Category: Breweries

After a busy October, with students back in Sheffield and the Steel City Beer Festival, November looks just as hectic. First of all our cask beers will be feature at Peddler Market in Neepsend over the first weekend November; look for our Amarillo Pale, Ginger Beer and Waimea IPA all featured alongside some great street food. We have less time in October than ever to brew one-off beers with our core beers keeping us busy but we have managed to squeeze a few in. The one that we are most excited about is The Last Geek (6.5%), an IPA brewed with the addition of Vienna and Oat malt to give a smooth mouthfeel, but then with huge additions of Mosaic in both the copper and fermenter to give those big tropical and pine flavours we have come to except from this superb American hop. On top of this in November we will have Waimea IPA (5.0%), a beer we have brewed before but with its great tangerine characteristics and high Alpha content it was one we had to brew again. We have also got our hands on some US Amarillo hops that we haven’t used for a good few years and have produced a great little session ale, Amarillo Pale (3.9%); expect citrus orange hop flavours leading to a dry finish. Josh Jepson

In partnership with Sheffield Wednesday we have produced a special new beer for match days at Hillsborough. Wednesday Pale Ale (4.0%) was launched on the concourses and in hospitality lounges for the Championship clash with Nottingham Forest on Saturday 9 September. Simon Webster, Chief Executive Officer of Thornbridge Brewery, says “When we were given the opportunity to brew the official Sheffield Wednesday beer, we were delighted. Our Managing Director Jim Harrison and I have been season ticket holders for years so to have one of our own beers inside the ground is a perfect match!” Wednesday Pale Ale will be available in the ground at all home games and in local pubs. A bottled version will be on sale at the end of September. Alex Buchanan

Head brewer Steve Bunting recently visited Stocks Farm in Worcestershire to take part in one of their annual hop walks. Steve brought back with him sacks full of the precious fresh hop cargo and the following morning the Acorn team were busy using the First Gold variety for the latest brew of Pretty Green (3.5%). This will be a vibrant, fresh, straw-coloured pale with wonderful citrus, sweet orange-like aroma and slender spicy notes. The brewery’s single hopped IPA range continues unabated. We’re now pushing towards the 130 mark with the introduction of the English hop variety Ernest. The 5% golden ale will deliver apricot, citrus and spice characteristics in a wonderfully rich and complex beer. Finally Acorn Brewery is delighted to announce that two directors of the brewery recently tied the knot.  Founder and Managing Director Dave Hughes and Business Development Director Christy Winfield, were married at Rogerthorpe Manor near Badsworth. Of course the health and happiness of the bride and groom was toasted with a pint of Barnsley Bitter – what else!  Dave and Christy then went on to honeymoon in the Maldives – you find any Barnsley Bitter there Dave?!

The big news from Steel City is they have a new host, so after a 9-month hiatus can finally brew under their own license again. The first brew will be Demons Are Back (named after a Mortiis song, but you all knew that), and will be a Transatlantic Pale Ale featuring Rakau and Hallertau Blanc hops (so maybe this one is Transpacific…). Two special versions will be created, the first will be for Steel City Beer Festival and will be named Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn, featuring chillies, as has become Steel City tradition for the festival. The second will be aged in a white wine barrel with grapes and dry hops, and will be available later in the year. Also available later in the year will be Scraping the Barrel, a rum-barrel aged version of Mayhem stout, and an as-yet-unnamed red wine barrel aged version. Also currently available is the latest Imperial collaboration Get In The C, pale and bitter (160+ IBU!) with plenty of Chinook, Cascade, Citra and Calypso. A special version for the Shakespeare was also produced and is named ‘Scarface’. A slightly stronger version was made on the minikit, and with reference to the MPs who showed more concern for the temporary silencing of Big Ben than the tragedy at Grenfell Tower is named The Bell End Gathering, with all proceeds to charity. Also available in October is the Weird Beard collaboration, an as yet unnamed chocolate & coconut white stout. A cask of this will be at Steel City Beer Festival. Dave Unpronounceable

