no. 059 | Lost Cause
Launched in 2024, Lost Cause brings together more than 40 years of combined experience across some of the UK’s most influential breweries. Welcome to batch no. 059.
Lost Cause founders Colin and Vik had spent years working for bigger breweries, tackling all of the constraints, admin and slow-moving decisions that come as part of a larger operation. As a result, they were feeling a degree of disillusionment. “I’m not a lost cause yet, am I?”, Colin said one Friday evening conversation and something clicked. By Monday, they had the beginnings of a logo, a company registered at Companies House, and their first contract brews booked in.
They had nearly done this back in 2015, but the timing wasn’t right. Another decade passed and useful, formative years spent working across Marble, Black Isle, Buxton, Northern Monk, Salt, Magic Rock, Fourpure and more gave them the confidence to finally bite the bullet and build something of their own.
Colin’s path into brewing was an accidental one. He came up through working bars, and ended up stepping into brewing duties when the brewer at Liverpool Brewing Co left. From there he went on to Marble in Manchester, then head brewer roles at Black Isle, Buxton, Northern Monk and Salt, picking up the title of Brewer of the Year in 2022 along the way. He was also among the early collaborators with Omnipollo when the Swedish brewery was first finding its feet in the UK. Yellowbelly, the peanut butter biscuit stout that became a cult beer, was his recipe. “That still blows people’s minds a bit when they hear it,” Vik says.
For Vik, beer was always around. Her dad and uncle home-brewed when she was growing up, and her uncle went on to open Mallard Brewery in the 1990s. At the time, Britain’s smallest brewery, running on a single barrel. She came into the industry through events, hospitality and brand management, working across many of the same breweries as Colin. “I didn’t realise it at the time,” she says, “but beer was kind of baked into me from the beginning.”
Lost Cause launched in April 2024 out of Whitwood, near Castleford, the two of them doing absolutely everything themselves — cuckoo and contract brewing, design, deliveries, marketing, events, floor cleaning, admin. In January 2026 they opened their own brewery, and in April their taproom followed: a proper, lived-in space at Calder Vale Road in Wakefield, where you sit alongside the tanks and the hum of a working 10hl brewhouse, with communal tables, rotating street food vendors, and a fridge full of cans to take home. The team, which stood at two people as recently as last year, is now eight. “That still feels slightly surreal,” Vik admits.
The brewing philosophy is straightforward in the best sense. “We want to make modern beer that people genuinely want to drink more than one of,” she says. Heavily hopped beers and fruited sours sit in the range alongside more considered, balanced releases. “Extreme for the sake of it has never really interested us.”
The brand, which Vik designs herself, draws on 90s skate culture, zines and low-brow surrealist art. The result is playful and recognisable without ever taking itself too seriously. Beer names come from odd phrases, in-jokes, bits of pop culture and things that made someone laugh. “We like beers to have personality before you’ve even opened the can,” she says. The seriousness is reserved for what’s inside.
Wakefield, the two are at pains to point out, was a deliberate choice rather than a default. They live here, their friends are here and there wasn’t anything doing quite what they wanted to do from a modern beer perspective. That felt less like a problem and more like an opportunity.