Year: 2021

In celebration of our 25th anniversary, we wanted to take the opportunity to cast our memories right back to the early days of Abbeydale Brewery, and tell you a few tales about our heritage, our beginnings, and how far we’ve come. And so, exactly 25 years to the day since we first mashed in the very first Abbeydale brew, we simply couldn’t miss the opportunity to share the story of Moonshine – our flagship beer, our biggest seller, and a true Sheffield icon!

We first told a version of this story in April last year, when cans of Moonshine were an imminent reality, but still the only way of getting hold of our 4.3% pale ale was on draught. Now a lot has changed in the past year and a bit, and with pubs being sadly closed for a great deal of that time, Moonshine in can has been a real success. Just like the popularity of the cask version was responsible for enabling us to grow and thrive between 1996 and 2020, the release of it in 440ml cans was a key contributor to us continuing to survive throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. And in the fourteen months that have followed since our cans of Moonshine launched, we’ve sold over 130,000 of them!

Moonshine was the first gyle (batch) that was created on our brewkit, on the 26th July 1996. Now you might have heard us say that Absolution was the first beer we ever brewed here (it’s even on the cans!), and this is true in that it’s the first that made it to release – a fact I only discovered when I found the very first brewbook! Our brewbooks document each stage of our brewing process, and although we now have a bespoke database (built by brewery co-owner, Sue Morton) to monitor our brews thoroughly and efficiently, each step is still lovingly written by hand too, and we’ve kept every single one of the 110 books which hold every tiny detail of the thousands of times we’ve mashed in. Anyway – imagine my surprise on seeing the fateful words “Gyle 1: Moonshine” written in the front of Brewbook #1, with Absolution relegated to the second brew! However, this first batch never made it into cask, with the first three batches of Moonshine being not-quite-right. We’ve been committed to the highest standards since our very first days, and so those fledgling barrels of what was to become our most popular beer were destroyed. (The story of Absolution is coming soon too – a beer that behaved itself impeccably from the off!)

Moonshine was the first recipe our brewery owner Patrick Morton worked on when setting up Abbeydale Brewery, being exactly the type of beer that he most liked to drink, and inspired by the pale, hop-forward American beers which were just reaching our shores in the mid 90s – but at a slightly more sessionable ABV. At the time, he never believed it would come to be such a success – named Sheffield’s most likely cask ale to be found on bars around the city throughout the last decade, most recently in the Sheffield CAMRA (Campaign For Real Ale) 2019 Beer Census (the 2020 version of course could not go ahead due to the coronavirus pandemic), Moonshine has also been the recipient of numerous awards over the 24 years of our history. Beginning with winning Sheffield’s Steel City Beer Festival on its very first appearance in 1996, it’s also been awarded Champion Beer of Yorkshire 2012, runner up Champion Beer of Yorkshire 2017, and won a national bronze medal in the Golden Ale category at the prestigious Champion Beer of Britain Awards in 2018.

Moonshine is light on bitterness, with the emphasis on late-added hops for flavour rather than hops added to the boil (which would extract a higher level of bitterness). Originally 100% Willamette hops, and with a character still very much driven by Willamette, the recipe for Moonshine has shifted gently over the years, blending in other hop varieties including Citra, Centennial, Delta and Chinook, at carefully adjusted volumes to ensure the flavour of the beer itself remains as consistent as possible despite seasonal variations in the raw ingredients. Hop forward in 1996, as trends have changed it’s now perceived as quite gently hoppy, but still with a deliciously refreshing, more-ish character.

Pat and Sue have always described Moonshine as a cross-over beer. Says Sue, “Often people used to tell me they didn’t like beer, but they liked Moonshine. I reckon that what they often didn’t like was crystal malt and very bitter flavours in brown, bitter beers. So Moonshine converted many non-beer drinkers and lager drinkers to real ale and pale hoppy beers. From there, many have moved, with us, on to more adventurous styles, and many others have loyally stuck with their first love, Moonshine.”

It’s come a long way since that very first pint was sold on 2nd September 1996 – it forms over half of our overall production (something which remained true when the majority of our sales were beer in can during the latter part of 2020 – a fact which took us a little by surprise!) and it’s a beer our brewteam craft up to 5 times each week (Jamie holds the record for having Moonshined the most!).  When pubs re-opened following the coronavirus pandemic, it was the first pint the whole team flocked to… oh, how we had missed it!