The Sheffield Brewery Company is pleased to announce that at the recent SIBA North & East Beer Completion, we came Gold in the small pack Mild Ales category for our light but highly flavoursome 3.5% porter, Brunswick Black.  The award was collected in person by our brewer, Nick Law, whose happy accident led to this slightly sweet porter (you can read the full story in a recent back issue of Beer Matters). In other news, our Brewery Tap Room will be open again on Friday 7 and Saturday 8 October.  Serving up a range of fresh keg and cask ales, food, and live music, our venue is the perfect place to hang out for good beer, good bands and good times. Finally, you’ll be pleased to know that over the next few months, we’ll be relaunching our Beer Club with a range of events including tap take overs, meet the brewer, specialised homebrewing courses and competitions, music nights, and more.  Our desire is to make The Sheffield Brewery Company the hub for all things beer, fostering a community of hop heads who are as passionate about the production – and particularly the consumption – of beer as we are.  Members will enjoy discounts on the bar as well as a range of other benefits. Details to follow at www.sheffieldbrewery.com. Nick Law

We have had a busy September both at the brewery and on the road. After previous collaborations at our place with Abbeydale and North Riding we have finally got round to visiting them and brewing up a couple of great beers. Firstly, at Abbeydale we brewed a mega-hoppy rye and oat IPA, Are There Hops in Hell? (7.3%), combining Eureka, Citra and Sorachi hops which will be available in both cask and keg. Over in Scarborough at North Riding we produced Variations (5.0%), a single-hopped pale ale using Enigma. This Aussie hop is said to produce pinot gris and raspberry flavours but we will have to wait and see. Back at base, we had Dan from Regather Co-operative over to help them produce one of their beers on a larger scale so they would have their beer in cask for the first time. For those of you have not heard of Regather they are trading co-operative based just off London Road and are home to one of Sheffield’s smallest breweries, producing bottled beers for events at their in-house bar. After chatting with Dan, we decided on a slight variation on their EPA and have brewed Regather Pale (3.9%), a fruity well balanced session pale using American Willamette hops with a floral and herbal finish. After initial tastings we are both really please with the outcome and look forward to seeing it on the bars of Sheffield. On top of all this we also produced a few specials by ourselves. Firstly we have re-brewed Coffee Milk Stout (5.4%) which went down really well this year. This smooth, rich stout is brewed with lactose and cold brewed coffee from local roaster Frazers Coffee. We will also be adding Tia Maria to a limited number of casks since it proved very popular at the Kelham Island Tavern’s summer beer festival. Next up is a brand new beer, Ekuanot Red (4.7%), with a biscuit malt body backed up with a big tropical hop flavour and aroma from the superb American hop Ekuanot (formerly Equinox). September also saw us finally get round to brew the missing American 5 Hop Version 13 (4.3%). After missing out number 13 for no reason other than to see if anyone would notice (and they did), we are trying out five of our favourite US hops together: Mosaic, Citra, Ekuanot, Simcoe and Columbus. So this one should be extra special! Look out for all of these beers in pubs across Sheffield and beyond as well as at Steel City Beer Festival in October. Josh Jepson

The latest special beer from Stancill Brewery is an experimental beer which has been named after the largest city in Kansas. Wichita is a 5.2% beer which features all the hallmarks of a classic American Pale Ale. Brewed using three different malts and generously hopped with a unique combination of Citra, Amarillo and Mosaic varieties. To help give the beer the classic taste of a US beer, it has been produced using a US yeast variety, packing every pint with plenty of flavour from first sip to last. Meanwhile, Brad Fitton has joined Stancill Brewery as director of sales. Brad has held previous roles at the now defunct Crown Brewery and Retford-based Springhead Brewery. In 2014, he was part of the original Stancill team who launched the brewery, and was responsible for developing the company’s sales strategy before leaving to pursue other opportunities. Brad returned to Stancill in August 2017, where he will be responsible for overseeing the company’s business growth strategy. Brad said: “Returning to Stancill Brewery is a really exciting challenge for me. I’ve spent quite a bit of time working in the brewing industry during my career and it’s great to re-join the brewery team. I enjoyed working with Tom and Adam when they first launched their business. It’s incredible to see how much they have achieved in such a relatively short period of time and I’m looking forward to helping support the brewery’s ambitious future growth plans.”

