The 40^th Steel City Beer and Cider festival which was held over the Halloween weekend was a roaring success with over 13,000 pints of beer and 1000 pints of cider supped by 4500 discerning drinkers. This far exceeded the 2700 that attended Ponds Forge last year and required 25% more beer and cider to be brought in at short notice to satisfy the thirsty drinkers. In fact the festival was such a success that the number of attendees on the Saturday evening had to be limited to ensure there was still been left until the end for those already inside. Even that didn’t work as the festival closed an hour early. This year saw a new venue with the festival moving to Kelham Island Museum at the heart of the Valley of Beer, the Beer Capital’s spiritual home of real ale. The new venue provided an atmospheric setting to celebrate Sheffield and District Branch’s Ruby Anniversary festival. Over 150 different beers from over 50 breweries were available over the weekend along with a range of international bottled beer and traditional cider and perry. Full use of the industrial nature of the venue was made with the beer being split over three bars including the museums own pub, The Millowners, brought to life for the weekend as a proper boozer. In addition the upper hall and a marquee by the river each provided their own unique atmosphere to suit all tastes. Fittingly for the new venue the festival was opened on the Wednesday evening by the Master Cutler, Mr David Grey MBE, with the festival charity this year being  Master Cutlers Challenger whose nomination is the  Brathay Trust who have a mission to improve the life chances of children and young people. Evening entertainment during the week was provided by the Amelia Carter Band, Soulfaces and Do$ch. Loxley Silver Band brought Saturday afternoon to life going down a storm. Mopping up the beer was a range of food including hog roast, cheese, black pudding, hotdogs (up to 20”), jacket potatoes, chocolate and crisps. Fancy dress Friday this year was brought to life by a horrific range of costumes to celebrate Halloween. A charity quiz was  also held to  challenge the little grey cells. The first night saw an exhaustive beer tasting of all the beers on sale by brewers, landlords, seasoned drinkers and other hangers on.  The final panel saw Cocoa Wonderland from Thornbridge Brewery declared overall champion of the festival. This wonderful ruby, brown 6.8% porter that oozes chocolate from every quarter really deserves the title. Thanks go to all the sponsors who have kindly supported the beer festival and to Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust, whose staff worked tirelessly alongside us, without who the festival would not have been the success it was. Thanks must also go to the brewers, many local, who are producing an amazing array of good quality beer. Some went out of their way to ensure that we still had beer available for sale on the Saturday. Thanks also to the customers who almost drank the festival dry, we hope you return next year to a bigger festival with much more beer. Final thanks must go to the volunteers without whose tireless work putting in up to 16 hour days there would be no festival. Some have been busy over the last 12 months organising the festival to ensure it was an amazing success.  A very special thanks go to the volunteers who turned up on the Sunday and Monday to help with take down. 2015, a bigger and better festival Following the success of this year’s festival thoughts now turn to how to make next year’s even better. Obviously more beer is required but that is only the start.  The organising committee will be meeting soon to reflect on what went well and what went wrong and work out how to improve the festival next year. Like all CAMRA beer festival the organisation is completely carried out by volunteers and yes we sometimes get things wrong but the feedback from this year’s beer festival has been overwhelmingly positive. Next year we promise it will be better. However we always need more help. If you think you may have skills that could be useful, either working or managing a bar, social media, health and safety, site, marketing, selling sponsorship or even if you don’t think you have anything special to offer but want to help please get in touch at festival@sheffieldcamra.org.uk, all help is much appreciated however small. If you feel like you could promote your business through sponsoring the beer festival then also please get in touch. We hope to announce dates for the 41^st Steel City Beer and Cider festival early in the New Year, so get it in your diary early. Cheers, Rob Carroll Chairman of the 40^th Steel City Beer and Cider Festival Organising Committee Beer of the Festival Winners Overall Champion 1st Thornbridge Cocoa Wonderland 2nd Fernandes Half Nelson 3rd Rat Ratweiller

