A recent addition to the Sheffield brewing scene, the brewery of Saint Mars of the Desert (SMOD) is perhaps unique as we believe it is the only Yorkshire brewery to possess a coolship. Based at 90 Stevenson Road, Attercliffe, SMOD commenced brewing in late 2018. The equipment was mostly supplied by Sheffield-based Moeschle (UK) Ltd.
Coolships (koelschips in Flemish) are vessels which are relatively shallow and have a large surface area: imagine a large, shallow bath. They allow the wort to cool quickly and enable spontaneous fermentation with lactobacilli, which provide sourness. It also becomes the home for Brettanomyces and other wild yeasts, which together add earthy notes. After a few hours, possibly overnight, the wort is moved to a fermentation vessel and, over time, brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) finishes the fermentation. The initial process can only happen during the cooler months of the year as this reduces unwanted moulds.
The coolship at Saint Mars of the Desert
In Belgium, this method is used to produce lambic. The wort is often run into oak tuns, where it may remain for periods of up to three years. Lambics are then blended to produce gueuze (often called “oude gueuze”, which means it is unsweetened). Fruit may also be steeped in lambic. Boon Oude Kriek (6%) is a prime example: drinking Boon Kriek (4%) alongside Delirium Red (8%) recently was like comparing a complex fine wine to alcoholic fruit juice.
Since 2013, Elgood’s Brewery in Cambridgeshire have used a set of two (formerly redundant) open copper cooling trays situated at the top of their tower brewery in order to initiate spontaneous fermentation. This is followed by a long period in stainless steel tanks to produce ‘cambic’: Blonde Lambic Style Sour Ale (6%), Coolship Fruit and Coolship Mango (both 5%). Elgood’s won the ‘best sour beer lambic in Europe’ class at the 2015 World Beer Awards with their Coolship Fruit receiving a gold medal at the 2017 International Brewing Awards.
Oak lambic tuns at Rodenbach in Belgium
Also, in the UK, Burning Sky in Sussex installed a coolship in 2017 while The London Beer Company are building the UK’s first mobile coolship. Samuel Smith brew organic fruit beer at Melbourn Bros’ All Saints Brewery in Stamford, Lincolnshire. Here, a coolship is used to allow the wort to cool rapidly before yeast is added. Across the Atlantic, several breweries use coolships. For example, Allagash (Portland, Maine) produce a Cerise (6.7%).
We look forward to seeing the SMOD coolship in use and sampling ‘Attercliffe Sour’ as it joins Barnsley Brie and Henderson’s Relish as a niche South Yorkshire product.
Dave Pickersgill
Sheffield Beer Week has a number of great local breweries involved in its fifth year such as Neepsend Brew Co, Kelham Island Brewery, Thornbridge and Abbeydale and also national and international breweries including Wander Beyond, Wild Card Brewery, Burning Sky, Moor, Orbit and Mikkeller. Brand new Sheffield brewery, Saint Mars of the Desert, will also be hosting their first Sheffield Beer Week event; adding to the vibrancy of the Sheffield beer scene. Look out for over ten beer collaborations specially brewed for the beer week to be released through the celebrations. There will also be two beer and food diners hosted this year with Thornbridge Brewery and Burning Sky partnering on a closing event and renowned beer and food author Melissa Cole and Abbeydale Brewery working together. Charity partnership for this year sees the beer week supporting The Lord Mayor of Sheffield Magid Magid’s Charity Fund and the British Hop Association.
Sheffield Beer Week’s additional strands for 2019, on top of its core beer and food, community and heritage, sees a continued celebration of women working in the beer industry, building on this to cover diversity and inclusion in beer and events. With a brewsters’ tap takeover collaboration with Norwich based organisers Fem.Ale and award-winning beer shop Hop Hideout on 15 March. As International Women’s Day on 8 March precedes the beer week, it’s a timely celebration. On Monday March 11th new Sheffield based LGBTQ+ beer group Out and About will celebrate its launch with an Abbeydale Brewery beer collaboration at the Devonshire Cat pub.
