Paul has been a committee member since 2014, as well as being on the festival committee.
‘I have enjoyed all the various roles I have played in that time, particularly my functions at [the 2017] festival, and I was delighted to be press-ganged into being the Festival Organiser for [the following] year (thanks Louise!).
‘As well as being fond of “lowering a couple for the tonsils”, I'm also a big music fan, particularly live music. Feel free to stop me for a chat anytime you see me in the pub (particularly if you want to sponsor something at the festival).’
Last month, after a major fitout and over 3 years planning, The Fargate finally opened. The joint venture between Thornbridge and Pivovar has been highly anticipated and didn’t disappoint when the crowds flocked in on opening day.
The dark wood interior gives the impression of a traditional pub, albeit a very stylish one, whilst the upstairs room features lighter colours to make the most of the light flooding through the large windows facing Fargate itself.
The central bar features 10 handpulls and 16 keg lines, with roughly a 50/50 split between Thornbridge beers and guests.
It’s certainly a great addition to the city’s main shopping street and with The Old Shoe and Head of Steam nearby, it seems a nice little city centre pub crawl is developing.
Crosspool Social is a vibrant community cafe on Sandygate Road, Crosspool.
With great coffee and cake by day, from the 9th of October they will be opening every Thursday and Friday night, 6pm till 10.30pm, to sell beers from a number of local breweries. Wines, spirits and soft drinks are also available.
A Lindr unit has been installed to serve 2 keg beers and on the opening night they were Mesters Rouge, a 5.5% Red IPA and Hollis, a 3.8% IPA, both from Little Mesters.
A well-stocked fridge has a range of beers from other breweries including Thornbridge. It was a well attended launch, and the cafe/bar combination will no doubt prove to be a great success in the area.
A number of our beer festival volunteers had a get-together recently to try their hand at dutch shuffleboard, or Sjoelen to give it it’s correct name.
The game involves sliding wooden discs along the board to try and get them into the numbered compartments. Not as easy as you might think as all the failed attempts start to build up!
In the upstairs room at the Harlequin on Nursery Street, over 20 of us tried our hand in a highest score competition and a quickfire play-off version. All over a few of the Harlequin’s excellent beers of course.
The pub also kindly donated £25 worth of vouchers for our two winners.
Lee Vallett won the high score competition, and Jamie Smith won the play-off.
It was a great success, and a repeat afternoon is planned for sometime in the spring.
Malc Anderson at the board watched by Ally Smith, Ian & Anne Ashforth and Lee VallettPlay-off finalists Jamie Smith & Jess Cawley Jamie in the process of winning the final
October sees the return of our ever-popular Beer & Cider Festival at Kelham Island Museum. Taking place over 4 days from Wednesday15th to Saturday 18th, we are expecting over 5,000 to come and sample the very best in Real Ale, Real Cider and Craft Beer. Street Food, talks, tastings, and demonstrations add to the atmosphere and make this one of the highlights of the Sheffield beer scene.
Local businesses and individuals can get involved by taking advantage of some of the sponsorship opportunities still available. All options come with a number of sponsor tickets which include FREE entry; FREE festival glass; FREE pint; FREE programme & a FREE go on the pub games. All sponsors are also named in our programme, have their logo (and link) on our website, and feature on the sponsor posters at the festival.
Here’s what on offer.
Stillage Sponsor
An A2 board featuring your logo, attached to the top of one of the stillage racks.
£125 + vat. Includes 3 Sponsor tickets
Banner Sponsor
Your banner hung in a prominent place at the festival. Banners can be any size up to 3m wide and 1m high.
£100 + vat. Includes 2 Sponsor tickets
Cask Sponsor
A4 sheet with your logo attached to one of the casks on the rear stillages.
£60 + vat. Includes 2 Sponsor tickets
Handpump sponsor
A6 card with your logo attached to one of the handpumps on the front of the bars.
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.
The winner of this year’s award for Pub of the Year for Sheffield South is Heeley-based Brothers Arms. Originally named Ye Olde Shakespeare Inn, which can still be seen in embossed letters on the front of the pub, it was taken over in 2014 by 5 members of well-known local ukelele legends the Everley Pregnant Brothers. 11 years on and it is still run by the same 5 people, with one of them, Richard Bailes, acting as Manager.
