Cellar Head Brewing Company is an award-winning independent microbrewery founded by Chris and Julia McKenzie in 2017. We wanted to create an all-inclusive brewery that crossed many divides - generations, beer tastes and styles, in a no nonsense "what you see is what you get" way.

We use traditional brewing methods to produce a varied range of modern beers focused on drinkability and quality using the finest of English grown malts and hops as well as selected high quality hops from around the world and our own strain of historic Sussex live yeast. We are lucky to still be surrounded by hop gardens in this corner of Kent and source as many hops locally as we can.  We showcases these hops with our monthly-changing Single Hop Pale series and Small Batch specials.

Cellar Head produces a core range of beers from modern American style pale ales to traditional best bitters.  Alongside these regularly brewed beers, we also produce seasonal brews throughout the year including green hopped beers and dark stouts. Having special relationships with local hop farmers, Cellar Head also produce limited, small batch beers from time to time using exceptionally rare or trial hops, usually less than 300 bottles or even just a single cask. When they’re gone, they’re gone!

At Cellar Head we produce cask conditioned and bottle conditioned natural, unfined beer.  Traditionally, fining agents are used to produce perfectly clear beer using Isinglass, a substance obtained from the dried swim bladders of fish. Yes, fish!  But as well as helping the yeast to settle to the bottom of the cask/bottle, the finings also take hop oils with it, thereby stripping some of the flavour and aromas - something we of course want to avoid.  By choosing not to add finings to our beers, they carry a natural haze and are also vegan friendly.  Additionally we do not filter or pasteurise our beers to get the most flavour out of our brews. 

Our bottled beers all undergo a natural secondary fermentation in the bottle; no priming or forced carbonation, which results in a light fizz that we feel is a more refined texture and mouthfeel. The beer is alive – unfiltered, unfined and unpasteurised and therefore does leave some yeast sediment in the bottom, so the beers will need a little time to settle before pouring in one motion if you want to leave it in the bottle! Our spent malt is fed to local cattle and the used hops spread on neighbour’s gardens to compost!

We are always keen to meet our drinkers face to face and we often arrange Meet The Brewer events in local pubs and micro-pubs.  We always bring malts and hops for people to get their hands on, and noses, in!  We’ll also bring along bottles of any pilot beers we have on the go – it’s a great chance for us to get feedback and your customers get a sneak preview of what’s coming up on the brew plan.  We run through an informal tutored tasting and suggest pairings with cheeses that we have available to snack on.