The Three Valleys Festival, which took place on Saturday 7th June, got off to a somewhat damp start, thankfully by about 2pm the rain had cleared, the sun came out and so did all the people! Joining all the locals were some people who had travelled a fair distance to enjoy the unique experience of the Three Valleys Festival including  a bunch of lads (pictured wearing their cider t-shirts outside the Jolly Farmer) from Co Meeth, Ireland, who had incorporated it into a stag weekend in Manchester and the guys from Stoke on Trent who were camping at Barlow Brewery – amongst others. I started my day out at the Coach & Horses with a half of Bridestones Silver Fern from the outside bar before joining my companions inside who were mainly enjoying beers from Thornbridge and Magic Rock. Next was the Dronfield Arms with a range of ales and ciders being served from the outside bar that has been built there as part of the new decking, they also had a music stage on the car park. Over the road at the White Swan a cider festival and BBQ was being held on the patio. We then travelled up to the Royal Oak, a comfy local which had a range of local beers on the bar where we met Alex Eagle and Nath Hehir of the University of Sheffield Real Ale Society before continuing on to the Travellers Rest. The Travellers had added to the pub with a fish and chip trailer, beer tent and live music lorry on the car park (the cars had been moved into the field over the road!) and offered a range of about 30 different beers (plus ciders too). A stunning view over the valley towards Chesterfield also featured here! We took a bus ride to the Green Dragon in Dronfield where the (closed off) car park was full of people enjoying drinks from the outside bar and hot pork sandwiches from the hog roast tent. We had one of each before walking up to the Victoria where the smoking shelter had been converted into an outside bar and a kiosk was serving jacket potatoes. The next bus ride was to the Talbot which had a retro American rock and roll theme – a stillage full of Brampton Brewery beers to drink, a buddy holly tribute band to entertain and food was burgers and hot dogs served American diner style. The Castle Inn followed a bus ride down hill all the way where we found a nice selection of ales on the bar, Woodthorpe Hall cider too and a BBQ going on outside. This was a quick pitstop before heading up to Barlow Brewery which was packed by the time we arrived, but the Barlow beer was on form, the live music was being performed and Moss Valley Fine meets were cooking up some great bangers. We also got to the Jolly Farmer where extra guest beers were being served direct from the cellar and the Hyde Park Inn which was just winding down for the evening. We finished at the Three Tuns, the pizza stall had packed up for the evening but roast pork sandwiches were still available, inside the pub was packed with some great guest beers available on cellar runs and the live folky music entertaining the crowd nicely.

There are many places vying to be the UK’s top real ale destination such as Derby, Manchester and York, with of course Sheffield being preeminent among them. Norwich has long been an excellent destination for the real ale lover and in order to promote Norwich as a real ale destination, no less than 44 pubs took part in Norwich’s “City Of Ale” festival from 22nd May to 1st June. There were many events such as brewery tours, meet the brewer nights and so forth being held as part of City Of Ale. My first port of call as part of this was just such an event, an “East v North” beer tasting at The Rose Inn. The Rose Inn is an excellent pub, popular with Norwich City supporters and real ale enthusiasts alike. In addition to been an excellent host, landlady Dawn Hopkins is also very active in the “Fair Deal 4 Your Local” campaign, to try and reform big PubCo’s such as Punch and Enterprise. The first part of the “East v North” beer tasting pitted Oakham JHB against Kelham Island Pale Rider. I personally preferred the cleaner taste of Oakham JHB but I was in a clear minority here as most plumped for Kelham Island Pale Rider. The 2 beers to go head to head were Golden Triangle Hop Lobster and Thornbridge Jaipur. I had been looking forward to sampling beer from Golden Triangle brewery but on the night it was a clear victory for the more citrusy charms of Jaipur. The next section was fruit beers. The contender from the East here was Panther Brewery’s “Pink Panther”, a wheat beer made with pink grapefruit. I had sampled this beer last year and loved it. Sadly on this occasion I felt that the beer wasn’t on such top form. The contender from the North was Samuel Smith’s Organic Apricot, which I found sickly sweet and not to my taste one bit. The Organic Apricot won this section. It was dark beers for the final section, with Wolf Brewery’s “Grandma’s Rich Porter” going head to head with Blue Monkey Guerrilla. This was quite an even contest, with the smoother, richer offering from Wolf Brewery holding its own very well against the roastier stout from Blue Monkey. In the event this was the one section where the East Anglian beer was victorious, although I personally voted more for the East Anglian beers on the night. The following day I undertook a crawl around some of Norwich’s best pubs. The City Of Ale programme has no less than 7 different pubs crawls for the intrepid drinker but I decided to go my own way. My first port of call was the Fat Cat. This pub has twice won CAMRA’s National Pub of the Year award and deservedly so. It’s a truly outstanding local with a huge range of cask ale on both hand pump and gravity dispense, including quite a few beers from their own brewery and a