Today at Abbeydale Brewery we’re really proud that we can continue to produce such a consistent and popular beer as Moonshine, alongside our ever-expanding range of other beers and styles. And we are very proud indeed to have been an early part of the beery revolution that has led to such a massive variety of beer being available in the UK today.

We hope you’ll join us in raising a pint or can this week! If you’d like to treat yourself to some cans, click here to find them on our online shop, or look out for them on the shelves of many of the independent retailers we supply – get in touch if we can help you track down your closest venue!

Cheers!

Laura, on behalf of Team Abbeydale

After the return of Brimstone and Last Rites earlier in the year, we’ve got a whole host of absolutely mega beer releases coming out in honour of our 25^th anniversary! The plan is to bring out a beer each week from now until the end of August, covering the entirety of our birthday month.

To get things started and make sure we’re all in the party spirit, welcome Celebration! This beer is a ridiculously refreshing 2.8% Mimosa Quarter IPA, brewed with Citra, Amarillo, and an innovative new product from our pals at Yakima Chief Hops – Cryo Pop™! Created with cutting edge technology, this blend contains hop varieties which hold beer-soluble compounds capable of surviving the intense brewing process, meaning they deliver a supercharged punch – or ‘pop’! – of aroma, which we thought was just perfect for our beer, inspired by everyone’s favourite first cocktail of the day! To boost up that Mimosa character, we’ve also added a whole 200L tub of orange juice to complement the citrussy notes found in the hops.

This beer actually began life back in 2018, when our Christie rustled up a one-off keg for a beer and brunch pairing event for Sheffield Beer Week at the Rutland Arms. We’ve taken the same Bucks Fizz based inspiration and scaled it up for this full release – originally paired with mushrooms cooked in prosecco butter on toast (YUM) we reckon this would also be the perfect partner to a BBQ in the sunshine!

Celebration is available now on our online shop as well as heading out to independent retailers and bars around Yorkshire and beyond. We’ll be launching pre-orders for mixed cases of all of our special birthday brews very soon, along with tasting sets for an online mini birthday party, so keep your eyes peeled for further details.

Crack open a can and join the party!

Cheers!

Did you know we’ve recently launched our very own subscription box? The perfect way to get a monthly delivery of an exciting mix of our brand new specials and familiar favourites, and other treats and little extras too!

We like to keep the exact details of what’s going to be in each box a surprise, but if you head below there’s a little peek at the first two boxes to give you an idea of the sort of goodies you will receive.

Our subscription boxes are just £29 per month, and this includes delivery as we’ve extended our free delivery offer to them too. Subscriptions can be amended or cancelled at any time – there’s no minimum commitment and we plan to keep the club going indefinitely.

If you’re interested in joining our Sub Club, head to our online shop, where you will find it right at the top of our "Beers" page. Once you’ve completed the transaction on there, which covers your first month’s subscription, we’ll then be in touch to get you all set up moving forwards… and that’s it! A delicious box of beer delivered to your door each and every month, without you having to lift a finger.

We reckon it’s a great way to treat yourself, or the gift that just keeps on giving for the Abbeydale Brewery megafan in your life!

Cheers!

We’ve tried to cover all the basics above, but if you have any questions we’ve popped our Ts&Cs here. If there’s anything else you’d like to know, as always do feel free to get in touch – email [email protected] or give us a call on 0114 2812712.

This weekend should have seen us hosting Sunfest up at our very own pub, The Rising Sun. With lockdown restrictions having been in place over the past 16 months, and the pub closed for much of this time, sadly for the second year in a row it hasn’t been possible to run an event which delivers what we want it to, and what you’ve come to expect from our annual beer festival – but we thought we’d spend some time reminiscing over Sunfests gone by.

