I was recently invited by George Bushell from the Shakespeare to join him and his colleague Charlie Slack at Loxley Brewery for a brewday. As part of Sheffield Beer Week, the Shakespeare is currently working with several Sheffield breweries and local businesses to produce a range of collaboration beers which will be available during Beer Week – watch the Shakespeare’s socials for details, but at time of writing these were planned to include:
- Loxley – Bitter
- Abbeydale – El Dorado Deception
- Little Critters with Nam Song (Vietnamese restaurant in Broomhill) – Vietnamese coffee stout
- Little Mesters/Emmanuales – NZ Rye Pale
- Duality Brew Co with Freak St (Nepalese cafe in Walkley) – Juicy IPA
- Triple Point – Miso Caramel Mild (and some special pins)
Not all are yet brewed and some may change! A launch is planned for Monday 9 March.
Loxley Brewery was started in 2018 by David Woodhead in a disused garage beneath the Wisewood Inn in Loxley. David, a friend of Wisewood’s owner Stephen Wesley, home brewed before taking on the new role and now mostly supplies beer to Wisewood, Raven (Walkley) and No3 (Sharrow) as well as producing bottle-conditioned real ale on premises. With his assistant Christian, David brews about 3 times a fortnight on the 5BBL custom-built kit.
George, Charlie and I all arrived when the mash was already on, and got to have a good chat with David and Christian about the brewery, and David’s brewing history and prior life in the steel industry. We did a lot of standing around with further talk during the sparge phase – in advance of the day the major elements I knew of for the brewing process were the amounts of waiting involved, with intermittent bursts of cleaning – all of which proved true.
We took turns to ceremoniously shovel bins of spent grain from the tun, which all goes to a good home as animal feed. We also weighed up the hops for the boil, probably our only other contribution for the day! I found it to be a very interesting day and having only had a basic understanding of the steps involved, it was a good learning experience for all the hard work that goes into every pint we sit down with.
At this point the Wisewood Inn had opened for the day and we celebrated what should be an excellent bitter with a pint and a chip butty!
A huge thanks to everyone at Loxley, the Wisewood Inn and the Shakespeare – keep an eye on their social media for upcoming events and where to drink the beer when it’s out.