The People’s Photography Trail will build on the success of last year’s photography exhibition trail across multiple venues with a broader focus on the people in the beer industry and beer lovers – tackling the lack of visual representation of the diverse range of people who work in and drink beer. We think it’s really crucial to promote increased diversity by showing relatable role models, often an encouraging force in itself, as ‘seeing is believing’ is an extremely powerful tool. Sheffield Beer Week will be working closely with photographers Nicci Peet (follow her project on https://www.niccipeet.co.uk/women-in-beer) and Mark Newton (his Beer Yorkshire project) to produce this photography meets beer trail around the city. Two talented local designers, Jim Connolly and Lorelle Skelton, have been commissioned to create pin badges which can be won on completion of the trail. Head here for further information: https://sheffieldbeerweek.co.uk/the-peoples-photography-trail/
Sheffield Beer Week is proud to be a part of the wider ‘Festival of the Outdoors’ initiative from The Outdoor City. With walking, running and cycling events. Including local historian, Sheffield CAMRA’s Pub Heritage Officer and British Guild of Beer Writers’ 2018 awards shortlisted author Dave Pickersgill’s popular Sheffield Pub Heritage Walk , a Mikkeller Running Club 5km and the ‘beertography’ trail encouraging people to walk, run or cycle The People’s Photography Trail route.
Kicking of the week on Friday 8 March, Sheffield’s craft beer festival, Indie Beer Feast launches (and grows to two days in 2019). A celebration of great independent craft beer in the iconic Abbeydale Picture House with brewery bars (20+) and street food. The beer festival champions and supports The Everyone Welcome initiative. Newly added for this year is the ‘Seasonal Celebration’ element which sees a number of breweries at the festival brewing up a special beer with a seasonal ingredient to first pour at the event. British Guild of Beer Writers’ member and Beer Writer of the Year 2017 Adrian Tierney-Jones will be heading up the tasting and judging panel to announce the Indie Beer Feast ‘Beer of the Festival’ picked from this seasonal celebration list. On International Women’s Day March 8th there will be a specially hosted Fem.Ale tasting at the beer festival in conjunction with Hop Hideout and Neptune Brewery.
The printed and online 2019 guide is available now: https://issuu.com/exposed_magazine/docs/sheffbeerweek_0219
Head to http://sheffieldbeerweek.co.uk for all other information.
Jules Gray
Our branch AGM takes place at Shakespeares on Tuesday 2 April at 8pm and one of the main items on the agenda is electing the committee that runs the branch for the year ahead. A number of long-standing members are unfortunately having to scale down their involvement, but this means we have some great opportunities for some new faces to get involved and give the branch a bit of new energy and enthusiasm.
Fancy a voluntary role on the committee? Here are the jobs we will possibly have available:
Beer Matters Editor and Webmaster: responsible for the content of our branch magazine and website and building a working relationship with local breweries and publicans that supply news and adverts.
Press and Social Media Officer: Spreads the word and ensures coverage of our events and campaigning themes, makes sure our viewpoint is reported when issues of our interest are topical, participates in media interviews, builds and maintains relationships with local journalists and influencers.
Social Secretary: Organises and hosts various social events for members throughout the year including guided pub crawls, brewery tours, beer tastings and more.
Young Members’ Contact: Acts as a local contact for the wider network of young members (aged 18-30) and takes the initiative to get more of our younger members actively involved in the branch by organising specific young members socials and liaising with the universities’ real ale societies.
Members are also welcome to put their names forward for other committee positions if they are interested. In the event that there are multiple candidates for a role then an election will be held at the AGM. If you have any questions about what being on the committee entails, please come along to a branch meeting or contact the branch by email or on Facebook.
As mentioned in last month’s Beer Matters, Saturday 30 March will see the return of the Sheffield Beer Census for 2019.
This city-wide survey is organised in order to collect information on which beers are available in the city on a particular day. We have been doing this for a few years now, and we are pleased to say that despite various claims from other cities such as Norwich, Derby and Nottingham, the information on the number of beers on sale usually shows that Sheffield can rightly claim to be Beer Capital of the UK.
This year we are looking for more keen volunteers to help collect the information. There are several routes you can join, or if you live in an area not listed you can help by simply visiting one or two of your local pubs. Each route will be led by a designated leader who will have the survey forms and a plan for visiting the various pubs. Many routes will involve public transport at some point, but your route leader will have details and can advise on costs and timings.
Daytime crawls will start at 12 noon, and eventually arrive at the Red Deer on Pitt Street by early evening to hand in the completed forms. Evening crawls then start from the Red Deer moving through the city centre before regrouping in the Kelham Island area.
If you would like to join on one of the crawls simply be at the start point for midday and look out for someone carrying survey forms or a copy of Beer Matters. If you are unable to join on a crawl, but would still like to help with collecting information, you can enter information directly onto our survey website, track.beer/survey.
We will need the name of the pub, and then for each cask ale on sale that day we need the name of the beer; the brewery; % strength; and price of a pint. There will be a Notes section where you can add if the pub serves real cider and keg beer. Please note only submissions made on 30 March will be counted towards the final totals.
The routes this year (and how to get to the starting points) are as follows:
Will be done in the evening after all volunteers meet at the Red Deer around 7pm.
