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).’
By the time this issue of Beer Matters hits the pubs, we will have started sending out our festival Beermats. As usual we have 12 different sponsors for the mats, each with their own design on one side, and a different festival design on the back. Collecting all 12 mats and fitting them together will form this year’s Festival poster, another excellent design from Robin Lunnon at Durb Design.
Our Beer Matters distributors will be taking the mats far and wide across the city, and beyond, so you might have to visit several pubs to collect them all. (I know. It’s a tough ask, but I’m sure you’ll cope.)
We’ll also be putting a few sets up on Ebay to auction off for the festival charity, which this year is the Yorkshire Air Ambulance.
Don’t worry if you don’t manage to complete your collection, as we’ll be holding back a hundred or so of each design to put out on the bars at the festival itself. Yet another reason to come and see us at Steel City Beer & Cider Festival 47, 18-21 October 2023, Kelham Island Museum, Sheffield
P.S. Our staffing form is now open on our website for anyone wishing to volunteer to help at this year’s festival. If you’ve never volunteered before but are considering it, simply email festival@sheffield.camra.org.ukand we’ll let you know all about it. Trust us, you’ll enjoy it.
It’s coming up to that time of year again. After last year’s successful post-covid return, we’re back once again at the Kelham Island Museum to celebrate all the best in beer and cider.
We’ve chosen to keep a very similar layout to the festival to let everyone get used to the changes we introduced last time. The Millowners Arms is still independent and offering a wide variety of drinks; The keg bar will stay in its new position in the rear courtyard, accessed through the engine room; and the Bradfield bar will be in the Brearley room, on your right as soon as you enter the festival.
No change in the range of beer and cider on offer though! Over 200 beers including around 50 keg beers, over 40 real ciders and 2 bottle bars featuring continental beers. The Sheffield Beer of The Festival award will take place again on Wednesday evening.
One noticeable change this year will be our decision to switch from beer tokens to beer cards. These will be A6 cards featuring a set of 20p boxes which will be crossed off as you spend. A common sight at other festivals we have decided to move to these to speed up service at the bar.
We have our usual array of live acts, and a great variety of food stalls, with extended vegetarian and vegan offerings this year. In addition to this we have our ever-popular Tombola stall, traditional pub games and CAMRA merchandise desk selling books and t-shirts.
Our overall festival charity is Yorkshire Air Ambulance, who will be grateful for any of your unused beer tokens, or festival glass deposit.
Although we’re not sure you’ll want to hand your glass back! We are delighted to announce that Henderson’s Relish are again one of our glass sponsors. This year they are sponsoring the pint glasses, with Bradfield brewery sponsoring the half pint ones.
No article on the beer festival would be complete without a word of thanks to our dedicated and hard-working volunteers. Each year they arrive to set everything up, man the bars, run the various desks, do whatever needs doing to ensure the festival is the success it is, and then dismantle everything and put it back in to storage for next year. We cannot thank them enough for the time and effort they give. The festival simply would not happen without them. As a thank you, this year we are running a free staff trip to Lincoln, and as an extra reward for the Sunday take down volunteers we have a free buffet at the Gardeners Rest. If you fancy joining our happy band please visit our website Sheffield.camra.org.uk/festival to get more details on volunteering. We can guarantee that you’ll enjoy it more than you expected.
Don’t forget to look out for our festival beermats around the locals pubs. As we have done for the last few years, the festival side of the mats are all different and once you collect all 12 they fit together to form an image of the festival poster.
We can’t wait to welcome you all back once more.
Steel City Beer & Cider Festival, 18-21 October 2023, Kelham Island Museum, Sheffield.
Volunteers from the 2022 Steel City Beer Festival had a summer get-together in the city recently. The day began with brewery tours courtesy of Triple Point Brewery and Heist Brew Co. Volunteers then set off from each brewery visiting a variety of pubs before all meeting up in the Kelham Island Tavern. Pubs visited included Rutland Arms, Sheffield Tap, Dorothy Pax, The Crow, Gardeners Rest, Alder Bar, Shakespeares and the Wellington, among others. A very enjoyable day, it gave everyone the chance to renew friendships made at the festival, and at last year’s volunteer’s trip to Halifax.