As well as a good range of well-kept real ales the judging panel for the award particularly liked the community focus within the pub. Regular quiz nights, music nights, and art events cover a range of interests, providing a great meeting point for local customers. And of course there’s a few prints on the walls from local artist, and one of the original five “Brothers”, Pete Mckee.
Visitors from further afield are also encouraged with the Brothers Arms being part of the “Heeley Triangle”, along with the Sheaf View and White Lion. The three pubs are starting to promote themselves collectively, and we can certainly confirm it’s a great pub crawl for real ale fans.
As a nod to the past the pub has some new artwork about to adorn their walls. As well as a number of old photos of the pub, there’s a list of all the landlords who have run the pub for the last 200 years, along with the name of the reigning monarch during their tenure. Originally put together by the Fox family who ran the pub through the 50’s and 60’s, it has been brought bang up to date, and a new version printed ready to hang on the wall.
Our presentation takes place on Tuesday 13th May, during the half time break in the quiz, so why not pop along to lend your support and maybe join the quiz, which starts at 7.30. See you there!
As you no doubt know, January is a tough time for the hospitality industry and there are many calls for people to support our pubs and help counter the post-Christmas lull.
Obviously we fully endorse this view, but would also remind you that our local breweries need that support as well.
We estimate around 5,000 people read Beer Matters, so if each of our readers were to buy an extra couple of pints from one of our breweries it would add thousand of pounds to their income. And if that additional money was spent in one of the numerous brewery taps it would help them even more.
Here’s a run-down of all our breweries with details of where you can buy their excellent beers.
Abbeydale Brewery
Sheffield’s oldest brewery, now owned by its employees and winners of multiple awards. They have a vast range of beers available through their online shop, and at their pub, The Rising Sun, in Nether Green.
Blue Bee Brewery
One of the smaller breweries in Sheffield supplying quality cask beer around the city, particularly in the renowned Kelham island Tavern, run by the same owners. Their ever-changing American 5 Hop Pale Ale is currently in its 75th incarnation!
Bradfield Brewery
20 years old this year, and a well-known name on the city’s bars. As well as the on-site brewery shop, Bradfield have 3 pubs. The Nags Head, near Dam Flask reservoir, the King & Miller at Deepcar, and the Wharncliffe Arms at Wharncliffe Side
Dead Parrot Beer Company
A 15 barrel plant based in the courtyard of their brewery tap, Perch Brewhouse on Garden Street, West bar. The brewery has recently been involved in the revival of the Allsopp’s brand.
Emmanuales
Basically a small Walkley-based home brewery, but Emmanuales have been around for over 10 years and supply a wide range of beers in cans to many of our local bottle shops, usually with religious based names.
Fuggle Bunny Brew House
Launched in 2014 in an industrial unit in Halfway, Fuggle Bunny open their on-site tap room every Friday, with a number of beers on handpull, and usually featuring a food vendor.
Heist Brew Co.
Decent size brewery and tap house in the heart of Neepsend featuring mainly keg beer and cider, but also the occasional cask. In-house food provided by Talon.
Little Critters Brewing Company
Another Neepsend-based Brewery, supplying throughout the city. Although they have no tap of their own, they are regularly seen in cans at local bottle shops.
Little Mesters Brewing
In the process of moving to new premises and installing larger brewing kit. Their beers can be found in their tap on Chesterfield Road in Woodseats, as well as cans at local bottle shops.
Loxley Brewery
Small brewery based underneath the Wisewood Inn at Loxley. The brewery also owns the Raven Inn at Walkley. and the recently opened micropub No3 at Sharrow.
Neepsend Brew Co.
No prizes for guessing where these are based. 10 years old this year and well known for producing mainly one-off beers. They also own the Wellington pub at Shalesmoor.
The Brewery of Saint Mars of the Desert
Internationally renowned brewery producing keg beers in a range of styles. Their tap room in Attercliffe reopens in March, but their beers can be found in many local pubs and bottle shops at any time.
Stancill Brewery
Established in 2013 using the old Oakwell Brewery kit and recreating their Barnsley Bitter. Often seen in many bars locally, as well as their own pub, The Albion, on London Road.