This past couple of months would have been an absolute hive of festival fuelled activity, with hours and hours of work going in behind the scenes. Picking the beers of course is one of most time consuming but most rewarding jobs – we’ve always had an emphasis on seeking out new beers and often even new breweries! As you will see below, the beer selection has grown over the life of the festival, but we started as we meant to go on with over 60 beers on for the very first event back in 2007. Once the beers are picked, the next big project has to start – the programme! Our festival bible and a real labour of love. As the festival gets closer, the whole Abbeydale team from the brewery and the pub pitch in to get everything ready, culminating in set up day at the start of the festival week. We learn a new lesson every year (and then desperately try to remember what it was by the time the next year comes around). A mammoth task fuelled by a round of bacon butties and the occasional shower in a lively beer!

And finally, it’s time for that first half pint in a festival tankard – personally, I always kick off my Sunfest with the annual charity beer. Supporting local charities is something we’ve always done, creating a special beer raising funds as well as partnering with charities over the festival weekend (the festival and associated charity beers combined have raised over £20,000 for local charities over the years) – we’ve tried to include links to charities below so please support them if you are able. Edale Mountain Rescue was the first of these in 2007, and we brewed the original version of Salvation for them. A far cry from the stouts that feature under this series today, this was a 4.3% hoppy pale ale. It was the first beer to sell out in the beer tent, very much setting a trend for the charity beer over the years. A total of 63 beers were featured at the first Sunfest, including 12 of our own beers – the very first time this many Abbeydale beers had featured together! (And 2007 seems a bit longer ago when you consider that at the time the beer prices ranged from £1.00 to £1.50 per half!) It was a rainy weekend (the year of the Sheffield floods), but the start of something very special.

The second Sunfest saw us support Sheffield Hospitals Charitable Trust, at the suggestion of Rising Sun regular Roger, who subsequently became a voluntary salesman for us, telling pubs around Derbyshire about his beer “Pain in the Arch”. The beer list was notable for a high number of beers from the Cotswolds, thanks to our driver Dave taking a busman’s holiday to source and collect them… it’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it!

2009 is the only year I can’t find a programme for, but I’m reliably informed that we supported the Shepherd Wheel Restoration Fund this year as we’ve got a mention on their plaque!  

By year four the beer selection had reached 100 and we were treated to a particularly sunny weekend. We worked alongside Rain Rescue this year (who have kept us all entertained with their annual dog show ever since) to come up with one of my favourite beer names for our charity beer, “Waggin’ t’Ale”.

Another long standing relationship was solidified in 2011 as Whirlow Hall Farm Trust helped us create Dr Morton’s Cow Polish, as well as keeping our bellies full with their amazing BBQ and hog roast, which is always a treat at the festival each year. Our Dan missed the hectic week before the festival despite having sourced the beers due to a pre-booked family holiday… we let him off once we found out that on this holiday he proposed to his now wife, Lucy!

A revolutionary moment occurred in 2012, as for the first time we had keg beer on offer!  The programme here begins: “It is over six years since Pat said to Rob [then GM of the Rising Sun] at the bar one Friday evening “I think we should have our own beer festival.” “Yes,” agreed Rob complacently, “we could easily put twenty beers on”. “Actually,” said Pat, “I had something rather bigger in mind…”

By 2013 we’d upped the keg offering to 6 lines, including an Abbeydale one for the very first time! The beer in question was Ascension, 6.0%, a one-off which was specially dry-hopped for the occasion and came with the disclaimer in the programme, “no, we are not doing keg!” – how times do change, as by 2014’s festival we were onto a beer made for keg ON PURPOSE (just the one, mind you), the beer in question this time being Pale Ale #3. The hardcore Abbeydale fans amongst you may be aware that these this series is what led onto the development of Heathen, our first “core” keg beer, originally known as Pale Ale #7.

2015’s Sunfest was our first opportunity to show off the newly (nearly) refurbished Rising Sun – you might remember there being lots of signs of workmen being busy, as work recommenced on the Monday morning following the festival, meaning getting takedown done efficiently was more important than ever before! We partnered with the James Brownhill Memorial Fund this year (and again in 2019). Ethna from the sales team curated the beer list this year, which meant that we had plenty of her favourite stouts on (including a keg of our very own Midnight Special Porter) – and very delicious they were too!