For anyone interested in volunteering for this year’s festival, the staffing form will be live on our website shortly.
Sheffield’s first micro pub, the Beer House on Ecclesall Road, has now expanded across the city with a second bar on Langsett Road in Hillsborough, at the tram stop and just by the bus interchange.
After 6 months of planning and fitting out, the new bar finally opened at the end of May with owner John Harrison being pleased with it’s initial success. Serving from 6 cask lines and 11 keg taps there’s a great selection of beer, and food will be added shortly with a selection of pork pies and sausage rolls from local suppliers.
Opening hours are 12 till 11, seven days a week, so there’s plenty of opportunity to call in and try it out.
Beer House interiorWindow seatsThere are 6 handpumps on the bar offering 5 cask ales and a ciderCraft keg fonts at the Beer HouseIf you’re getting a City Centre bound tram, the Beer House and tram door lines up almost perfectly to walk straight into the bar!
Our friends behind Sheffield’s first permanent Micropub, the Beerhouse on Ecclesall Road, are opening a new bar in Hillsborough. It’s been 6 months in preparation, but the aim is for a late May opening so they could already be trading by the time you read this!
Following the same style as the original, they will have a good range of well-kept beer featuring 6 cask lines and 5 keg, as well as “Yorkshire Tapas”, namely pork pies and sausage rolls!
A tie-in with the S6 foodbank will also help local people as well as fostering a community spirit within the pub.
Positioned by the Supertram stop opposite the old Hillsborough baths, the new Beerhouse S6 will become part of a rapidly-developing part of town. A number of interesting new bars and restaurants have opened in the last couple of years, making Hillsborough a great place for a night out.
The Gardener’s Rest on Neepsend Lane has been voted Pub of The Year for Sheffield North by the Sheffield & District branch of CAMRA. This is the third time this friendly well-run community-owned pub has won the award and in 2019 they were also Sheffield & District CAMRA’s overall Pub of The Year.
The pub has been through many changes in the last couple of decades. After extensive flood damage in 2007, the pub finally reopened in 2009, and steadily built back it’s reputation and customer base under the guidance of previous owner Eddy Munnelly, who sadly died earlier this year. A tribute to Eddy appears on the News page of the Sheffield CAMRA website.
A turning point in the Gardeners’ history came when Eddy decided to retire in 2016. Keen to keep the pub in all its glory, a group of regulars formed the Gardeners Rest Community Society and took over the running of it. A subsequent share issue saw nearly 400 investors raise enough money to buy the pub outright in 2017. As they say – “more than a pub, a community hub”.
8 handpulls on the bar serve a regularly changing line up of great real ales, as well as real ciders, often from small independent breweries and producers.
Regular live music has been a feature of the pub for some time, featuring local musicians as well as drop-in sessions for anyone who wants to join in. There are also occasional art exhibitions in the main bar; frequent beer festivals; a bar billiards table in the snug; and possibly the quirkiest beer garden in Sheffield.
We will be presenting the award on Tuesday 20th June at 9pm. Everyone is welcome to join us to celebrate and the pub has kindly agreed to provide sandwiches!
Exciting news broke recently about a joint venture between Matt from the Bear on Abbeydale Road, and Mike at the Cider Hole in Shalesmoor. A unit inside Orchard Square is in the process of being fitted out as we speak, with a planned opening some time in June, although a name hasn’t yet been chosen (updated, it is to be called the Old Shoe!).
Apparently, the new venue will feature 20 taps, including 3 cask lines and cider too. We can also expect the same wide range of cans, bottles and artisan ciders for which both existing businesses are well known.
It is anticipated that the Exemption Ciderhouse production will relocate here from the Cider Hole.
It looks like being a great stop off for anyone arriving at Midland station heading for Kelham Island. We’ll have more details to announce next month, and will feature a full report once they are open.
A timely reminder of the musical legacy of Fagan’s famous musical gatherings has appeared in the form of a new CD from local folk singer Fil Tebbutt.
Fil is one of the many musicians to have graced the back room at the pub during Tom & Barbara Boulding’s time as landlord and landlady and has now teamed up with several other regulars to produce an album combining both traditional and modern folk songs.
