Month: December 2018

2018.

365 days.

22 years since the brewery was founded.

100 different beers brewed.

26 can releases.

Over 11,000 BBL produced (that’s over 18,000 hL)

AND LOADS OF MOONSHINE… around 1.8 million pints supped!

Here’s just a select few of our highlights of our year in beer…

The biggest development of the year for us and something which will continue to have a massive influence in shaping our 2019 was our expansion. This is something we’d been quietly working on behind the scenes for pretty much the entirety of the year, so it was not only an exciting announcement for us to make back in November but also quite the relief! Our new tanks have already enabled us to boost our capacity and the much needed extra space means that we are able to stay right at the heart of our beloved Abbeydale Road community. You can read more about the details of our new space in this blog post.

We’ve expanded our reach in terms of brewery events, hosting our 12^th Sunfest festival at the Rising Sun, as well as Funk Fest, the very first (we think!) dedicated sour beer festival to be held in the UK outside of London. We’ve met more of our drinkers than ever before at tap takeovers all over the UK – from the Hanging Bat in Edinburgh to the Stoneworks in Peterborough and all sorts in between, including our first “Funk Dungeon on tour” event held at Tilt in Birmingham in October. We’ve also had stalls at a number of local Farmers Markets which has been a brilliant way to get to know our neighbourhood even better! And we’ve been lucky enough to be part of some amazing festivals including Fyne Fest, hosted by Fyne Ales in the most beautiful setting imaginable, and Thornbridge’s glorious Peakender.

Collaborations have continued to be a great way for us to try something new and mutually learn from our brewery pals, and we’ve worked with some truly incredible people throughout 2018 both home and away, including Yeastie Boys, Haandbryggeriet, Bad Seed, Alphabet and Northern Monk.

Talking of working with brilliant people, we’ve been lucky enough to have art created by some of the industry’s finest, including James Murphy continuing to develop wonderful pieces for our Brewers Emporium range, Jim Spendlove working with us on our series involving other local institutions like Peddler Market, and Lewis Ryan (Lewy) creating an awesome colourful beery jigsaw from the can labels for us, something we believe to be a world first.

Our flagship pale ale, Moonshine, took home a bronze medal in its category at the 2018 Champion Beer of Britain Awards, an achievement we’re hugely proud of – more on that here.

We also cranked up our charity efforts this year, not only in raising oodles of funds for Bluebell Wood with this year’s charity beer “Brewbell Wood”, but also with 11 of the team challenging themselves to take part in the Sheffield 10k on behalf of Cavendish Cancer Care, and raising over £1500 for the cause. A great big thank you to everyone who donated!

Looking ahead to 2019, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that once again we have a mega year planned, including the launch of our first ever lager! Heresy will sit alongside Heathen at the heart of our Brewers Emporium range – we’re still in the final planning stages at the moment but watch this space for more details! 

Colourway not yet confirmed… let us know what you think!

From all of us at Abbeydale HQ, a huge thank you for all your support this year. We can’t wait to find out what the year ahead has in store.

Cheers!

We are pleased to announce that we can now officially state that Heathen can be labelled as a gluten free beer!

Heathen is made using gluten containing ingredients, specifically barley and wheat. However, in the production of our tasty American Pale Ale we use an enzyme called Brewer’s Clarex. Initially used to reduce chill haze by breaking down protein chains (polypeptides) found in the beer, this clever little enzyme also reduces the gluten to below the 20ppm threshold required to label a product as gluten free, meaning it is safe to drink for many of those amongst us who are sensitive to gluten.

There has been no change to the production of Heathen in this process – the beer itself remains exactly the same as it always has been! However we didn’t want to make this declaration until we’d undergone months of rigorous testing to be fully confident in the consistency of our product and the reduced gluten level it contains.

The vast majority of beers labelled as gluten free that you see on bars and shelves of pubs and bottle shops around the country will have been produced in a similar way to that described above as for Heathen. Whilst there are gluten free beers available that have been brewed with no gluten containing ingredients, these are few and far between. The reason for this is that gluten free grains generally do not hold the same characteristics as those more commonly used in brewing, and so a wider change of process would be needed for us to be able to utilise grains such as rice and sorghum effectively on a large scale.

The next batch of Heathen to go into cans will display a declaration of the beer being gluten free on the label, and this information will also be made more visible on our website. This is all part of a wider scheme to make sure our drinkers are all fully informed, which includes clearer labelling for our vegan-friendly beers too!

Those of you who’ve been following our progress for a while will already know that we were hoping to expand, and have been bursting at the seams of our current premises for a good few years now. We’ve looked into a whole variety of options along the way, from building an entire new site from the ground up, to looking at ways of adapting existing buildings all over Sheffield, but we couldn’t make any of them work for us in quite the way we wanted them to…

…And in the end, despite the years of difficult decisions and seemingly endless hunting, we’re really pretty glad it all happened this way, as our search has eventually led us right back to our very own doorstep! Some of the units that join directly on to our current site have recently become available, and so we’ve managed to get hold of a massive 7426 square feet of extra space! By being able to spread out rather than pack up and move, we haven’t had to halt production and have been able to boost our capacity by a much-needed extra 20%. It also means that we’ve been able to stay right at the heart of the Abbeydale Road community which we love so much and which inspires so much of our identity.

Look at all this lovely space! And this is just one small part of it!

As well as increasing brewing capacity, we’ve also got improved warehousing capabilities, meaning we can look after all that delicious beer even more carefully than before, and shiny new office facilities for the team. There is also the potential to create our very first dedicated on-site events space which is something we are HUGELY excited about, so do keep your eyes peeled for details of a little launch party coming in early 2019!

There’s SO much more to come from us, this really is just the start of the next stage of our ambitious development programme, so do watch this space for more!

Cheers!

Swanky new office for our events and marketing team!