8 YEARS OF VAULT CITY
Welcome, Vault Citizens! Put on your party hats and pour yourselves something sour while we tell the Vault City story, from 40-litre batches of home-brewed beer to more than 1.5 million litres brewed every year at our independent Edinburgh brewery.
2018
Vault City’s story started in an Edinburgh taproom and brew pub called The Hanging Bat, where a love of craft beer and a 50-litre brew kit became the testing ground for the foundations of our brewery’s earliest beer releases, and plenty of the beers that came after.
By July 2018, Vault City was official and the home brewer to brewery owner pipeline was complete. The basement of Steve’s Edinburgh flat became Vault City’s cellar, and the spare room became an excise and customs warehouse where Steve stored our first brews Mango & Elderflower Sours.
2019
By August 2019, Vault City hired their first employee and began Cuckoo brewing in Dundee, renting a shared space where 400-litre quickly became 4,000-litre batches. Two weeks later, Steve packed in his IT job to go full time at Vault City and marked the occasion with a commemorative family photo.
Demand for heavily fruited, modern sour beer kept growing and Vault City got invited to some big beer festivals like Dark & Wild, Beavertown Extravaganza and Indie Man Beer Con.
2020
December 2020 marked our return to Edinburgh, where we moved into our first dedicated Vault City Brewery. This was such a huge decision for our brewery, and our small team of 2 full-timers and one part timer! Considering the ongoing global pandemic, we very nearly never made this pivotal move that thankfully paid off and allowed us to brew more beers at bigger volumes.
So, with the lease signed, we got to work fixing up our new home for the next 5 years, installing a new brew kit and fresh tanks.
2021
In our Portobello brewery we found our flow with 3 new beers every 2 weeks, trialling different fruit combinations, malt bills and some other weird and wonderful additions, but always maintaining the same mixed fermentation house culture - keeping that signature Vault City sherbet zing! It was this year that we introduced our 4-day working week (reducing from a typical 40-hour week to 35) without loss of pay. After trialling this for our small team we decided this was the future for Vault, baked it into our team contracts and have implemented it ever since – even as we scaled to over 30 team members. Read all about it here.
This was also the year we opened our tiny taproom, The Wee Vault, with more taps than seats. It was also during a fresh lockdown (just lucky timing for us!).
2022
In 2022 the biggest change for our brewery was the introduction of canned beers which allowed us to export beers to new markets, and finally release a core range of Cloudy Lemonade and Strawberry Sundae. This was also the year that we did our first ever Edinburgh Fringe collaboration with comedian Ed Gamble, donating 20% of all profits to CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably).
2023
By 2023 we’d released around 300 different beers, and were consistently releasing at least 3 beers every 2 weeks, expanding our range of sours, stouts, radlers and more.
This was also the year that we pimped up our 1960s Bedford ice cream van, which from that point onwards became known as The Vault Wagon and has since been towed up and down the country for festivals and events.
2024
In 2024, with the help of our amazing community, we bought the building which has now become our forever home. After an incredible crowdfunder sale, we were able to buy the warehouse we’ve since transformed into a brewery. Thankfully we still had our rented Portobello site at the time which allowed us to start planning the new brewery while we continued to release fresh beers every 2 weeks.
This was also the year we released the first ever Stoopid beer from our Smoothie sour series, and introduced our sour scale to all sour beer cans, showing you in advance if it’s sweet and tangy or super-sour.
2025
In 2025 we launched the second phase of our crowdfunder sale, and with the continued support of our amazing community we were able to get started on our brewery build and in November that year, start brewing and packaging beer there. It’s still a work in progress, and as an independent brewery we have to prioritise certain projects first, but the ongoing transformation has been incredible, and we can’t wait to open the doors for tours in the near future.
2025 also marked 5 years of Iron Brew sours and our first ever GLOOP cream stout, launched in a small batch for an event at Joule Manchester
2026
8 Years of Sour Beer. We can’t quite believe it. We’re incredibly grateful for all the amazing people who have supported us, and for allowing us to brew some of the weird and wonderful flavour combinations we've become known for. Here’s to many more years of sour beers!
