Category: Breweries

After a very unpredictable 2020 for the whole population – including our beloved beer industry, and us here at Abbeydale Brewery, we’re finding things to look forward to in 2021. One thing we can be sure of is that we will be celebrating our 25th anniversary! We feel very fortunate to be here and certainly feel it’s a milestone well worth celebrating.

Throughout the year we’re planning on releasing a series of anniversary beers, which will be marked with our special commemorative logo. We don’t want to give too much away just yet, but suffice to say we’ve got some amazing surprises up our sleeves with some completely new brews and some twists on popular favourites on the way.

We’re kicking off the year’s special releases with two returning beers… the first of which has been brewed this week! Our Amarillo hopped American Brown Ale, Brimstone, was a much loved feature of our core range from 2006 until 2016 before we had to take the difficult decision to retire it, but it’s back as a limited release in early February… including in can for the very first time! It’s a favourite beer of our Sales Director, Dan Baxter – who himself has worked for the company since 2007. Starting out at one-time Abbeydale pub The Moon, he began working at the brewery as a brewer and salesman in 2008 (following in his granddad’s footsteps, who used to work at the old William Stones Cannon Brewery on Rutland Road), and he’s never looked back. Dan’s very excited to get Brimstone back in his life, and we hope you are too! 

Also in February we have the return of Last Rites, our always popular dry hopped barleywine – we can’t wait to welcome it back to our line-up.

abbeydalebrewery.co.uk

Kelham Island Brewery are having a January sale on their online shop with discounts on all their packs of cans.

Thornbridge Brewery also have an online sale with 10% off everything, use the discount code NEWYEAR10.

New beer releases from Abbeydale Brewery mid January include the latest edition of their Salvation series of flavoured stouts (this one involving Sea Salt and Caramel) along with the return of Huckster Cryo, a juicy 6% New England IPA with a plethora of hops including the Ekuanot Cryo variety. Also making a temporary comeback is one of the more traditional seasonals, “Dr Morton’s Duck Baffler”, a sessionable 4.5% ABV classic pale ale brewed with Citra Hops which impart a zesty and refreshing flavour to the beer. All three are available in cans to order direct from the brewery online.

The newest brew at Neepsend Brew Co is Hiero, a 4.6% American pale hopped with Summit, Centennial and Eureka. The majority of this beer will be available in can (available to order online for home delivery) although a limited quantity will be put in cask for outlets still able to sell it.

Little Critters Brewing have a launched an online shop on their website selling their beer in cans along with brewery merchandise for home delivery. Free delivery is available for orders over £65.

Loxley Brewery will be at John Lewis in Sheffield City Centre from 7 to 13 December manning a stall selling their bottled beers and merchandise, handy for Christmas shoppers!

Grizzly Grain have brewed another batch of their Tilt Hammer Stout, which is now available in bottles.

Crosspool Ale Makers latest beer available in cans is Straight Outta Crosspool, a gluten-free West Coast IPA.

Drone Valley Brewery continue to offer home delivery of their bottled beers along with an increased selection of merchandise, additionally in the run up to Christmas they have opened a shop at their brewery in Unstone.

Little Mesters Brewing are now selling online for click and collect orders, the collection point is their brewery next door to Mitchell’s Wines at Meadowhead. Beers are available in cans or mini-kegs and the range includes a traditional 3.9% bitter, a hazy IPA and a lager. Merchandise including t-shirts is also available to order.

Abbeydale Brewery currently have a variety of 24 different beers available in cans and for those wanting to create a beer advent calendar for December they are offering a variety box containing one of each of the 24 beers to order online with free home delivery (alternatively click and collect is available from the brewery). The selection is diverse ranging from the 3.8% Daily Bread traditional bitter up to the 12.4% Strawberry Tigers and Rooftop Jacuzzis stout!  Some of the beers are also available individually in 9 pint mini casks.

Recent brews from Neepsend include Arion, a 5.4% Hopfenweizen and Bramble, a 4.8% Blackberry Porter.

Neepsend now has a brewery shop selling their beer in cans and mini-kegs along with merchandise. You can also order online for home delivery. One of the beers recently canned is Paikea, a 4.4% New Zealand Pale and yes, they’ve spotted the typo on the label…

Crosspool Ale Makers have brewed a Gluten Free 4% ABV Pilsener called “He Ain’t Heavy”. It is available to order online in cans for collection or delivery.

Grizzly Grain‘s latest beer is Auto Barn, a 4.5% ABV Spelt and Rye Hefeweizen, available in bottles for home delivery. The next beer, currently being brewed, is an American Brown Ale.