Steel City Brewing
A cuckoo brewer who’s worked in a number of locations and probably the most adventurous of the local breweries since the demise of Lost Industry. Not brewing at present but you might find some of their beers in local bottle shops.
Tapped Brew Co.
Small brewery which can be seen brewing in the back room of the Sheffield tap, which is where you will also find plenty of their beers. Their American Flyer brown ale won the Champion beer of Sheffield at the 2024 Steel City Beer & Cider Festival.
Toolmakers Brewery
Small 5 barrel plant established in 2013 in an old tool making factory. The brewery has it’s own function room and its beers are always available at their pub, The Forest on Rutland Road.
Triple Point Brewing
Modern brewery visible from the bar and with a large outdoor seating area. Flagship beer Debut is a previous Champion Beer of Shefield winner. On site food offer from Twisted Burger Co.
True North Brew Co.
Located on Eldon Street, behind forum, the brewery mainly produces beers for True North’s own venues, ten in Sheffield and one in Barnsley. Their Devika IPA won Champion Beer of Sheffield in 2022.
We hope we’ve given you a bit more information to encourage you to search out some of the breweries and their beers in the coming months. It really is a case of ‘use them or lose them’. Sheffield has a proud brewing culture and we’re sure you’re just as keen as we are to preserve it.
Outside of the City of Sheffield there are three further breweries within our branch area – Intrepid based in Brough (near Bradwell), Eyam Brewery based in Great Hucklow (near Buxton) and Contour based in Grindleford.
For more information and up to date news on all our breweries, visit www. sheffield.camra.org.uk/breweries.
The weather smiled on the Steel City Beer & Cider Festival this year, and brought in the crowds for another successful festival.
Bronte Jones did the honours with the official opening. A local firefighter and a recent finalist on Gladiators, Bronte has been working with our chosen charity, Weston park Cancer charity to raise funds. Shown here with Paul Manning the Chairman of the Sheffield & district branch of CAMRA.
Abbeydale brewery produced a special charity beer “Together at Every Step” to raise even more money for Weston Park. A dry-hopped pale ale which we’re pleased to say sold out!
Abbeydale also hosted a beer tasting event held by Jim & Laura Rangeley, which focused on the history of the brewery and it’s recent move to become an Employee Ownership Trust.
Andy & Philippa Morton with their beer goggles on. A perfect example of the “Finest Quality Merchandise” on offer at the Tombola stall.
Wednesday evening saw our annual Beer Of The Festival award taking place. Each Sheffield brewery put forward a beer and a series of blind tastings arrived at the winners. This year’s winners were
1st – Tapped Brew Co. American Flyer. An American brown ale
2nd – Triple Point Brewery. Debut. A new-style IPA.
Dan & Martha from St Mars of the Desert brought a Stichfass cask of their traditional old ale ‘Owd Eerie’, which managed to sell out in under 30 minutes!
A variety of street food stalls kept the visitors fed throughout the festival with a number of delicious options.
Thursday saw The Tigermen take to the stage with some rousing rhythm & blues.
Friday night’s entertainment was the excellent Highway Child, back for their third appearance at the festival
Loxley Silver band returned for their ever-popular usual Saturday afternoon slot. A particular highlight was the haunting ‘Gresford’, written in 1936 to commemorate the Gresford Colliery mining disaster in Wrexham where 266 miners lost their lives.
Throughout Saturday, sword dancing mayhem was provided by local favourites Kelham Rapper and Sheffield Steel Rapper. No area of the festival was left untouched by their lively performances (No, we don’t know how they do it without injuring themselves either)
On 3 of the days the mighty Rover Don engine was in operation to the delight of the visitors lucky enough to get in the room before it was full.
The cider team in jolly mood. (We don’t know if this was before or after they tried the 13% mead from local producer Paradise Garage!)
The staff at the Keg Bar had a very busy festival as usual, and obviously all enjoying it. Even Josh from Kelham Island Tavern was smiling! The tall chap at the back wasn’t much help though.
A familiar face! Sean Clarke, former owner of Beer Central working behind the bar in the Upper Hall.
A lively afternoon in the Upper Hall.
