Month: June 2020

Home deliveries is something we have always offered on our online shop, and we pledge to continue this service into the future, whether you’re based just around the corner or in the far flung reaches of the country! 

Our free local delivery service was introduced in March in response to the Covid-19 situation. With our pub customers closed and the whole country staying at home, we were able to keep some of our drivers on the road delivering direct to your door (with some help from other members of Team Abbeydale too!), as a free alternative to collecting from us at the brewery.

We are now in a position to offer extended collection times from our lovely pub, the Rising Sun, as of Saturday 4th July when the pub re-opens. As such, this will be replacing home delivery as the free option for our locally based online shop customers. We will have a midnight cut-off for orders, with all orders placed by midnight Sunday-Thursday ready to collect at the pub from 4pm the following day (this will come into effect this weekend, so we’ll keep the 1pm Friday deadline this week!). The Rising Sun will be open midday-11pm every day, so this makes it nice and easy to pop by to collect your beers at your leisure.

Free local* delivery will continue to be an option on our online shop until Friday 3rd July, when we will then be implementing charges in line with our courier service (which we subsidise to ensure it’s kept affordable for our customers). This gives us the greatest degree of flexibility, so if our Team Abbeydale driving squad are having a particularly busy day, our courier partners APC will be able to step in and get your beer to you in a timely manner. We know that not all of you will be ready to venture out just yet and we’re committed to ensuring we can keep offering you a great service. Prices start at just £4.99 for up to two cases (or equivalent weight). Our premium same day service for the postcodes closest to us at the brewery**, guaranteed to be delivered by us direct, will continue too.

We have kept the free delivery option available for as long as possible. However, we have found that as more people return to work, home delivery has become less convenient for many of you, and our drivers are becoming increasingly busy stocking up our pub customers as they prepare to re-open. So having taken feedback on board we believe this is the most accessible, and safe, solution for all. We are not re-instating collections from our brewery site at this time.

We will of course continue to remain adaptable as circumstances change in the “new normal” we’re all living with, and welcome all feedback and suggestions, so please get in touch if you have any comments. We’re definitely still learning and are always keen to get better and make sure our service improves!

We would like to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to everyone who has supported us over the past few months. We’ve been able to deliver literally thousands of minikegs alongside our canned range, which continues to grow – we have some really exciting beers coming up in can! We genuinely couldn’t have got through all of this without you, and we hope you will continue to stay with us and enjoy our beers as we all get ride out this storm together.

*Includes postcodes S1-14, S17, S19, S20, S30, S35

*Same day delivery covers postcodes S1-3, S6-11, S17

As well as being a bunch of people that love a beer, we’re also a group of foodies here at Abbeydale Brewery who love experimenting in the kitchen. Beer can be as versatile as wine when paired with food and can even be added as an ingredient in many dishes too!

Here we’ve taken inspiration from our light and summery Unbeliever – Tropical Berliner Weisse (3.8%), which is made using mango and passionfruit purees, and created a simple seafood salad recipe that’s a perfect light meal for 2 to eat al fresco under a blue sky… or in the gloomy indoors on a rainy day if you feel the need to bring some sunshine to your plate!

Ingredients:

Method:

Start by cooking your rice noodles, then drain and chill.

Whilst they’re cooling in the fridge, prepare your salad. Pop the crab to one side for now, chop all your other ingredients excluding your salad leaves (we recommend chopping the coriander and chilli quite finely – save a few coriander leaves to garnish, if you like) and combine in a bowl.

Then, whisk together all of the dressing ingredients. Pour most of the mixture over the salad and stir in, saving a little to finish.

Arrange your salad leaves (we like something crisp, like little gem lettuce, here – but you can use whatever you like or have to hand) in a dish and pop your noodles in the middle. Top with the salad, and finally add the crab atop. Drizzle over the last of the dressing.

As an alternative presentation, you could go for something like a romaine lettuce, combine your noodles, crab and salad all together, and use the leaves as a cute little dish – this would make it great as a sharing starter as part of a bigger meal.

Serve alongside a glass of chilled Unbeliever (which you can purchase along with a range of our other beers on our online shop!). Delicious.

Following the successful launch of our flagship pale ale, Moonshine, in 440ml cans last month, we’re proud to announce that Absolution is joining the ranks!