It would be great to see a few more faces on the crawls, and even better if we can prove yet again that Sheffield is unrivalled in its range and quality of beer on sale. Hope to see you there!
2019 sees Sheffield Beer Week celebrate its fifth year as a city-wide beer festival and umbrella beer focused event occurring in multiple venues, launching from Monday 11 March.
It is with great excitement that the first few breweries have been announced for 2019 #SheffBeerWeek events. Follow updates as they are released via our Twitter. Not only do we have great local breweries such as Neepsend, Kelham Island Brewery, Thornbridge and Abbeydale all getting involved but a list of national and international breweries including Wander Beyond, Wild Card Brewery and Mikkeller. Brand new Sheffield brewery, Saint Mars of the Desert, will also be hosting their first Sheffield Beer Week event; adding to the vibrancy of the Sheffield beer scene.
With beer tourism alive and kicking in Sheffield, the city’s beer reputation was solidified with research after 2016’s University of Sheffield commissioned Beer Report written by broadcaster Pete Brown. It is great to see traction building in Sheffield’s beer scene with recent mentions of the city in the Guardian’s ‘Top 50 UK Pubs’ featuring Shakespeares pub and The Times article ‘Sheffield: the northern capital of cool’.
Jaega Wise of Wild Card Brewery. Credit: Nicci Peet
Sheffield Beer Week’s additional strands for 2019, on top of its core beer and food, community and heritage, sees a continued celebration of women working in the beer industry, building on this to cover diversity and inclusion in beer. With a brewsters’ tap takeover collaboration with Norwich based organisers Fem.Ale and award-winning beer shop Hop Hideout. As International Women’s Day on 8 March precedes the beer week, it’s a timely moment to take stock of and celebrate women’s contributions.
The People’s Photography Trail will build on the success of last year’s photography exhibition trail across multiple venues with a broader focus on the people in the beer industry and beer lovers – tackling the lack of visual representation of the diverse range of people who work in and drink beer. Sheffield Beer Week will be working closely with photographers Nicci Peet (follow her project on niccipeet.co.uk/women-in-beer) and Mark Newton (his Beer Yorkshire project) to produce this photography meets beer trail around the city.
There will be a continued celebration of our Norwich City of Ale partnership and active exploration of the greener side of Sheffield – The Outdoor City, with walking, running and cycling events. Including local historian, Sheffield CAMRA’s Pub Heritage Officer and British Guild of Beer Writers’ awards-shortlisted author Dave Pickersgill’s popular Sheffield Pub Heritage Walk and a Mikkeller Running Club event.
The Sheffield Beer Week Photography Trail in the Sheffield Tap. Credit: Mark Newton
On Friday 8 March we kick off the week with Sheffield’s craft beer festival, Indie Beer Feast. which has grown to two days for 2019. A celebration of great independent craft beer in the iconic Abbeydale Picture House with brewery bars and street food, the beer festival champions and supports The Everyone Welcome initiative.
Jules Gray, Sheffield Beer Week Director, said: “Sheffield Beer Week wouldn’t be what it is without those involved. It shows the unity and community of the Sheffield and global beer scene. Beer tourism is a crucial cog to Sheffield’s continued success and positive economic growth. The city is not only attracting engaged and inquisitive tourists to the area for beer, outdoor sports and creative arts but also new beer-focused businesses to locate here. The beer week really adds vibrancy to the city, boosts the local economy and keeps the high street buzzing with good beer chatter”.
For full listings of all Sheffield Beer Week events taking place, head to sheffieldbeerweek.co.uk.
It’s springtime again, time for us to get our walking boots on and go for some drinks further afield. Sheffield has many great pubs and green spaces within its boundaries, but looking further afield there are many villages in the easily reached surrounding countryside which have great pubs in them too – all worth visiting. We are also lucky to still have within the city a public transport system that will get you there and back (most of the time!).
Although we as a branch have organised minibus trips to many of these pubs – usually on our way to present one of them with a well deserved award – these can be limited. To supplement them we are continuing our RambAles, a series of roughly monthly guided strolls in the countryside surrounding Sheffield visiting a number of pubs for a drink.
We hope that people won’t find the walks too long or too strenuous. Most routes will feature a number of drop-out points where people can leave the walk and make their own way back to Sheffield by public transport if they don’t fancy doing the whole walk, or want to stay for another drink in a particular pub. These will also provide joining points for any latecomers. Some timings and fares will be given in the walks’ listings (see the Diary section), but it pays to double-check these yourself!
