
SPECIAL BEERS
We had three special commemorative beers from local breweries.

This year the charity collecting donations at the festival was the Childrens’ Hospital Charity and the beer marking this was Pride of Yorkshire, from Bradfield Brewery. The name refers to the upcoming Pride of Yorkshire Sculpture Trail taking place in 2026 celebrating the charity’s 150th anniversary and will feature 150 large lion and lioness sculptures, and 150 smaller lion cub sculptures positioned across South Yorkshire, each telling a unique story and designed by professional artists and community groups. For details of this visit prideofyorkshire.org.

We’re celebrating 50 years of our Beer Matters magazine and here Abbeydale Brewery helped out to mark the occasion with a dry hopped special edition of a regular beer badged up with an actual magazine cover!

Finally, Neepsend Brewery helped with a special pumpclip for a cask version of their Alcis session IPA to mark the memory of Kevin Thompson, our social secretary and press officer who unexpectedly passed away recently.
THE FESTIVAL OPENING


This started with the unlikely trio of our festival organiser Paul Crofts, Sheffield Childrens Hospital Charity’s Holly and Jon McClure from Reverend & The Makers (who have a new single out called Haircut) behind a bar pulling a pint of the Pride of Yorkshire beer.





Attention then moved to the stage where after welcoming everyone to the festival, Paul introduced Megan from Beer Central who announced the winners of our Champion Beer of Sheffield & District competition and presented the certificates to the winning brewers.
The competition had been judged earlier in the afternoon by six teams of invited guests at a blind tasting.

Finally, back at the bar we had Dan & Martha from the Brewery of St Mars of the Desert with their German Stichfass casks filled with one of their new beers, Fledermaus, for a special tapping and pouring. A long queue soon formed with the beer selling out quite quickly!


Also present at the festival opening and beer judging was Dale from the Great British Pub Crawl, a social media content creator whose videos are available across many platforms charting his progress visiting as many pubs across the country as possible. With a fair old audience built up he takes the opportunity to champion the British pub and recently launched an online petition asking the government to give pubs a fairer deal, which complements CAMRA’s own lobbying nicely!
LITTLE CHICAGO WALKING TOUR


On Thursday morning 19 lucky ticket holders embarked on a guided walk around places in Kelham Island featured in the “Little Chicago” local history booklet (which was available to buy at the festival) with a pub stop at the Crow along the way. The tour and talk finished at the beer festival.
Thursday was also the first full day of the festival with all the food traders open alongside the bars and games.

A number of ticket holders enjoyed a tutored tasting event with Bradfield Brewery in a private room at the festival. This involved the brewers talking their audience through a number of beers in their range with their biggest selling Farmers Blonde and their whisky barrel aged Belted Galloway Stout among the 5 beers included.
Thursday night saw the live music programme kick off with the Retrobates starring Kitty Noir taking to stage whilst on Friday night it was Soul Battalion playing to a packed house! On Saturday we had Loxley Silver Band playing in the afternoon, Kelham Rappers dancing outside afterwards then at tea time on stage was Blythe Power.

FOOD TRADERS






The festival featured a number of street food vendors outside in the courtyard including Carribean Fusion serving flavourful authentic Jamaican street food such as jerk chicken wraps and Mutton curry, Yuleys Bratwurst with a range of German sausages on the BBQ, Yorkshire Crepes serving pancakes with various sweet and savoury filllings including some cocktail themed options, Sunshine Pizza Oven and finally Bonnie and Clyde slinging out deep fried Italian snacks.

Meanwhile inside we had Cheese Factor from Chesterfield indoor market boasting a refrigerated display filled with a whole range of cheeses along with pork pies serving up Ploughmans Platters and sandwiches.

Also inside was Fairfax chocolatiers with a range of fancy choccies and signature spirits. There was an option to combine the two with a cup of boozy hot chocolate!

BARS
The festival boasted a range of over 250 different beers in cask, keg, bottle and can plus cider, perry and mead spread across 4 areas.


The upper hall featured cask ales from brewers at the lower end of the alphabet (A-L) whilst the marquee featured cask ales from brewers at the other end of the alphabet (M-Y). Both those main areas had a cider bar and a bottle/can bar.



New this year was the Guest Brewers’ Room with three bars hosted by the breweries themselves with beers on both cask and keg. Pouring beers here were Radio City Beer Works, Turning Point and Ossett.


Meanwhile a wander beyond the courtyard through the Hawley Gallery (exhibition of knives and tools!) took you to the dedicated keg bar with some rather interesting craft beers pouring from a wall of 27 taps.
THE RIVER DON STEAM ENGINE

This is something the museum is well known for so it was arranged for it to be fire up for a demo at set times each day of the festival from Thursday onwards and always proves to be a popular attraction!
OTHER DISTRACTIONS!

We also had our tombola (every “1” is a winner!), classic pub games, CAMRA membership sign up stand and book shop.

GLASSWARE
All the drinks were served in commemorative glasses featuring this years festival logo with a choice of two designs – a classic pint glass with Hendersons Relish artwork and a beautiful stemmed half pint with Bradfield Brewery 20th anniversary artwork.
THE UNOFFICIAL FESTIVAL FRINGE
We get loads of beer tourists coming to Sheffield for the festival who are also keen to experience the great pubs the city is famous for with a whole load within walking distance of the festival venue including the Fat Cat and Kelham Island Tavern. Some of the pub ran events during festival week, for example Shakespeares Ale & Cider House had a tap takeover and the Harlequin hosted live music.
THANK YOU!
Thanks to all those visitors that came an enjoyed the festival and drank all the beer & cider, thanks to those that donated prizes for the tombola and thanks to all our sponsors for your support.


An even bigger thanks to all the volunteers that gave up their time to help organise, build, run, staff and pack up the festival. We move into an empty venue several days before the festival opens building it all from scratch and of course after we close Saturday night it all requires dismantling and packing away before the museum opens to the public again!

There is also of course months of publicising the festival in advance and we had a small army of volunteers distributing promotional beer mats, posters and flyers!

THANKS FROM THE TOMBOLA
The organisers of the recent 49th Steel City Beer & Cider Festival would like to thank the following for donating items to the festival tombola and to sell in support of Sheffield Children’s Hospital Charity:- Wayne Brierley RIP, Abbeydale Brewery, Blue Bee Brewery, Kelham Island Tavern, Paul & Tina Crofts, Ossett Brewery, Terry Palmer, Fairfax Distillers & Chocolatiers, Paul Manning, The Wellington, Dave Pickersgill, Nigel & Emlyn Tasker, Bernie Hunter, Crown & Glove, Loxley Brewery and everyone who donated anonymously. Apologies if we have missed anyone. – Andy Morton.
