Absolution holds a special place in Abbeydale Brewery history, as it’s our longest standing beer, and the first beer we ever brewed back in 1996. It’s a deceptively easy-drinking, premium strength golden ale (5.3%), featuring a carefully selected blend of hops from around the globe. The hops have changed slightly over the years – as they are a natural product which vary from harvest to harvest, having flexibility over the hops that are added to the beer can actually provide a greater level of consistency of flavour rather than keeping the recipe exactly the same. The current Absolution recipe contains Willamette, Bobek, Cascade, Pacific Gem and Tradition hops, to create a fruity and well-balanced beer, with a subtle sweetness and a long-lasting finish.

For this special brew of Absolution for can, we needed a 60 BBL (100HL) batch to fill the almost 20,000 cans we have ready. We mashed in the first batch at 5am and the second at 9am, filling one of our massive tanks by 5 o’clock. Not a bad day’s work, we have to say!

Double brewdays are not a rare occurrence for us here at Abbeydale Brewery, although they’ve been less frequent during lockdown of course. However, usually, the batches brewed on the same day would be different beers, or would go into separate tanks. So for Moonshine for example, which in usual times we brew in 30 BBL batches (the largest our mashtun can handle) at least five times per week, the second batch of day 1 is blended with the first brew of day 2 in one of our large 60 BBL fermentation vessels. Brewing this way gives the yeast a head start munching away on the first batch added to tank, meaning it has already reached krausen (the first signs of fermentation are visible, in the form of a nice billowy, foamy head) by the time batch two gets blended in. Fermentation times are therefore reduced, and we can get the beers rolling through the system nice and quickly. This method of brewing is known as drauflassen.

As with our Moonshine cans, the recipe for Absolution is exactly the same for can as for cask, with just a few tweaks to the process to make it reach you just as we intend. (You can read more about these processes, and our decision to move to cans rather than bottles, here).

Lockdown has been the perfect time for us to get to grips fully with this project as our cask production has slowed down immensely, leaving us a little space to up our can production, and we hope to have the rest of our core range (Deception, Daily Bread and Black Mass) in can over the next few months too. We can’t promise they’ll all be permanently available in can, as cask will remain the primary format for these beers – and we very much hope that in the coming months we will be able to support and supply our loyal pub customers again (they’re the reason we’ve got to this stage, after all!), and that you can all have the opportunity to safely sup a hand pulled pint! However, we hope we’ve achieved our aim of keeping some familiarity for us all in these challenging times, and please be assured that we will continue to strive to offer as many of our beers in as many delicious ways as we possibly can.

You can pick up 6-packs or cases of 24x440ml cans of Absolution, along with all of our other currently available beers, on our online shop. Trade customers can call us on 0114 2812712 or email [email protected] to place any orders with us direct.

Cheers!

After a successful trial last week, we’re pleased to announce that we will be opening The Rising Sun (Fulwood Road) for draught beer, cans, gin and wine from TOMORROW! Your friendly landlord Garry will be on duty and is very excited at the prospect of saying hello to some of his regulars (before sending them on their merry way home with their takeaway beer!)

For the week commencing 1st June, the pub opening hours will be Wednesday-Friday 4-9pm, Saturday 1-8pm and Sunday 1-6pm. You can call by at any time during these hours to make a purchase. Please keep an eye on the pub’s social media for any updates/announcements.

We are also offering a pre-order and collection service again! Simply place your order at abbeydalebrewery.co.uk/shop by midday on Friday and select the appropriate option at the checkout, then swing by the pub over the weekend to collect your goodies! This option is FREE and has no minimum order. We would recommend pre-ordering as described above to ensure you get your first choice of beer, but we will have a limited stock of 6-packs available for walk-ups too, alongside draught beer and bottles of wine to take away.

Payment on the day can be made via card only. 

This won’t be a shop you can browse in, but we’ll have counters set up – the first will be where place your order (or state your name if you’ve pre-ordered online), then you can move on to the collection point, and then leave through the side exit, so it will be one-way throughout. A strict risk assessment has been carried out, and socially distant service, queuing and moving through the building will be monitored and followed at all times.

At the moment, we are still not able to offer a collection service from the brewery premises, so this option currently applies to the Rising Sun only. We are absolutely not open as a pub and so will not allow people drinking or lingering on the premises under any circumstances. As always, the safety of our staff and customers is paramount and we will constantly be reviewing the measures we have in place to ensure they fully comply with all guidance issued by the government. We hope this goes without saying but please do ensure you take appropriate responsibility for the safety of yourselves and others too, please do not leave your home if you or anyone in your household has symptoms and make sure you stay safe!

Cheers!