Steel City Beer & Cider Festival

Sponsorship A great way to support the beer festival and local charities is though sponsorship, why not sponsor a barrel of beer? Fancy a works do at this year’s festival, why not promote your business at the same time? Group of friends who fancy doing something different on a night out? Something to celebrate? You can sponsor a barrel for just £125 and your name will appear on the beer label behind the bar, plus your name will be included in the programme and on the website, sheffield.camra.org.uk/festival.  We will provide you with 6 complimentary tickets to the festival and a free pint to get you started. £25 of the sponsorship goes to the festival charity, which again this year will be the Master Cutlers Challenge. We can also discuss any corporate hospitality requirements you may have.  For more information please contact festival@sheffieldcamra.org.uk. We would like to thank the following companies for generously supporting the beer festival:
  • Toolmakers Brewery
  • Fuggle Bunny Brewery
  • Raw Brewery
  • Welbeck Abbey Brewery
  • The Hop/Ossett Brewery
  • Thornbridge Brewery
  • Sheffield Brewery
  • Gardeners Rest, Neepsend
  • Easton Safety Engineering Ltd
  • Tyzack Machine Knives
  • Fat Cat, Kelham Island
  • Bradfield Brewery
  • Kelham Island Brewery
  • The Forest, Neepsend
  • Blue Bee Brewery
  • Stancil Brewery
  • Dyson Signs and Graphics
Entertainment As well as great beer and cider, we also have some great entertainment planned for the course of the week. However for those who like to enjoy their beer in peace Wednesday night is for you with as it is quiet night with no entertainment. The band for Thursday is still to be confirmed but I am sure they will be great. On Friday night we have the Sheffield’s Number 1 Soul band the Soulfaces, an 8 piece including a 3 piece horn section. I’m sure they will get you up to dance the night away. For those with a more traditional taste for music we have Loxley Silver Band returning for the second year after delighting the crowds last year. They will entertaining on Saturday afternoon performing a collection of traditional marches, show tunes and some more modern hits they are bound to go down a storm!  For those who like to do a bit of thinking with your beer then Saturday afternoon sees the return of our charity pub quiz. No cheating with smart phones though! Bringing the festival to a raucous close on Saturday night is Do$ch bringing you “Maximum” high energy British rhythm and blues. On Friday and Saturday night we will also be having local bands on the stage in the marquee. Festival Beers WP_20140906_013 WP_20140906_021 WP_20140906_001 WP_20140906_005 WP_20140906_025 In early September the branch brewed to beers to celebrate the 40th Anniversary Steel City Beer and Cider Festival. Early on a Saturday morning several members of the branch arrived at Blue Bee brewery to help owner Andy and brewer Josh brew a festival special. Rubee is a 5% nearly ruby coloured IPA. On the following Tuesday several more members of the branch helped brewer Tim at Sheffield Brewery brew Ruby, Ruby, Ruby with apologies to the Kaiser Chiefs, a 4.8% malty beer. Both beers will be coming to a bar near you soon, so look out for and see how good a collection of beer and cider drinkers can brew beer!  Volunteering   Apart from the vast selection of incredible ales and cider from all over the world on offer, it is the mingling of people from all walks of life, united for a few days simply to enjoy themselves, which makes me love Sheffield Beer Festival so much. They say a pub is only as good as the landlord and it’s true, it’s the people who both run and attend the Sheffield Beer Festival which make it so special. When I work on the cider bar my favourite thing to do is to guess which cider a certain punter will like. When I get it right, it makes my shift, the punter is delighted and many of them say they’ve discovered a newfound love of cider. Again, it’s the people who make the festival. It was my husband, amateur cider-maker Brian Trevelyan, who first introduced me to beer festivals thirteen years ago when we met. In only just over a decade, how they’ve changed. Beer festivals really did used to be the preserve of real life “Real Ale Twats”, the popular comic strip from Viz, with which many of you will be familiar. Blokes with beards and beer-bellies, propping up the bar, guffawing and knocking back their pints with barely a woman in sight. A few years ago, I noticed that the demographic was changing at every beer festival I attended. Suddenly there were more women. There were students, not a few of them but loads of them, in groups of males and female friends, all drinking sensibly with no trouble caused. Hipsters started to appear with a different type of beard, ones they’d only just sprouted to ride on the beard new-wave. And this new clientele spread from its beer festival spawning ground out into the world where a couple of years back there was a sudden explosion of “craft ale” pubs and “brew houses”, an explosion which led to real ale suddenly being hip and fashionable. But it started at beer festivals. Now, beer festivals are a must-visit for any discerning hipster, the likes of which intermingle with the trad beer festival attendee, creating a wonderfully harmonious and inclusive atmosphere of real ale (and real cider) aficionados from every demographic, whether young, old, male, female, trad- bearded or hipster-bearded. As a woman, I particularly like the fact that every year there are more and more women attending. Sheffield Beer Festival is honestly somewhere I’d feel comfortable attending on my own. And I can’t say that about many High Street bars!  Jude Calvert-Tomlinson

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