Category: Festivals

Organisers have confirmed the annual 3 Valleys Beer Festival in Dronfield will be taking place again this year on its usual date, the first Saturday in June, which this year is 2 June 2018. This event gets more popular every year and is now classed as a major event by Derbyshire County Council so organisers are working together with their emergency planning committee to ensure all have a safe and enjoyable day out. 3 Valleys sees a whole raft of pubs, clubs and breweries putting on small beer festivals on the same day and fund a free bus service linking all the venues with Dronfield rail station and new this year there will also be festival buses from Halfway Park & Ride site where the 120 bus and Blue route tram terminate. Entry to all the venues is also free of charge so it is a great value day out featuring beer, cider, food, live music and scenery. New venues confirmed for this year include Fuggle Bunny Brewhouse and the Butchers Arms at Marsh Lane with returning favourites including the Miners Arms at Hundall, Hyde Park Inn at Hill Top, the Jolly Farmer and Miners Arms in Dronfield Woodhouse whilst in Dronfield itself the Dronfield Arms, Green Dragon, Manor House Hotel, Blue Stoops and Pioneer Club are all back again for 2018. It is expected there will be a few more venues still to be announced. One cluster of venues that have proved very busy in the last few years are those on Dronfield High Street – Blue Stoops, Manor House and Green Dragon – all offering outside bars, music and street food stalls – so new this year will be a road closure to make it easier and safer to walk between these venues and provide more space to eat and drink outside! As a result the festival buses will serve these venues using the stop in the Civic Centre. For all the developing news about 3 Valleys 2018 keep an eye on the festival’s Facebook page. Andy Cullen

There are many ways you can assist CAMRA – for example, you could work at one of our many beer festivals. There are dozens of varied roles: serving the beer is the obvious job, but there are many others: from van or fork-lift driving to building (and demolishing) bars to glass washing to social media to counting money. Whoever you are, there are jobs which suit your talents – jobs you will enjoy and jobs which are useful for your CV. Upcoming beer festivals include both Magna (Rotherham) and Burton-on -Trent. In August, the Great British Beer Festival (GBBF) at Olympia (London) offers an opportunity to take part in one of the key beer festivals worldwide.  Accommodation and a coach back at the end of each evening are provided for volunteers. Burton might be fifty miles away but it’s on a direct train line from Sheffield; a Derbyshire Wayfarer ticket costs £12.60 (£6.30 for over 60’s). An excellent beer festival takes place at the Town Hall: you could volunteer for part of the day, enjoy your beer and then return northwards. Locally, next October, the 44^th annual Steel City Beer Festival will need many hours of volunteer time. The online staffing form will be available around August – we look forward to welcoming many of you as an integral part of the making of this festival, the highlight of the Sheffield beer calendar. On a day-to-day basis, volunteering opportunities include the continuous updating of WhatPub, liaising with local breweries, writing articles for Beer Matters and many more I have not mentioned! There’s lots to do – just get involved! Dave Pickersgill

The recent Steel City Beer & Cider Festival, which for the fourth year in a row was held at the Kelham Island Museum, proved as popular as ever. More than 6,100 visitors attended over the four days, between them drinking over 14,500 pints of cask ale, 2,300 pints of cider and perry, 1,400 pints of cask-conditioned key keg beer (a complete sell-out) and 566 bottles and cans from the international section. Our membership stand saw 93 new members join CAMRA, a record for the Steel City Festival. As always, the festival was completely organised and staffed by volunteers, who very kindly gave up their time to ensure that the festival went as smoothly as possible. As a thank-you, a day trip to York was arranged for the volunteers; photos from this will appear in the next issue of Beer Matters. The volunteers’ work began on the Monday of festival week, with two days of frantically constructing stillages, bars and stalls and then positioning, venting and tapping all of the beers and ciders. This year, we had 227 cask ales, 46 ciders and perries, 36 key keg beers and 22 different cans and bottles. Wednesday evening, the opening night of the festival, was a real who’s who of the Sheffield beer scene, as representatives from many of our local breweries and pubs paid us a visit. The evening also saw the judging panels select their beers of the festival; the overall gold award was bestowed on Weird Beard’s Curse of the Ryeclops (7.5% rye IPA), with silver and bronze going to Blue Bee’s Ginger Beer (4.5% pale ale with added ginger) and North Riding Brew Pub’s Doomguy (6.2% chocolate orange porter) respectively. Seven local brewers won awards in the categories, including Sheffield Brewery’s Crucible Best (3.8%), which took gold in the Bitter category. The Friday evening session is traditionally fancy-dress night, and this year a number of volunteers got into the spirit of things, working their shifts in an array of Victorian attire. Drinkers were treated to plenty of entertainment, if not the best of weather, with live music provided by Do$ch, J&M Select, The Beat Merchants, Highway Child, Vegas 6 and the traditional Saturday afternoon performance from the Loxley Silver Band. Visitors could also experience the immense River Don Steam Engine in operation at various times during the festival. Our chosen charity this year was the Weston Park Cancer Charity, and proceeds from the quiz, collection buckets and donations of unused beer tokens added up to a total of £1,300, which has now been donated and very gratefully received. We must say thank-you, of course, to all of our sponsors who made the festival possible, especially to our main sponsors; Bradfield Brewery, who again sponsored the pint glasses and the Millowners Arms; SkyBet for sponsoring the half-pint glasses and Neepsend Brewery and Wetherspoons for sponsoring the volunteers’ t-shirts. We hope that everyone who came to the festival had a great time, and whether you made it or not we hope to see you all next year!

From Friday 17 to Sunday 19 November, The White Heart in Penistone will be hosting its 5^th beer and cider festival, hoping to follow up the success of the previous four events. Over the three days, there will be 30 real ales and 10 craft ciders on offer, alongside food and live music performances each day. Four of the beers will be supplied by the pub’s very own micro-brewery, Penistone Brewers – something a little different to look out for! The rest of the beer is to be organised by Acorn Brewery and will feature a range of breweries. The White Heart is the oldest pub in Penistone, established in 1377 as a coaching house which would have brewed its own beer, a tradition that has been resurrected 640 years later. All the beers on the main pub bar are Cask Marque approved, and the pub was awarded Barnsley CAMRA’s Summer Pub of the Season in 2016. The pub is located on Bridge Street, Penistone, S36 7AH. There are hourly trains direct from Sheffield to Penistone (Sheffield to Huddersfield train), and the pub is about a 10-minute walk from the station. See you at the festival!