Author: Dominic Nelson

Happy New Year! Welcome to 2019 – now in our 13^th year, we continue to brew award winning ales in cask and keg and provide a consistent high quality great tasting range of styles.

Our brewery shop on Percy Street is now well-established and folk are welcome to pop in anytime during the week between 10am–4pm to pick up their favourites in bottle and mini-keg – best check our Facebook page to see what’s in stock or pop along anyway and have a browse and meet the team led by head brewer, Marv.

All the hard work invested by the community owners at the Gardeners Rest has certainly paid off for this fantastic gem of a pub on the Don. Revellers visiting the Kelham and Neepsend area as well as regulars are attracted by the fab atmosphere and also the pub’s eclectic range of music and alternative events – see their Facebook page for details. The Sheffield Brewery Co. is very proud to continue to support the Gardeners Rest as its brewery tap and looks forward to meeting more customers when we arrange another meet the brewer event.  

As part of our love of music and beer the brewery is opening the Cellar Room Sessions: a series of gigs and DJ nights deep down in the completely unique and atmospheric cellar conditioning room! We’re featuring blues, jazz, soul and anything else which sounds good and takes our fancy. We’ll be kicking off on Saturday 2 February with Swear Box Acoustic at their very best playing some mean tunes from their repertoire of blues rock and soul classics. Keep your eyes on social media for details of our Friday forays underground and in the warmer climes in brewery yard with funk, soul and rock ‘n’ roll nights too.

On the brewing front we have brewed a craft pilsner lager with the name Percy St. At 5%, very crisp and using Bavarian hops for a classic hoppy finish, it has gone down a storm with customers and is available to order from us direct.

Our favourites: Five Rivers, Blanco Blonde, Crucible Best and Razor Paste have been joined recently by SIBA award winner Get Thi’ Sen Outdooerz which is also now part of the core range. Sheffield Porter and our new stout, Ruskin, have headed up our excellent darker side of life with Renovator (black IPA) and the infamous Berlin Black. We will be releasing monthly specials again and will highlight details through the usual social media channels.

Our heartfelt and sincere thanks to those pubs and kind folk who continue to support our brewery as we continue to deliver great tasting beers for your enjoyment!

Paddy Spencer

It’s not too late to wish you all a happy new year, is it?! After our biggest production month EVER in December 2018, we’ve not given ourselves very much of a rest as we dive straight in to yet another exciting year for us here at Abbeydale.

Firstly, we are very pleased to announce that by the time you read this we will have brewed the first batch of our new lager, Heresy! Whether it will be the final recipe or if it will need a little more tweaking is yet to be discovered, but do keep a look out as we’ll be sure to keep you updated on our progress.

In terms of releases for this month, we’ve got the return of Doctor Morton’s Safety Beer. A 4.1% Australian hopped pale, this fruity and refreshing beer is one of our favourites within the series. You might notice that we’ve given the range a little bit of an artwork refresh to bring it more in keeping with our other beers… spot the cheeky little cameo of Doctor Morton himself!

We’ve got another returning beer this month which we are very excited to welcome back… it’s Brimstone! We know it’s been missed by many of you since we had to make the difficult decision to take it out of our core range due to difficulties in sourcing Amarillo, the key hop in this 3.9% American style take on the classic English bitter. Luckily, we’ve managed to get hold of just enough to bring Brimstone back as a seasonal special. So keep your eyes peeled for it as it won’t be around for long!

There’s an all new Voyager IPA (5.6%) on the horizon too, this time hopped with Simcoe, Vic Secret and Enigma. Expect strong, citrus aromas and an upfront bitterness balanced by a punchy fruit-driven flavour packed with notes of grapefruit and dried peaches.

And finally, we’ll be releasing our (at the time of writing, unnamed) collaboration with the absolutely superb Siren Craft Brew. We’ve got together to create a DDH Farmhouse IPA, focusing on the interaction and bio-transformation between Brettanomyces and hops, an area we haven’t looked at in detail before. A barrel fermented version is coming later in the year too.

Laura

We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year, and are getting back in the swing of things.  Whether you partook in Dry January or Tryanuary, we’ve got a range of specials this month that are sure to get you excited! 

We starting with an old favourite that we haven’t see in a while, Admiral Keppel (4.3%). This golden English ale is brewed with Admiral hops which brings a pithy bitterness and the delicate aroma of spiced oranges.

