the tanks, the Saturday tour most weeks

A chemistry degree, four years at a big brewery in Burton she will not name, and two at a small one in Bristol she will, before coming home to Pontypridd in 2017 with a recipe book and a plan for the chapel. Catrin brews every beer, designed the kit, keeps the yeast, and leads most of the Saturday tours because, she says, the person who made it should be the one who explains it. She poured a batch away in 2019 and tells everyone.

Dafydd Rees

Co-founder. The taproom, the trade, the van, the quiz

Fifteen years running pubs in the Valleys, the last of them the one on the corner that a chain closed, and then the chapel with Catrin, his cousin, in 2017. Dafydd runs the taproom and the trade, drives the Thursday van himself, writes the quiz, found the pews in a chapel in Maerdy, and is the reason the trade price list is on the website: "If I would not say it to a landlord's face I should not be hiding it."

8taps on the bar, the board on this website updated when a keg changes
28different beers brewed last year on the ten-barrel kit
46pubs, bars and shops in the Valleys and Cardiff that stock us
4.8average rating

The rest of us, and the paperwork

Who else, and what to ask any brewery for.

The brewhouse

Elis, who came from a brewing course in Nottingham in 2021 and runs the canning line on Tuesdays, and Non, who started on the bar, asked too many questions and is now the second brewer and the one who makes the sours.

The bar

Six part-timers, most of them students from the university up the hill, every one of them through a beer-tasting session and a cellar afternoon before their first shift. They know what is in the glass because they have tasted it.

The licences and the insurance

Premises licence to 11pm with the sound limiter the council set; the alcohol wholesaler registration for the trade; food hygiene for the vans checked each visit; £10 million public and product liability, and SIBA membership since 2018.

Where the money goes

The taproom pays the wages; the trade pays for the malt; the tours paid for the canning line; the quiz has raised £14,000 for the food bank since 2019; and the chapel roof, which cost more than the brewing kit, is paid off next spring.

A small microbrewery taproom in a converted Victorian stone chapel on a terraced street in Pontypridd, dark green doors open, picnic benches outside, hills behind

The Old Chapel

Built 1868, closed 2009, a roof fixed in 2016, a first brew in March 2017.

Dafydd found it with a tree growing through the vestry and a For Sale sign that had been up for four years. The roof came first and cost more than the brewing kit. The pews came from a chapel in Maerdy that was closing too, the bar from a joiner in Treforest out of the old chapel floor, and the glass wall onto the brewhouse was Catrin\'s condition for coming home: "If people cannot see it, they will not believe it was made here."

Finding the chapel

Saturday at two: the tour, a flight, and a can to take home.

Ninety minutes round the tanks with whoever brewed that week, malt and hops in your hands, a taste from a fermenter, then four thirds on the chapel floor. £25, twelve at most. The same form takes a mixed box, the gallery, or a trade order.

Book the tour What is on the bar