Year: 2020

Our entire range of flagship beers, previously only available in cask, have now all made the move into can!

With Moonshine having being launched in can back in May, our team have been working hard to enable our other core beers to do the same… Absolution, Daily Bread (which has since won Regional Gold and National Bronze Best Bitter in smallpack, at the SIBA Digital Beer Awards) and Deception all followed, and today we’re very excited to announce that Black Mass completes the line up!

First brewed in 1996, Black Mass is a generously hopped 6.66% dark ruby ale with a complex base which includes chocolate malts, black malts and roasted barley. Flavours reminiscent of bitter chocolate, fruitcake and raisins, with beautiful aromas of dark chocolate, coffee and burnt toast. It’s a beast of a brew!

We’re thrilled to be able to offer our most longstanding beers in a way that can be drunk at home, as well as enjoyed in the pub. For all five, the recipes are exactly the same as for the cask ales we know and love, with just a few tweaks to the process ensuring the beer reaches you just as we intend.

We’ve always preferred canning as a method of presenting beer to bottling, as we believe they allow for a much higher quality finished product, as they are light proof and there is less chance of extraneous air leaking in. Cans are lightweight, transport more easily than glass, and recycle well. It also means there is no chance of broken glass contamination in the brewery which is important for us as we operate in a small space (as those of you who have joined us at one of our events here in the past will know!).

We were fortunate to take delivery of our own canning line back in April, which meant we have been able to get much more beer into can than ever before. It was always our plan to release our core beers in this format, but with recent circumstances meaning cans have become a bigger part of what we do over the past few months, our plans were brought forwards a little. We can’t promise they’ll all be permanently available in can, as cask will remain the primary format for these beers – and we’re firmly dedicated to supporting and supplying our loyal pub customers again (they’re the reason we’ve got to this stage, after all!). But 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 get your hands on our gorgeous cans, including super fresh Black Mass, via our online shop.

Our entire range of flagship beers, previously only available in cask, have now all made the move into can!

With Moonshine having being launched in can back in May, our team have been working hard to enable our other core beers to do the same… Absolution, Daily Bread (which has since won Regional Gold and National Bronze Best Bitter in smallpack, at the SIBA Digital Beer Awards) and Deception all followed, and today we’re very excited to announce that Black Mass completes the line up!

First brewed in 1996, Black Mass is a generously hopped 6.66% dark ruby ale with a complex base which includes chocolate malts, black malts and roasted barley. Flavours reminiscent of bitter chocolate, fruitcake and raisins, with beautiful aromas of dark chocolate, coffee and burnt toast. It’s a beast of a brew!

We’re thrilled to be able to offer our most longstanding beers in a way that can be drunk at home, as well as enjoyed in the pub. For all five, the recipes are exactly the same as for the cask ales we know and love, with just a few tweaks to the process ensuring the beer reaches you just as we intend.

We’ve always preferred canning as a method of presenting beer to bottling, as we believe they allow for a much higher quality finished product, as they are light proof and there is less chance of extraneous air leaking in. Cans are lightweight, transport more easily than glass, and recycle well. It also means there is no chance of broken glass contamination in the brewery which is important for us as we operate in a small space (as those of you who have joined us at one of our events here in the past will know!).

We were fortunate to take delivery of our own canning line back in April, which meant we have been able to get much more beer into can than ever before. It was always our plan to release our core beers in this format, but with recent circumstances meaning cans have become a bigger part of what we do over the past few months, our plans were brought forwards a little. We can’t promise they’ll all be permanently available in can, as cask will remain the primary format for these beers – and we’re firmly dedicated to supporting and supplying our loyal pub customers again (they’re the reason we’ve got to this stage, after all!). But 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 get your hands on our gorgeous cans, including super fresh Black Mass, via our online shop.

A huge thank you to all of you who have supported us by purchasing beer via our online shop over the past few months. 

We wanted to update you all regarding the supply of our minikegs, which were introduced on our online shop in response to the closure of pubs back in March, as a way to make sure you were still able to drink our delicious cask beer at home. 

As our wonderful pub customers are now re-opening, we are beginning to find it increasingly difficult to stock our beers in both cask and minikeg. The minikegs were always intended as a temporary measure, and so they are now no longer a product we can guarantee keeping in stock. We believe a hand pulled pint to be the best way to experience our beers in cask, and so we would encourage those of you who feel comfortable to do so to support your local pub, they really do need us now more than ever. 

We will ensure our online shop is kept up to date, with any beer that is available once we have fulfilled all cask orders for our pub customers still heading into our lovely little 5L minikegs. If a particular product is out of stock, we will not be able to confirm if and when it will be next be available. 

We do have a huge range of beers in can including many of those which were popular in minikeg, so there’s still plenty of opportunity to drink our beers at home if you’re not quite ready to venture out to the pub just yet. Early in lockdown we were fortunate to take delivery of our very own canning line, so rest assured there will always be plenty to choose from! 