Our next special, Nightingale, we have you thinking of Springtime. This IPA is as British as they come and is packed full of herbaceous notes from English Goldings and UK Cascade hops. The balance in this golden brew comes from honey-sweet caramalt and boasts a generous 5.5% ABV.

2019 will see more changes for the brewery, including a brand new range entitled Foraged & Found, which goes hand in hand with our new initiative “Go Green for 2019”. In addition to their 6 core real ales and kegged lager-style beer, “Pivo”, we also brew 3 unique specials each month, designed to offer something different in terms of taste and style and to pick up on developing trends.  This year we have developed a bold new range of specials centred around sustainable production. Each ale within the Foraged & Found range will be brewed with a food by-product from food producers, eateries, and community groups local to the brewery.

The range showcases the brewery’s efforts to have a positive impact on environment and local community, and highlights their commitment to reducing unnecessary waste. A variety of typical beer styles from across the world will be brewed, chosen to enhance and highlight the key flavour notes of the foods utilised.

First up from this new range we introduce Out of the Blue. This experimental 5.8% Stilton porter is brewed with whey from the award-winning Stichelton Dairy.  They produce a world class unpasteurised blue cheese following an original Stilton recipe. The whey is a by-product of generating curds for cheesemaking and it’s full of water, protein and sweet lactose. Using this as a proportion of our brewing water gives this porter a full-bodied, rounded sweetness. If you want to learn more about our innovative new range check out our blog at welbeckabbeybrewery.co.uk/blog.

Jess Low

We are back into the swing of things after the New Year here at Blue Bee and it’s been a busy start. The first brew of the year was the returning Amarillo IPA (5.0%), this single hopped IPA showcases the American hop’s floral, citrus and orange characteristics beautifully.

On the brand new beer front, following on from our range of single hopped session beers this month we have Mosaic Session (3.5%), a low ABV oat pale showcasing the fantastic Mosaic hop and its tropical and grapefruit flavours, expect bags of flavour despite the strength. Also on the cards is the return of Ginger Beer (4.5%) and we are now brewing the thirty fifth version of American 5 Hop (4.3%) this time combing Columbus, Eureka, Amarillo, Mosaic and Chinook.

On top of this we’d like to let everyone know that all our core beers: Reet Pale (4.0%), Hillfoot Best Bitter (4.0%), Triple Hop (4.3%) and Tempest Stout (4.8%) are all vegan.

Josh Jepson

After a great finish to a busy 2018, we spent January recuperating and preparing for another busy year ahead. The brewing schedule is complete and it was full steam ahead for the seasonal ales kick-starting with Farmers Cold Start (3.8%) in January.

Sticking with seasonal ales, back for 2019 (and its 13^th outing since first being brewed in 2006), Farmers Irish Dexter returns to our seasonal calendar. Available in cask from 25 February and up to St Patrick’s Day, this deep red-coloured ale at 4.8% ABV has a sweet malty flavour with a dry finish.

Plans are underway on further developing our second Brewery Tap, the King & Miller in Deepcar. The next stage of works include a full refurbishment of the kitchen facilities as well as the upgrading of a further seating area and function room. Keep an eye out for the food served date coming soon!

Jackie

Steel City started the year with a collab, a ‘home’ three-way with Lost Industry and Boutilliers. The base beer is Burn the Kirsch, a cherry-smoked pale with cherries and cherry blossom. Cherry-smoked malt gives a sweet fruity smoke flavour, rather than the unpleasant phenolic flavours of beechwood or peat. There will also be a wine-barrel aged version later in the year, as well as a braggot (beer/mead hybrid).

The launch of the special Stout Wars box sets of bottles went incredibly well, with Hop Hideout and Beer Central selling out before the beers even went on the shelf, and the online launch through Hoptimism selling out in under two minutes.

The barrel aging of the third Stout Wars trilogy is almost complete, and there will be a launch event in the spring. The main brew started at 12%, some of the barrels have fermented quite a bit further! The trilogy is in fact a Douglas Adams-esque trilogy of four:

• Episode VII: The Brett Awakens – aged in a red wine barrel with raisins and brettanomyces. Thanks to the brett this episode has fully fermented out so is 15.8%.
• Episode VIII: The Last Berry – aged in a bourbon barrel with blackberries and blackcurrants.
• Episode IX – aged in a sherry barrel with damsons.
• Solo – second runnings, soured and bretted in a red wine barrel with cherries.

All four will be available at the launch, the Solo will be on keg and the other three will all be cask. The exact date is still TBC, as it depends on the opening of the venue…

Dave Unpronounceable