Drone Valley Brewery are now offering Christmas gift packs, available to order online.

Triple Point Brewery now have a separate shop located in the warehouse next door to the brewery and bar which you can buy cans, minikegs, merchandise etc from without having to order in advance. Latest brews include Kokos, a coconut stout; Parkin, a 7.2% AVB Treacle and ginger ale; and Substantial Meal, a 4.5% session IPA.

Recent beer releases from Abbeydale Brewery include “Through The Sticks”, a 5.1% lightly smoky sour beer with rosemary & lemon brewed in collaboration with Little Earth Project and the latest version of “Indulgence”, this time a Honeycombe Chocolate Stout. Both beers are available in can and can be ordered online either to collect from the brewery or for home delivery.

The Kelham Island Brewery 30th anniversary special beer, which some of you may have tried on cask at the Fat Cat or other pubs, is now available in cans from the brewery shop or to order online for home delivery.

Sheffield Brewery Company temporarily closed their brewing operations at the start of lockdown v2 on 5 November, with their taproom already forced to close under tier 3 restrictions towards the end of October. They are hoping to be back in business in December after lockdown when the pubs are able to reopen. (UPDATE – from 27th November they will be commencing weekly deliveries for beer ordered online).

Little Critters beers are now available in cans and minikegs from selected off licences or to order direct from the brewery for delivery. The latest beer to be canned is “C-Monster”, their 6.5% Citrus IPA.

Little Mesters Brewing is up and running and their website is due to go live soon and are also promising an imminent announcement about beer and merchandise! They are based at the former Mitchell’s Hop House brewery, which is next door to Mitchell’s Wine Merchants at Meadowhead and have a tap room upstairs.

Eyam Brewery have introduced a “1665 series” which sees some of their regular beers jacked up a few notches. The latest release in this series is a Black Death Imperial Vanilla Stout at 11% (their regular Black Death Vanilla Stout is 7% ABV) offering deeper, more complex flavours than normal! It is available in 750ml bottles.

Loxley Brewery rebranded during the first Covid-19 lockdown. Their ‘numbered’ cask ales now have names, which comes as a shock to most but it really does make things easier – they promise! 

The micro-brewery started out in 2018 just casking ales, and soon expanded their knowledge and started bottling too. When the bottles proved popular, they had to build an on-site bottling plant!

You’d think there was a story behind the numbered cask ales, but really their isn’t, they just didn’t know what to call them and so aptly named them with numbers! This proved popular and made a lot of customers laugh – it really was a talking point. But as bottling commenced, they were inspired to name the bottled ales after local history and folklore surrounding harrowing tales and gruesome legends once told about murders and tragedies on Loxley Common and surrounding areas. Revill, Lomas, Halliday, Fearn & Gunson the bottles were named…and now so are the casks!

Handy guide to know Loxley Ales:
Wisewood One – Revill 
Wisewood Three – Halliday (no relation to our good friend James!)
Wisewood Four – Gunson
Wisewood Seven – Lomas
Wisewood Eight – Fearn 

Wisewood Two, Five & Six were scrapped prior to the name change as they were the least popular brews. Renaming the beers also made sense so that the numbers didn’t jump! 

So – where did the names come from?

Halliday – Thomas Halliday built a Cave House on the Loxley Common.

Revill – In the evening of 30th December 1812 Mary Revill was murdered in the Cave House, which stood lonely on Loxley Common.

Lomas – Marys husband, Lomas Revill, a game keeper, hadn’t come home that night. He had been seen in the local inn and was found the next morning in the gamekeeper’s cabin.

Gunson – The surname of the chief engineer with the Sheffield Waterworks Company. John Gunson engineered the Dale Dyke Dam which burst and flooded Sheffield in 1864, killing many people.

Frank Fearn was hung in 1782, for the murder of a watchmaker. He told the watchmaker a story of a pocket watch club (where customers would save weekly towards the cost of a pocket watch) in High Bradfield. En route, Fearn clubbed and stabbed the watchmaker to death on Kirk Edge Road and hid his body in a nearby copse.

*Bottle delivery available – visit http://www.loxleybrewery.co.uk/shop/ to place your order OR VISIT The Raven Inn / The Wisewood Inn for a proper pint!’*

Hannah Hebb 

Whilst many pubs are closed and in Sheffield we aren’t generally allowed to meet friends & family we don’t live with, it being a tier 3 Covid alert area, you may be choosing to enjoy beer at home. That doesn’t have to mean supermarket booze though, a number of our local breweries sell beer in bottles, cans and minikegs and some will even deliver to your door if you order enough!

