Ashley Barnard meets a family who have got the ice-cream business well and truly licked.

A FAMILY business started 30 years ago on a smallholding near Harrogate is now a booming tourist destination in the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

Brian and Brenda Moore established Brymor Ice Cream in 1984 after the introduction of the milk quota and as they watched other local farmers begin to manufacture cheese and yogurt in a bid to do something different, they decided to start making ice cream.

Their son Robert now runs the firm – along with wife Diane and their daughter Nicola and son Tom – after the death of his parents two years ago, and said they had come a long way since the idea was born 30 years ago.

He said: “We originally had a smallholding in Weeton, near Harrogate.

“We had just started milking cows when the milk quota was introduced and the Conservative government at the time encouraged farmers to diversify.

“We just got going with making ice cream – it was a lot of trial and error as we had never done it before – and we thought most of it would go to wholesale, but we got quite a bit of publicity locally and started to get a lot of people coming to the farm to visit us.”

But this created problems for the Moore family, as the smallholding could not cope with the increasing numbers of people turning up to sample the ice cream.

Mr Moore said: “We were also in the newspapers every week because of planning permission problems, but that just brought more people to us.”

It took two public inquiries before the Moores were faced with a choice between shutting the business down or moving elsewhere – so they set about searching for the ideal location.

Mr Moore said: “We looked all over the country but finally found the farm at Jervaulx, near Masham.”

Mr Moore said some of the secrets to his success were the herd of 100 Guernsey cows, picked because they are bigger than Jersey cows and give creamy milk, and because of a unique recipe formulated by ice-cream expert Dr James Rothwell, chief consultant to the Ice Cream Alliance.

“We met Dr Rothwell by chance at an ice-cream convention. We got chatting and he liked the way we worked and agreed to create a recipe for us,” he said. “We still use the recipe to this day – getting the basics right is so important.”

Mr Moore revealed how his ice cream is created. “The milk is pumped daily into the dairy and skimmed to provide our own top-quality cream.

“As the milk is being pasturised, cream, sugar, dextrose, skimmed-milk powder and stabiliser are added, and once it has been pasteurised, the mixture is kept in a holding vat at 2C to let it age.”

The mixture is then pumped through a freezer before different flavours are added, and as the smooth ice cream comes out of the freezer, fruit, nuts and sauces can be mixed in.

The ice cream then goes into different-sized containers and is put into a blast freezer, which freezes it to -24C.

There are no preservatives in the ice cream. The quality is kept by freezing quickly and keeping frozen.

Brymor is based at High Jervaulx Farm, Masham, HG4 4PG. For more information call 01677-460337 or visit www.abmoore.co.uk.