Scottish beer festival when I visited. I started with the Fat Cat’s very own honey ale (an old favourite of mine) before sampling beers from Tryst and Williams Bros. The atmosphere in the pub was great and quite frankly I could have stayed at this one venue all day! Next up was a short walk to the Reindeer. A pub with 10 real ales, busy with people eating Sunday lunch. The cask range had a distinctly local flavour with beers from the likes of Humpty Dumpty, Redwell and Elgoods. The beer I chose here was Humpty Dumpty’s City Hoppers, one of a series of individually dry hopped beers designed especially for City Of Ale 2014. This was a very pleasant 3.8% beer. From there I headed into the Plough, a pub run by Grain brewery with 5 cask ales, all from Grain. I chose their porter, which turned out to be one of the nicer beers from this slightly under-rated brewery. I then ventured further into the Town centre, to the Murderers Arms. Happily this pub wasn’t full of actual murderers, but instead is a bustling city centre pub with food and, when I visited there was also a separate City Of Ale bar here selling local ales. I ate at the Murderers, with Jo C’s “Knot Just Another IPA” to wash the food down. From there I decided to give in to a spot of craft keg heresy and moved on to the Norwich Tap House, a bar that specialises in craft keg beer. I started with a half of Redwell IPA, which I found disappointing but then I noticed some excellent bottle conditioned beer in the fridges and ordered a bottle of De Molen “Donder & Bliksem”, a bottle conditioned beer from an excellent Dutch brewery. For my next venue I chose a pub which has gone in the opposite direction to the Norwich Tap House and been keg free for many years, the Kings Head on Magdalen Street. This pub had 14 beers on cask, again with a strong local emphasis. My own choice here was Shortts Farm “Blondie”, which apparently was selling very well. The Kings Head was unusually quiet, but it turned out this was because many of their punters were out on a brewery trip that afternoon to S&P brewery. Not far from there was my final call of this trip, the Plasterers Arms. This pub was hosting its own “Fem:Ale” beer festival with beer made by Brewster led breweries such as Brentwood, Ilkley, Dancing Duck and others. The beer I chose here was my favourite of the whole visit, Jo C’s Norfolk Kiwi, a very good hoppy bitter. The Plasterers was very friendly and busy, with live acoustic music as well. In summary, there are many truly outstanding pubs in Norwich, and there are a fair few other pubs I didn’t visit on this occasion I could also recommend such as the Earlham Arms, Fat Cat & Canary and Kings Arms. When it comes to pubs Norwich can stand toe to toe with any other top beery British town. City Of Ale is also a superb event, with more than enough to keep any lover of real ale busy. However, I do personally feel that many of the many East Anglian Breweries are lagging behind their less conservative Northern counterparts. Tom Sturgess

This year we are celebrating our 40th annual Steel City Beer festival – volunteers from Sheffield & District CAMRA have been organising and staffing this event in various venues since the 1970s! We are pleased to announce the basic details and you may well enjoy the same excitement as us about what’s new. The dates this year are the 29th October to the 1st November and the venue is Kelham Island Industrial museum. As usual there will be over 100 real ales to choose from plus a selection of continental bottled beers and a great choice of traditional cider and perry. Also as usual there will be a choice of foods plus stalls selling various goods, old fashioned pub games to play plus a programme of live music. The various bars and stalls will be spread across 4 areas – the upper hall, the Mill Owners Pub, the marquee and the plaza – each area will offer unique character and atmosphere. The beer range will showcase some of our local breweries along with new, rare and interesting real ales from across the UK with all the common beer styles such as pale ales, bitters, mild, stout and porter covered and our volunteers behind the bars happy to advise about beers and ciders and help you choose one you will enjoy. At this point we are looking for businesses to help support us and promote themselves by being a sponsor at the festival – whatever your budget we will be grateful for your support, the most basic package is to sponsor an individual beer and see your company name on the cask and in the programme, up scaling you could sponsor the van we hire for set up/take down, sponsor the programme, sponsor the posters/flyers, sponsor a festival zone or for the top level of support you could sponsor the whole festival! All our sponsors package include complimentary tickets that include entry, glass, first drink and a go on the games, these tickets could be used for corporate hospitality or a staff thankyou – or just use them yourself! Kelham Island Museum is easy to get to – walkable from the City Centre or served by buses nearby on Gibralter Street or Nursery Street, additionally it is only a short walk from Shalesmoor tram stop. The location of the venue also makes it easy to combine a visit to the festival with some great nearby pubs.