We are very excited for our 200th brew, which will be available this month. For number 100 we brewed Century IPA (6.6%), a beast of an IPA featuring our biggest hop bill to date, so naturally for number 200 we are going for the imaginatively named Double Century IPA. We’ll be going all out on a 7.2% IPA hopped with Citra, Mosaic, Ekuanot, Centennial and Amarillo in frankly unnecessary quantities. Don’t expect subtlety on this one; just huge amounts of hop flavour. It, along with four more of our beers, will be available at the Steel City Beer and Cider Festival, which we are delighted to be supporting by sponsoring the festival volunteers’ T-Shirts. Other new and returning brews this month include Loa, a 4.1% extra pale ale hopped with Summit, Azacca and Chinook, a return for Callisto, a 4.6% APA which showcases a trio of fruity US hops and the latest single hopped IPA, Citra IPA. The new stout, Salted Caramel Milk Stout, probably doesn’t require a description but is a beer we are very much looking forward to brewing and will also be hitting pubs in October. There will be other new brews out towards the end of the month but I’m not quite organised enough to tell you they will be just yet! We have just taken delivery of a rather large number of hops, though, including a few varieties we haven’t had the chance to use previously (some of them – very unusually for us – from places other than the US, New Zealand or Australia). A return for our popular mango pale, Manna, is also long overdue. Gavin Martin

It’s all gone collaboration crazy this month as we’ve got LOADS of beers coming up that we’ve made with friends from all around the world! First up – earlier this year we brewed an “away” collaboration, a strong Tripel style beer called Trials and Tripelations, with the excellent chaps at Twisted Barrel Ale in Coventry. The barrel aged version of this has just been released by Twisted Barrel, and so we thought it a perfect time to have the guys back for the return leg. Together we’ve concocted a fruited rye ale, Forest Fruit (4.4%) with additions of blackberries, redcurrants, raspberries and chuckleberries. You may have spotted on our social media that we’ve had some Americans in the brewhouse! All the way from North Carolina, Ass Clown’s head brewer and keen foodie Matt has created a maple bacon ice cream stout with us! Don’t Go Bacon My Heart (7.1%) contains 30kg of actual bacon from the lovely folks at Whirlow Hall Farm and beechwood smoked malt in the grist, balanced out with lactose and some lovely chocolatey malts for a slightly bonkers but magnificent flavour combination! And from closer to home – after the success of last year’s “Getting Caught in the Rain” Pina Colada beer (we reckon we started a trend there) with Blue Bee, Josh has made the trek back across Sheffield to brew with us here. Introducing Are There Hops in Hell? – a 7.3% big fat hoppy rye IPA that will be making its debut at Steel City Beer Festival from 19 October. We’re also really excited to announce that Brewdog Sheffield have selected us to partner up with them for Collabfest for the second year in a row, and our lemon curd on toast inspired Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy (5.5%) will be launched at their bar on 20 October, available on general release the following week. And finally, we are of course releasing some beers that we’ve made all by ourselves! Especially for autumn, we’re introducing Pilgrim (5.0%) to the Brewers Emporium range, a spiced ale based on the flavours of pumpkin pie and a real favourite of the whole team here. Look out also for Destiny (4.3%), a light golden beer with Simcoe hops, and Restoration (4.2%), a pale ale loaded with Chinook and Cascade for a citrusy flavour and a lasting bitter finish. Hope to see plenty of you for a pint down at Steel City Beer Festival! Laura

Exit 33 Brewing’s two specials for October are old recipes resurrected. We liked them so much last year we decided to bring them back! One for the Road (4.3%) is a pale ale brewed with a fantastic blend of hops including El Dorado, Amarillo & Azacca, which make for a hoppy full-flavoured session ale. And as the weather turns autumnal we’re also bringing back Carbon Copy (6.0%), our dark Cascadian ale. This beer is complex; made with speciality German malts, it is very dark, with a good malt profile and then the hops hit you! A heady mix of Columbus, Bravo, Simcoe and Zeus. Pete Roberts