“When the martins take to the wing” features songs that Fagan’s regulars will have no doubt heard drifting across the bar, and one of them “The Girls of Glossop Road” even includes Tom’s own voice on the choruses.
It’s an excellent collection of tunes, all expertly sung and played, and great to play at home if you’re missing the craic. All profits from the CD go to charity, and you’ll probably have to visit the pub on a folk night to try and get hold of a copy. I heartily recommend you do.
Fagan’s Stories
As readers will know, Tom and Barbara Boulding, landlords of Fagan’s pub, retired in February after 37 years behind the bar. In the weeks before their retirement, Tom took time to record some of the stories and history behind the objects and artwork hanging on the walls of the pub, with pub regulars Tegwen Roberts, Ed Wynn and Dave Young.
One of the videos involves Tom talking about the day of the Hillsborough football disaster, which he remembers vividly. Did you know that the Mayor of Osaka once came to Fagan’s for his tea? Or that the former landlord Joe Fagan served in Bomber Command, and was a member of the Caterpillar Club? Hear these and other stories on YouTube @FagansStoriesSheffield.
Tegwen has also recorded a podcast about the early history of the Fagan’s – which goes back to the late 18th century – with support from Ed, Dave and producer Steve Dunbobbin. The podcast is a short dive into the early history of Fagan’s (formerly the Barrel Inn) told through the stories of some of the many people who have been part of the pub and its community over the past 200 years.
The podcast includes interviews with musicians who have played in the pub’s legendary back room, artist Pete McKee who created ‘the Snog’ mural on the gable wall, and CAMRA’s own Dave Pickersgill.
The podcast is available on Soundcloud; again just search for Fagans Stories Sheffield. There is currently one episode available, with another episode to come shortly with more stories from the pub’s community. As Tom says, ‘It’s Fagan’s, so there’s always a tale’.
Festival organiser, Paul Crofts, looks back at Steel City 46 and forward to 47
After a three-year break, we were finally able to return to Kelham Island Museum for our annual beer festival. For obvious reasons, the world has changed dramatically since our last festival in 2019, and we approached the 2022 event with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.
The general feeling amongst the organising committee was that there would be some pent-up demand for a festival, and that visitors would be keen to return to what has become a very popular event. However, information we were getting from CAMRA HQ was that visitor numbers at other festivals were down. There was also the background of rising prices and uncertainty about the future impacting how much people would have to spend.
Needless to say, the feedback from local breweries and on social media was positive. The hospitality industry has been particularly hard hit by the economic situation. The festival was seen as something that would help generate a bit of interest and encourage people back into going out and celebrating the Sheffield beer scene.
So when it came to opening time on the Wednesday, we were somewhat relieved to see a queue of punters actually wanting to come in! Over the next four days though, it became clear that despite a steady stream of visitors we were not going to achieve the attendance numbers we were hoping. Probably a combination of poor weather on some days, post-Covid wariness and a permanent change in some people’s habits meant an overall reduction on 2019 numbers. Luckily those that came spent a little more and by the time we closed on Saturday the committee were satisfied that we had produced another great festival.
One particularly popular feature was the half pint glasses, featuring the Henderson’s Relish logo. We ordered 35% more half pint glasses than usual in anticipation of these being popular and they sold out! Visitors also had a good range of food stalls to choose from, along with the usual exciting live music, with festival favourites Kelham Island Rapper doing their riotous routines in every bar.
Two noticeable changes this year were an expansion of the ticketed events, and a new keg bar position. Beer and cider tasting sessions, hosted by Hop Hideout and the Cider Hole, and pub heritage talks by Dave Pickersgill were an excellent addition to the festival, building on the 2019 talk by Roger Protz. The keg bar had to be repositioned due to the Millowners Arms becoming a commercial venture, and moved to the rear courtyard. A number of visitors commented that this felt separated from the rest of the festival, and we will probably look to find a better spot this year.
A couple of CAMRA employees who came up from the St Albans head office to work with us were impressed with what they saw and we believe it enhanced Sheffield’s reputation as well as justifying the decision to hold the 2023 Members’ Weekend here this April.