We also do recognise that there is still some demand for our minikegs, and are looking at ways that we can offer these (especially our flagship beer, Moonshine!) for special occasions, so watch this space! 

We will of course continue to try our very best to remain flexible and adaptable, and above all carry on providing the best service we possibly can. 

Please keep your orders coming in online, we really do appreciate each and every one! 

Cheers,

Team Abbeydale

It’s been a while since we launched the first of our Hidden Treasures of Sheffield series, Family Heirlooms & Tuneful Endings, but now that pubs are carefully re-opening we’ve been able to get our cask production back to a more usual level and release some more cask only specials! For anyone who needs a reminder, this series of pale ales is intended to shine a spotlight on the bits of our city that are unique, quirky, and often not very well known – celebrating our humble hometown by paying attention to the everyday history that so easily passes us by.

The second in the series is inspired by a favourite secluded little spot of John, our Production Director. In the woods around More Hall, across the valley from Wharnclifffe Crags in the north of the city you might just find yourself a dragon. The Wantley Dragon, to be precise!

The Dragon of Wantley was originally the subject of a satirical ballad from the seventeenth century. A portly knight (More of More Hall) clad in a bespoke suit of armour made of Sheffield steel (what else?!) manages to slay a huge cattle-and-child-eating dragon which has terrified our fair city for many a moon… by kicking it up the bum. Classy. A (now rarely performed) opera and novel are also based around the legend, and the "fabulous dragon of Wantley" is referenced by Sir Walter Scott in the first chapter of his most famous novel Ivanhoe, so it’s not just us that have been inspired by this comic story.

The ballad accurately describes the landscape surrounding Wharncliffe Crags, and now a snaking stone wall with a dragon’s head commemorating the tale can be found in nearby Bitholmes Wood. It can be a little tricky to locate, but this gorgeous walk from Stocksbridge Walkers Are Welcome contains directions as to how to find it and take in the local area too. The wall itself was created by John Alston, who recycled an existing wall into a dry-stone formation of the dragon in 2009. The huge head (which is a whopping 1.6m in length and weights a whole tonne!) was chainsaw-sculpted from elm by Mark Bell.

We’ve tried to pay a little tribute to all of the elements of the story in the artwork for this beer, created by our in-house designer, James Murphy.  John likes to take a festive sandwich to eat by the wall on his annual Boxing Day walk, hence the dragon’s snack that you can see in the foreground of the pumpclip!

The beer itself is an easy drinking 4.1% pale ale, hopped with Summit, Columbus and Chinook for notes of pine and grapefruit. Crisp, refreshing, and delicious, with a lip-smacking bitter finish. It’s available in cask to our trade customers from Monday 17th August, and minikegs are currently available on our online shop.

With thanks to Dave Pickersgill for allowing us to use the above photograph, and for sharing his local knowledge with us too.

Cheers!

We’re super excited to have been able to have rebrewed our much acclaimed Deliverance – Sabro™, HBC 472 & HBC 692, created in collaboration with Yakima Chief Hops.

This variation of Deliverance was first released in March this year, when it returned to our range after an absence of almost TWO YEARS… and we jumped straight back in with something truly special. So special in fact, that we reckon we didn’t make enough of it, so we’ve brewed it again for even more of you to enjoy!

Our Deliverance range uses different hop varieties in carefully selected combinations, and those featured here are a little family of three, which all stem from the wild Neomexicanus species. HBC 472 and HBC 692 are both new hop varieties stemming from the amazing Sabro™ hop – which was HBC 438 until it was named.  These hops come from the same lengthy breeding process that brought you Citra, Mosaic and Ekuanot, and we’re already falling in love with Sabro™ and its family. We’re lucky to be amongst the first in the country to get our hands on these experimental hops.

Yakima Chief Hops are a 100% farmer owned hop supplier. They’re the only grower-owned network of family hop farms in the world – direct relationships with the brewers is something which establishes Yakima Chief Hops as world leaders in this field – so it was fantastic to welcome them to the brewhouse to help us create our limited edition collaborative beer.

Our new version of Deliverance (available online here!) is bursting with aromatics and incredibly juice-forward – pineapple upside down cake and mango coulis on the nose with a heady, resinous character. Masses of tropicality on the palate, with notes of dessicated coconut teaming up with bags more pineapple, peach and zesty grapefruit singing together in perfect fruity harmony. Full bodied and creamy, super smooth but with a lingering bitterness in the finish which really showcases the complexity and diversity of flavour that this chosen hop combination brings.

Here’s a little more information on those little green nuggets of aromatic joy for all the beer geeks out there! Sabro™ Brand HBC 438 is itself still a relatively new release from the Hop Breeding Company (a group of farmers and scientists dedicated to nurturing, cultivating and eventually releasing new varieties of hops for us all to enjoy, who are based in the Yakima Valley) which is supplied through YCH’s experimental hop program. Known for having a really unique complexity, it imparts distinct tangerine, coconut, tropical fruit, and stone fruit aromas, with hints of cedar, mint, and cream. Sabro’s sister and daughter, HBC 472 and 692, share many of the same fruity, citrussy characteristics – we found a very distinctive Pina Colada note in the 472!