For those that do small pack but don’t deliver, don’t forget your friendly independent beer shop may sell it (including some that deliver such as Hop Hideout, Beer Central or the Beer Stop at Dronfield).

There are also some pubs (and also the Archer Road Beer Stop off-licence) that can sell you fresh hand-pulled cask beer to go in carry out cartons.

Here is a list of breweries based in Sheffield or close by that we know deliver to addresses in Sheffield:

• Abbeydale
• Acorn
• Ashover
• Bradfield
• Brampton
• Chantry
• Crosspool Ale Makers Society
• Don Valley
• Drone Valley
• Eyam
• Fuggle Bunny Brewhouse
• Geeves
• Grizzly Grain
• Heist brew Co
• Kelham Island
• Little Critters Brewing Company
• Little Mesters Brewing
• Loxley
• Neepsend
• Peak Ales
• Sheffield Brewery Company
• Stancill
• St Mars of the Desert
• Thornbridge
• Triple Point
• Welbeck Abbey

Intrepid Brewing aren’t delivering but are operating a brewery shop on an ad hoc basis, check their Twitter feed for opening hours.

Abbeydale Brewery normally host Funkfest at the brewery in September, showcasing beers from their “Funk Dungeon” project along with other sour and mixed fermentation beers from guest brewers. With the Covid pandemic this hasn’t been possible, so they are taking it to people’s homes with limited edition Funkfest beer packs available to order from their website from 5th October and local bottle shops selling suggested guest beers. This will run alongside online tutored tastings and video tours of the brewery over the weekend of 30th October to 1st November!

Neepsend Brew Co have brought back a tweaked version of one of the beers from their back catalogue, Tabaldak is a New England style beer brewed with plenty of oats, wheat & dextrin malts and big flameout and dry hop additions.

Thornbridge Brewery are celebrating Jaipur IPA’s 15th anniversary with a special dry hopped edition, the return of Jaipur X and a gift pack available to order online.

Little Mesters is the new brewing company that have taken over the brewery attached to Mitchells Wines shop at Meadowhead, along with the upstairs tap room. Check out their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/littlemestersbrewing/.

The 5,000th brew has kick started a return to the seasonal ale calendar for us at Bradfield Brewery. After the great success of our 5K brew and keen interest in our seasonal ale availability from both the pubs and our fans at home, we’ve decided that the rest of the seasonal ale lineup for 2020 WILL go ahead!

So next up is Farmers Jack-O-Lantern, a popular Autumnal seasonal ale, lightly hopped and amber coloured at 4.5%. This will be available from 5 October in nine and 18 gallon cask with the five litre mini kegs to follow shortly after.

While there may not be any remembrance event gatherings being held this year, it will not stop us commemorating our fallen soldiers with our Farmers Poppy Ale. 10p from every pint sold of this fruity golden ale is donated to the Royal British Legion and will be available in nine and 18 gallon casks from mid-October, with five litre mini kegs available shortly after.

And then before we know it… the ‘C’ word. I’ll just leave that there.

Jackie

Whilst we’ve been busy running the Covid curveball gauntlet, we didn’t forget an all important milestone! Mid September has seen our 5,000th brew take place and we hope you’ll agree, that’s something to celebrate.

Now usually we’d all be saying ‘let’s raise a drink together to celebrate!’ but let’s face it, we shouldn’t really be encouraging crowd gatherings at the moment so we’ve thought of a different way to mark the occasion.

This momentous brew will be celebrated with a 24 hour brewathon which will begin on 22 September, and we’ll be blogging along the way for all to enjoy! Brewers Sam, Bruce and Kieran will be doing five consecutive brews starting at 5pm on the 22 September and finishing at 5pm on Wednesday 23 September.

With our seasonal calendar being turned upside down, we had planned for a brand new brew in May this year, using our very own, home grown hops. Not wanting these hops to go to waste and with the milestone brew coming up, it lended us the opportunity to go forth and deliver!

So with our homegrown hops included, the 5K brew was brewed using five different hops, five different malts, courtesy of our new malt supplier, Paul’s Malt, and if you’ve not guessed it, the beer is 5% ABV.

A well hopped and nicely balanced IPA, the 5K is available in cask from the 21 September and will be available in five litre mini kegs soon.

Follow us on social media to check out the 24 hour brewathon!

Jackie