Little Mesters Brewing first appeared in 2020 after taking on the brewing equipment and premises from Mitchells Hop House, based in Mitchells Wine Merchants at Meadowhead. In 2023 they opened the Little Mesters Tap in Woodseats, and the next phase of their development sees them expanding and relocating the brewery to larger premises in Attercliffe. We talked to co-owner Neil Adgie for an update.
Neil, tell us about the move.
OK, so we basically moved Little Mesters Brewers from Meadowhead to down here at Attercliffe in November 2024, but the building was a shell. And then over the last six months we’ve had everything inside the building replaced or renewed. We’ve got a mixture now of new kit and some second hand kit in here, including some of the kit from Lost Industry when they closed down giving us a capacity of about 5000 litres.
To give you a little bit of history of this site, there used to be a brewery here back in the 1800s called Royds Brewery, which later became Burton Weir Brewery, named after the little Weir next to us on the river Don.
I believe you’ve started brewing cask now.
Yes, we do real ale now, as well as keg and cans. Whenever we do a brew, we do about 80% evenly split between cask and keg and then the other 20% goes into cans.
Are you going to be selling cask at mesters tap?
Yes, we’ve had a handpull put into the tap room at Woodseats, mainly for our own beers but it may feature a guest beer from time to time.
Who are the team at the brewery?
We took on a very experienced new head Brewer, Sam Bennett, who use to run Grizzly Grains brewery until recently. He’s really good and is a big asset to the company. We have Tom Naylor who’s been with us now a couple of years. We call him the Apprentice, although that’s a bit unfair as he’s just passed his level 4 apprenticeship.
You had a recent run in with the Portman Group about the knives featured on the pump clip for the beer ‘Stan, brewed to celebrate Sheffield’s famous Little Mester, Stan Shaw. How have you responded to that?
Obviously we didn’t see anything wrong with the pump clip, as it just showed the types of knives that Stan was renowned for making. And the Portman Group are just an advisory group who don’t actually have any legal powers. However we thought they could make things difficult for us, and as we were considering a rebrand anyway it made sense to include the name change and redesigned clip as part of that.
What is your beer range now?
We’ll have a core of basically 5 beers.
The Last Mester, which used to be Stan, is a 4.6% pale ale, slightly stronger, more overly hopped, more leading itself to an IPA. We’ve also got a 4% hazy pale ale, called Mesters Mate.
We’ll have a bitter, about 3.8% or 3.9% which will be called Mesters Royds Bitter, being a bit of homage to the brewery that used to be here. Stout seems to be really popular again, so we’ve got a good recipe for a stout which would be around about 4%, unnamed, as yet.
We’re going to produce a lager as well, which we have done in the past, as we’ve got the facility to be able to do lagers.
What are your plans for the future?
The idea is to do some beers that aren’t necessarily experimental but to perhaps do things that haven’t been done for a while. So for instance, we’ve just run a red IPA and we’re in the process of doing all the dry hopping and things on it now. And that’ll be a quite a bit stronger between 5% and 5½%. I think we’re going to call that Mesters Rouge, named after a polishing paste called Jewellers Rouge which was used for buffing and shining up high quality knife blades.
And then it’s a case of, looking at a summer drink. We’d like to do a Koelsh, but that will be keg rather than cask, and we’ll probably do a Christmas beer.
We also want to do some fruit beers. We’ve actually got five really big cherry trees on site and we’ve got permission to harvest all of the cherries from those, so at some point it’s likely we’ll do a Cherry IPA.
One of the other things that we’re currently doing is a complete rebrand. We’ve got a Sheffield chap working on that, Nick Law, who your readers may know as the man behind the Emmanuales beers.
We’ve also engaged with Luke Horton, who’s a local artist to do work on a little mesters images. Things like this to give it a different sort of perspective. Not to lose the history but try and give it a bit of a fresher look.
Where are you selling your beers? Obviously, your own tap, but are there any other places that sell it?
We sell quite a few of our cans to smaller outlets, and we do the Chop Shop, down in Kelham Island. Believe it or not, one of our biggest customers is Sheffield Cathedral. We supply them with cans and kegs for all of the events they have in the cathedral, and they actually do quite a lot of events, so they sell quite a lot of beer in there.
We’ve got about another 5 or 6 outlets that we currently do some kegs and cans to, but we’re looking at really trying to expand the market. We’ve got some pubs that take our kegs, but I want to try and introduce them to the cask as well, pubs like the Shakespeare down at Kelham Island. So it’s about getting around people and getting them aware that we’re now producing cask as well as keg.
Well, good luck with everything Neil. We look forward to seeing your beer at a few more local outlets, and personally I’m interested in trying that Cherry IPA if it appears.