Steel City 47
Looking forward to this year’s festival we have looked at some of the changes forced on us by the pandemic and are planning several improvements.
It has been obvious for a while now that we have an enthusiastic but ageing band of volunteers, and the physical work of running the festival is becoming more of a challenge. We have a concern that this may now be putting off some people who might otherwise be only too willing to help. Therefore we have plans to use third-party companies to cover some of the more strenuous and time-consuming elements of the build. From discussion with a number of existing volunteers it appears these moves will be very popular and we hope that it will help in recruiting new volunteers as well as encouraging back some of our previous volunteers.
We also plan to work more on attracting new volunteers to specific areas. Something in particular that we want to improve is the number of people in our cellar team. Anyone who thinks this may be something they would be interested in can email festival@sheffield.camra.org.uk and we will be happy to give them more details on what is involved. We would like to have a larger team so we can share out the workload and make it easier and more enjoyable for everyone.
One pleasing aspect of this year’s festival, which will be vital for the coming year, is the great camaraderie between the volunteers. This was evident both during the festival and at the subsequent staff trip to Halifax. We’ll be keeping this going during planning meetings, with ongoing communication with all volunteers and by arranging a couple of social events over the summer.
Again, anyone wanting to know more can email us or call in to one of our planning meetings, which are held the third Tuesday in each month at the Gardeners Rest in Neepsend. I can guarantee that being part of our team will be both enjoyable and rewarding.
The dates pencilled in for Steel City 47 are 18-21 October 2023.
Each year the Steel City festival committee arrange a free day trip for the volunteers, as a thank you for their hard work.
This year’s destination was Halifax, so on a Saturday morning, a few weeks after the festival, a packed 52-seater coach set off to see what the West Yorkshire town had to offer.
First stop was Cock o’ the North, the tap room for Halifax Steam Brewery, just on the outskirts of town. The brewery had experienced some difficulty getting staff for the day, so two of our committee ended up acting as temporary barmen to ensure everyone got served without too much of a wait. They seemed to enjoy themselves, no doubt helped by the free pint they received for their efforts.
An hour later and everyone made their way back to the coach, only to find out that the driver wasn’t able to start it! A mechanic was apparently being despatched to sort it out, but in the meantime we all had to make our own way into Halifax. Some chose to book taxis, some took a short walk to the nearest bus stop and a few others walked into the centre.
Once in town, there were plenty of excellent venues to choose from. A particular favourite was the Grayston Unity, a Grade II listed building advertising itself as the smallest live music venue in the UK. By a coincidence of timing they had just had a Sheffield breweries event, so the pumps featured beers from Abbeydale and Little Critters.
Guided by a local CAMRA member, a small group of us got on a bus and left the town centre in search of the (almost) legendary Big Six. A short ride and a myriad of tight streets later, we arrived at the award-winning building. Dating from 1857, this pub has an unmade road on its garden side and is set within a row of terraced houses. Erected as a purpose-built beer house with its own brewhouse, it has an unusual layout and retains many of its internal fittings. These include oak-framed fitted seating, wood-panelling and a fine bar back-fitting, all probably dating from soon after its 1928 acquisition by local brewers Ramsden’s. The layout consists of a central corridor with two partly opened-up rooms, plus a bar-lounge and an excellent cosy snug. In addition, four cask beers were available. An excellent interlude in a packed day.
Back in town, the Meandering Bear, Victorian Craft Beer Café and the Square Chapel Café & Bar were all visited and found to have a good range of well-kept beers. All have won recent awards from Halifax & Calderdale branch. Slightly out of town at Dean Clough Mills was the Stod Fold brewery tap, also a recent award winner, and a large number of the volunteers all met up in the final pub of the day, Kobenhavn, the Halifax & Calderdale Pub of the Season Autumn 2021. Six cask lines and 24 keg lines gave us plenty of choice for a last drink.
Finally, a quick walk through a very festive looking Piece Hall and we were back at the coach, now thankfully working again. Overall a great day out, with a good range of top-quality pubs, which it was pleasing to note were very busy. If anyone fancies taking a day out to sample Halifax’s drinking establishments, a copy of the pubs list and map that was produced for the trip is available from our website.