For all hops named HBC, this means that they are a newer hop from the Hop Breeding Company’s programme. Eventually, if the hop proves itself a worthy component of that beverage that brings us all together, it is rewarded with its very own name (Mosaic was once HBC 369, and Citra was HBC 394). The whole process can take a very long time, with Sabro™ only becoming commercially available after two decades of research and trials. With hops being a natural product and so susceptible to the environment they are grown in, it’s important to make sure that not only do they have desirable aroma and flavour characteristics, but also that they can survive and grow well.

The Neomexicanus subspecies, which all three of the hops used in our new Deliverance stem from, is itself interesting. Almost all commercially available hops are of European origin and descent, even those which are now bred in the USA, but in the Sabro™ family, we are able to make use of a genetically distinct sub-species of hops that have been growing wild in the New Mexico mountains for the past million years. Groovy!

There’s still much more to come from this series, and the possibilities are ever growing, thanks to the efforts of not just our brewers, but also the hop breeders, growers, farmers and suppliers, who work tirelessly to ensure that the humulus lupulus that gives so much character to your beer is the very best it can be.

Cheers!

We’ve got a couple of new beers emerging from our mixed fermentation Funk Dungeon project over the coming weeks, so thought it was a good opportunity to tell you all more about the progression of the design for this series. The aim of the artwork is to expand on the little skeleton character found on our original Funk Dungeon branding, created by our in-house designer James Murphy.

This development began last year, and we wanted to imagine a world where our character ‘rises’ from his grave (Chapter 1 – Ryes From The Grave) and goes about having a great posthumous ‘life’ throughout the rest of the series.

Here’s where the series has taken us so far!

Chapter 2 saw our skellie friend and compatriots surprisingly take to the basketball court for our collaboration with award-winning beer and food writer Melissa Cole, ‘Slam Dunk Da Funk’, and at that stage, there was no knowing what they should choose to do next… 

In Chapter 3 – ‘Heavy Nettle’ for our collaboration with Sheffield institution Church: Temple of Fun, we saw that they had got together as cafe-racer motorcyclists at some gas station – probably up to no good!! Chapter 3’s offering was accompanied by a special sister release of a Kveik New England IPA, ‘Hop Cult Armageddon’. Whilst not officially a Funk Dungeon release, we looked to bring the characters ‘to life’ for the first and possibly only time! To honour the important Norwegian yeast addition, our characters donned brutal facepaint in homage to some of their favourite Scandinavian Black metal bands. We all have one!

Chapter 4 is due to be released very soon, and is a sour, bretted, barrel aged lager called ‘Funk In Drublic’, which sees our familiar friends back together as a 3-piece rock & roll band. Playing out hit after hit in a dingy, wreck of a club, our lead singer / guitarist is joined by a bad-ass, up-right bass player and a heavy-hitting stand-up drummer. We’d like to imagine this place would be raucous and rowdy and a Bretted Sour Lager would be the perfect beer to sink down at the front of this gig!

Chapter 5 is safely resting in barrel, patiently waiting for release – what on earth will our characters get up to next?!

Along with the bretted lager, we also have another release from our mixed fermentation project which is available right now! ‘Hop Bretta – Tradition’ sees the development of the original Funk Dungeon branding to bring it more in line with this progressive series… as the ever-growing range has evolved with the development of ideas by James and our Funk Dungeon lead brewer Jim and team, the original Brewer’s Emporium design felt a little out of place. The continuing stream of beers being released in 2020 is a perfect excuse to match up our original design and the future of the Funk Dungeon range. Our skeleton friend is still bathing in their frothing cauldron but they’re looking so much fresher!

As with all of James’ work, each concept is sketched out a number of times with pencil on newsprint to develop the perspective and depth. Once James is happy with the idea and layout, the design is hand-inked on heavyweight cartridge paper using Staedtler pigment liners.

The inked illustration is scanned in at high resolution (600 dots per inch) then coloured using Adobe Photoshop and a drawing tablet. This final coloured image (including layers of transparency if required) will now be transferred to the master can label template in Adobe Illustrator to finalise the specific beer information and details, ready for proofing.

The Funk Dungeon cans have seen our in-house designer James further develop a method of design which allows the shimmer of our aluminium cans to add emphasis to certain aspects of the image. This was initially brought to the Brewery by guest designer Lewis Ryan (Lewy) for our Sow the Seeds/Reap the Harvest duo, which allowed the drinker to overlay the two designs to complete the seasonal transition. This has been used to great effect on the Funk Dungeon range, with the metallic elements of the design glistening when reflecting light. There are also a few little “Easter egg” style inclusions that will appear across the series  – see what you can spot when you give the can design a closer look!

Mind Your Head…

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!