Overall, another great festival. Thanks as ever go to all the volunteers who showed up and put in all the hard work to make it happen. And of course to all our visitors who came along to enjoy it.
It’s a couple of well-earned months off now for the planning committee before we start the process again in January. We’re always keen for new people to join the team, so feel free to email us if you’d like more info.
the team of volunteers that stayed behind after closing time Saturday to make a start on takedown then enjoy a few beers and pizza slices after!
The Dorothy Pax is going back to its Grassroots for their Tramlines Fringe Event, Canal-Lines. All free, just as it should be!
Richard commented “…we’d love to go big again this year, but it’s been so tough for us all this year that we’ve decided to go back to our roots. We’ve got a stunning lineup of amazing artists, we’re so excited to be working with our partners Waterbear College of Music, Sammy Fangers and of course The Chalton Country Club. I can’t stop waving my arms around with glee like Wallace and Gromit when they know there’s a cheddar moment inbound!”
The DPx will have their usual bountiful inside bar, a Triple Point Tap Takeover on the outside bar and the world exclusive of a new TP release. There’ll be plenty of outside seating and outside speakers so you can hear the performances whilst catching some rays, fingers crossed.
Richard also said “This year’s Tramlines Fringe is simply epic, so many great gigs over the weekend at so many great boozers and venues. We should be extremely proud of what we can achieve collectively in our city. Please support all the venues across the weekend. This is a world-class event, our own SXSW…get involved.”
All the Pax Crew have worked so hard to deliver a great program, this truly is a family-focused event. Bring the kids, bring the dawgs and we’ll provide the collective cheer!
Further information on our website here: https://dorothypax.com/canal-lines-2024/
In a recent issue of Beer Matters, we reported that Thornbridge brewery had taken delivery of one set of the Burton Union brewing system. This system had operated in the Marstons brewery for over 100 years, and it was a great relief to know that at least part of it would continue being used. We visited the brewery to see it in action, and to have a chat with joint owner Simon Webster, and head brewer Rob Lovatt.
Rob Lovatt, Thornbridge head brewer,
We should start by explaining what the Union system actually is. The process begins as usual in the brew house. After mashing, boiling and cooling the yeast is pitched. Twenty four hours later the wort is transferred to the unions where the magic happens. The six 750 litre wooden barrels are filled to the brim and each is fitted with an outlet tube at the very top leading to a large stainless steel trough. As the fermentation gets going the yeast head is expelled into this trough, the liquid component settles and is returned, by gravity, to the barrels. The temperature is monitored at the end of the swan necks filling the trough and adjusted as necessary. The speed at which the trough is filled rises and falls as the fermentation progresses and is usually complete in 5 to 6 days. From there the beer is transferred for conditioning and racked into barrels as usual.
Some minor tweaks have had to be made to reflect the different factory conditions. At Marstons the Unions were in a large enclosed warehouse avoiding contamination with the open trough. Due to the position of the set in Thornbridge’s premises, clear plastic covers have been installed over the trough for this purpose. They have also installed thermometers in the pipes to ensure a constant fermentation temperature of 22 degrees.
One of the original cellarmen from Marstons was invited to Thornbridge to see the Union in place, and was happy to impart some of his experience in looking after the sets. He had first hand knowledge of all the barrels that were in Burton and as they were all numbered he was able to pass on useful tips for maintaining the specific barrels now residing in Bakewell.
The system was originally devised to “clean” the beer, and the first test run on the Thornbridge sets were of their flagship beer, Jaipur. Head brewer Rob Lovatt produced 90 casks of the union version and described it as being more rounded and with more esters than the original.
Simon explained that although they have been pleased with the success of the ‘unionised’ Jaipur, they really want to use the system to produce new beers, with recipes designed to make the best use of its unique brewing method.
First up will be a 6% English IPA, called Union, which was happily fermenting away during our visit, followed by an English pale ale at 7%. Both will feature English hops such as Northdown and Goldings and will be worth looking out for. After that there are some collaborations planned and a version of 90 Shilling Ale from Colorado-based Odell Brewing Company was mentioned.
Credit is due to Thornbridge for taking the time and effort to rescue this important bit of British brewing heritage and we’re sure it will be producing interesting beers for us all to try for some time to come.
