BRITONS love ice cream. Despite our all too often rotten weather, we just can't get enough of the delicious creamy flavour.

In fact, the UK is Europe's third biggest consumer of ice-cream. Each one of us consumes about eight litres - or 14 pints - every year.

Twenty years ago, Brian Moore and his family tested the market for their own brand of ice cream by giving it away.

He and his wife, Brenda, made their first ice-cream - vanilla and strawberry - to test on family and friends.

When their assembled crowd of taste-testers announced the product would take some licking, the family decided to put ice cream-making ahead of farming and set up Brymor Ice Cream.

Mr Moore hit upon the idea for the ice-cream business when milk quotas meant production was slashed by half from his pedigree Guernsey cows in 1984.

Brymor's first batch for sale to the public amounted to 180 litres. Now they make 300,000 litres a year.

The enterprise started while the family were farming at Weeton, in Lower Wharfedale, North Yorkshire. Now they work from High Jervaulx Farm, in Masham.

Mr Moore, 68, is chairman of the firm, which produces 30 flavours of ice-cream, frozen yoghurt and fruit sorbet.

The creamy concoctions are made from whole Guernsey milk, mixed with double cream. Only the best natural fruit flavours, imported from Italy, are used. Sauces and nuts are imported from Canada and America.

Feed given to the cows is jointly formulated by animal nutritionist Joe Youden and Mike Every, technical sales manager for Masham-based feed producer I'Ansons.

It includes soya and maize extracts to provide the cows with the wide spectrum of nutrients needed to produce the rich, high butterfat milk required for top-of-the-range dairy foods.

Mr Moore's 39-year-old son, Robert, is now Brymor's managing director.

He said: "When we started, we were farmers producing ice-cream. Now we're ice-cream manufacturers who also happen to be farmers.

"We can't believe it's 20 years since it all started."

Robert believes there is a big difference between Brymor ice cream and flavours at the cheaper end of the market.

"Our ice cream is very much at the premium end of the market. It's not like cheap, air-filled ice cream you might find on a supermarket shelf - ours has a ten per cent butterfat content. It's rich and solid, but producing the whole milk you need for such ice cream is demanding. You need healthy, well-nourished cows to produce milk with a high butterfat and protein content."

Twelve years ago, an ice cream parlour was opened on the site and a paddock was transformed into a car park.

As Mr Moore, whose wife is the firm's secretary, looked back over the years, he recalled setbacks amid a string of national accolades for the ice cream.

A serious fire hit the farm in August 1999, but fortunately did not affect the ice-cream parlour.

Then in 2001 came foot-and-mouth disease and the family and their 14 staff had to work from Masham Town Hall's ballroom to protect the herd.

Last year, they installed a clotted cream plant and now all bull calves are reared for veal and marketed through Yorkshire Game.