The art of beerplomacy
More than a tool for building community and connection, beer at Brass Castle can get things done
Robyn Gilmour
Photos:
Brass Castle
Saturday 28 June 2025
This article is from
Sunchasers
issue 119
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There’s a blue sky through the window behind Phil Saltonstall, when our call connects. I expected as much, knowing I’d be speaking to Brass Castle’s founder from his current home, in Monserrat. Before starting Yorkshire’s Brass Castle brewery, Phil and his wife were diplomats. His wife still is, with her work most recently requiring that the pair relocate to the Caribbean. “She has these quite high-energy diplomatic roles around the world, so it’s very much me trailing after her and keeping an eye on the brewery, but trusting that all the fantastic staff I've got back home are keeping everything running,” says Phil. It’s a hard life.
That said, the pair have definitely earned the perks of their current situation. “The brewery began when Harriet and I were working at the UN, and I was actually working on the Security Council,” says Phil. “It's diplomacy that took me to brewing, and I guess it still colours what we do in some quite fun ways. I'd been a home brewer forever but was in Manhattan from 2007 to 2010, right when the craft beer revolution was really going off.
“I was brewing in my apartment at the time, and literally had a moment where I was sitting next to a US colleague in a meeting at the Security Council, chatting about homebrewing of all things, when he said, ‘My brother runs a brewery in Princeton, you should go and take a look at this commercial brewery’. So that was that. I sort of snuck off from diplomacy and did some interning at a brewery in Princeton, and then decided, knowing that our next diplomatic spin would be back to the UK, that I would set up a brewery when we went back, which is what we did.”
While Phil is technically no longer a diplomat, he is still very much involved in what he calls “beerplomacy”, a term that would sound corny if examples of it in action weren't so impressive. “The job of the diplomat is networking and connecting people, and being in spaces and saying, ‘you're doing this, and I know somebody's doing that, I think it would be beneficial if you both talk’. Beerplomacy, is exactly the same thing,” says Phil. “So for example, a couple of jobs ago we were in Trinidad and Tobago and so we thought it would be cool to source some local cocoa for the team to brew with back home.”
PHOTO: Phil, the founder
Until the 1950s, Trinidad was the world’s biggest producer of cocoa, but nowadays most cocoa beans come from Africa. “In my opinion, these beans aren’t as interesting as the Trinitario bean, which is native to Trinidad and Tobago but can also be grown in large parts of South America,” says Phil. “Trinitario has a really profound flavour and is a keystone of fine chocolate.” So Brass Castle got in touch with a Trinidadian cocoa company about importing some cocoa to the UK, only to learn two crucial details through chat in passing: local effort was underway to revive cocoa farming on the island, and a sizable Trinidadian brewery was using imported cocoa in the production of its chocolate stout. Phil saw an opportunity.
“So we imported this Trinidadian cocoa, brewed a beer with it, sold a load of it in the UK — where it was enjoyed, in particular, by the Trini diaspora — and sent some of the beer back to Trinidad,” Phil continues. “There, it got into the hands of local brewers, who reached out saying ‘oh, great, you use local cacao, can you tell us how you did that?’. Now there's a contract established between the local brewery and the local grower, and we did the networking that facilitated that.”
Obsessed with getting people into the rooms they should be in, and speaking to others with whom they might meaningfully connect, Phil is all about using his unique position to the advantage of others. This applies, in particular, to the Brass Castle brewing team who Phil tries, when possible, to invite out to whatever far-flung location he’s calling home-for-now, whether for inspiration or to collaborate with locals.
As an extension of this, the brewery team also shares an ‘if we can, we should’ mindset, which manifests most obviously in its commitment to vegan brewing, particularly when it comes to cask. Phil says that back in 2011, when the brewery was finding its feet and still doing lots of research and development, he was surprised to learn how prolific the use of isinglass was in cask brewing. While interning in the US, he’d learned about vegan fining agents and filtration methods, and worked with the Brass Castle brew team to integrate plant-based coagulants into production. Why? The question more commonly asked at Brass Castle is why not?
“Because I’m moving around the whole brewery is in that mindset of creating links and facilitating connections, and who knows what the outcome will be,” says Phil. “Of course, we do what a brewery does, which is, in our case, making very accessible beer that’s principled, completely vegan and allergen free, so people never have to think ‘can I drink this?’. We get into pubs, hotels and restaurants and onto shelves and bottle shops, but we do this beerplomacy thing too.
“When you start to think about links and connections you realise nowhere is remote, and that's really exciting. Our brewery is based in Malton, not far from Leeds, which is where the UK’s second biggest West Indies Carnival takes place outside of Notting Hill, which was set up by the Trinidadian diaspora in London. We’re all connected.”
Brass Castle’s philosophy and ethos is laden with such meaningful insights, but to share one more; Phil points out that a common misconception about diplomacy is that it’s about concealing what you really mean. In reality, he says it involves being incredibly direct about where red lines are drawn, and nothing is off the table. “You know, diplomats are actually very frank when they speak to each other, because it wastes time to not make your position known. I think drinking a beer, sitting down, talking something through, is a really great manifestation of that. When we were first starting the brewery, and had no presence outside of beer mats, we wanted to think about how we could incorporate that into our brand.”
Phil wanted something to represent how, when two people sit across from one another with a couple of beers between them, they can come to see the same thing. Brass Castle landed on the ambigram that’s now its logo. “That's the thread,” says Phil. “Beer is all about that community, chat, connections and networking. That’s the thread.”
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