The first RambAle of 2019 will take place on Saturday 23 March. The plan is to catch the 11:40 272 FirstBus from Sheffield Interchange as far as Fox House (c12:18). We shall walk through the Longshaw Estate to the Grouse Inn, then through Hay Wood to Grindleford station and Upper Padley. Any walkers who wish to can then continue along the Derwent riverside path to Leadmill and Hathersage for further refreshment and buses or trains back to Sheffield.
RambAle dates for the rest of 2019 will be:
Saturday 20 April – Chesterfield Pub Circular
Monday 27 May – Hope Valley Meander (including festival at Old Hall in Hope)
Saturday 29 June – Deepcar to Wortley (for Wortley Beer Festival)
Saturday 27 July – Baslow, Froggatt, Longshaw, Fox House
Saturday 24 August – Bradfield, Dungworth, Stacey Bank, Nags Head
Saturday 28 September – Monyash, Bakewell, Sheldon, Ashford, Thornbridge Brewery
Saturday 26 October – route TBC
We hope you can join us on one or more of our RambAles. Everyone welcome.
At the end of January, we received the fabulous news that Beer Matters has been entered into the national CAMRA Magazine of the Year competition.
Every year, Regional Directors choose the best magazines from their area to go forward to the national contest and this year we have been chosen by the Regional Director for Yorkshire, Kevin Keaveny. Explaining the process, Kevin said: “As Regional Director I and my colleagues receive copies of every magazine produced in our regions. One of our tasks throughout the year is to choose two contenders to go forward to the national judging. For Yorkshire this is extremely hard with ten branches producing a magazine on a regular basis.
“For this year’s competition this magazine has gone forward as one of our entries. How do we choose? Well, that’s the hard bit. There are certain features that all CAMRA magazines must include, then I look at the editorial – is it understandable by non members and does it contain a element of campaigning? This magazine ticks all the boxes across the year. The final thing I look at is readability – by that, I mean is the font size reasonable with no magnifying glasses required?”
“I would like to thank all the magazine editors and their helpers, who are all volunteers, for the time they spend putting the magazine copy together, selling the advertising, delivering to pubs etc. Without this band of dedicated people you would not be reading this!”
The overall winner will be announced at the CAMRA AGM and Members’ Weekend taking place in Dundee in April, so we’ll be keeping our fingers crossed until then! Thanks once again to all our contributors, sponsors and distributors for making the magazine possible.
As part of Sheffield Beer Week 2019, our branch’s Pub Heritage Officer will be leading a walk around Kelham Island and Neepsend on Tuesday 12 March. The tour starts at 2pm at the Millowners Arms at the Kelham Island Industrial Museum, a gallery celebrating Sheffield’s brewing heritage, complete with its own traditional bar. After a short talk, the event will follow a 1.2 mile route passing the oldest working brewery in Sheffield, a myriad of industrial sites, more breweries and a number of pubs before finishing at the Gardeners Rest, close to the now derelict Cannon Brewery.
A limited number of copies of the Sheffield’s Real Heritage Pubs will be available at a reduced price of £5.00. The book is also available as a free download: sheffield.camra.org.uk/rhp.
Places should be booked in advance. Full details, including booking information, are available at: tinyurl.com/yc3djsuo.
Saturday 30 March will see the return of the Sheffield Beer Census after a break in 2018.
For those who haven’t taken part in the census before, Sheffield & District CAMRA organises this city-wide survey to try and get an idea of the full range of real ales and ciders available around the Steel City on a particular day. Volunteers take an area of the city each and visit as many pubs as possible, noting the name, brewery, ABV and price of every real ale available in each one.
Other cities such as Derby, Manchester and Norwich also undertake similar surveys as we compete for the coveted title of Beer Capital of the UK.
At the February branch meeting we are hoping to recruit volunteers to lead each route. If this is something you might be interested in, please come along for more information. Those wanting to lead routes in suburbs we don’t often get to, particularly in the north and east of the city, are especially welcome. The meeting will take place at the Old Queens Head, Pond Hill on Tuesday 5 February (8pm start).
Look out in next month’s Beer Matters for full details of all routes and route leaders.
A new update sheet has been released for the Yorkshire’s Real Heritage Pubs book (originally published in 2015) and it is good news for Sheffield’s historic pubs with no fewer than 13 pubs from our branch area being added to the listings.
Among them are some of Sheffield’s best known real ale pubs, including the Fat Cat and the Wellington, both of which won Pub of the Month awards in 2018. A special mention goes to the Sportsman in Hackenthorpe, which has been upgraded to National Inventory status as one of the county’s finest examples of a little-altered 1950s pub.
The full update sheet can be downloaded here, while the book itself can be purchased from the CAMRA online bookshop (£4.99 + P&P).