And just like that, the festival was 10, as we hosted Sunfest X in 2016. This coincided with the brewery’s 20^th birthday, so a double cause for celebration. “Not Just Jam” with Seven Hills Women’s Institute was our charity beer this year, raising funds for Light Sheffield. We included plenty of beers brewed by women this year too! The keg list had by this point increased to 20 – including the first outing of Heathen as one of our official core beers, at the forefront of our Brewers Emporium range.

2017 was my third Sunfest as part of Team Abbeydale and I was put in charge of curating the beer list. I decided we needed to show off a bit more, it is our festival after all! So this was the first time we filled an entire bay of racking with our own beers, including a number of event exclusives brewed especially for the festival. Our charity partners this year were Cavendish Cancer Care who we’ve worked with many times over the years (in fact, a few of us are running Sheffield Half Marathon for them this September, so this seems like a good opportunity to give our fundraising page a cheeky mention!). Landlord Garry joined the pub team in time for the 2018 festival (at which we supported local children’s hospice Bluebell Wood), and by 2019 we had our very own lager, with Sunfest giving us the perfect opportunity for a big Heresy launch party! The festival exclusive pilot recipes continued over these most recent years, with everything from table beers to DIPAs to dandelion and burdock doppelbocks being trialled, helping to inspire full scale brews along the way (or not, as the case may have been…!). And although the balance shifted a little, dropping the cask a little to a choice of 72, we upped the keg accordingly meaning that over 100 beers have continued to be on offer each year – one of the largest selections in the city.

And that little whistlestop tour through the years brings us to 2020 and 2021, where Sunfest has taken a hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic. All that’s left to say is a huge thank you to everyone who’s been involved over the years.

Please share your memories in the comments below!

Cheers,

Laura

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve been asked to create a special collaboration in support of Indie Beer Shop Day, which this year takes place on Saturday 17^th July.

Inspired by Record Store Day, Indie Beer Shop Day is an annual celebration which showcases the independent beer shop sector in the UK. Last year witnessed the first Indie Beer Shop Day, where Donzoko Brewery released Indie Graft in celebration of the sector. This year, the concept has built up momentum, with twice the number of independent retailers getting involved (over 100 altogether!) and with us being one of three breweries nationwide selected to release official Indie Beer Shop Day beers, which will be available exclusively from participating retailers from 2^nd July.

We’ve named the beer itself Independence, in keeping with the theme! A 4.0% pale ale single hopped with Idaho 7, vegan and gluten free, intended to be deliciously sessionable and very accessible. Refreshing with delicious flavours of stone fruits, alongside tropical notes, hints of pine and a bitter finish.

Make sure you pick up a can before the day itself on the 17^th, when we’ll be taking part in a special virtual beer tasting evening hosted by the legendary beer write, Pete Brown. Find out more about where you can purchase it from here, and look out for the other two national collaborations from Pilot and Double Barrelled Brewery too!

Throughout the pandemic, with pubs closed for vast swathes of the past year, the support of independent beer shops was a critical part of our survival as a brewery, and the relationships we were able to maintain, build upon, and even create, were and continue to be hugely important to us. The indie beer shop sector is a vital link and valuable connection between us as a brewery and the customers within our community.

In addition, participating beer shops have all been invited to arrange events and local collaborations too, so there’s all sorts going on! For every £1 spent in a local business, around 50-70p recirculates back into the local economy, so be sure this July to support your independent retailers on your local high street.

Use the hashtag #IndieBeerShopDay to get involved on social media too!

Cheers!

As you will hopefully be aware, here at Abbeydale Brewery we are celebrating our 25th anniversary this year! We’ve come such a long way since 1996… but we wanted to know more about where we came from, how we got here, and what went on before. For that, I would like to hand you over to our brewery founder, co-owner, and the mastermind behind it all – Patrick Morton. The below is in his own words.

“I recall being introduced to the joys of alcoholic fermentation by my father when I was in my mid-teens… somewhere between Reginald Maudling’s legalisation of home brewing and my attaining the significant age of 18.

We had some apple trees in the garden and most years had a reasonable crop of dessert apples to which we would add some Bramleys from the market and feed them all through a primitive, domestic meat mincer clamped to the kitchen table, the resultant slush then being run into a bin containing a few pints of water with a couple of bags of Tate & Lyle and a sachet or two of citric acid (to limit oxidation of the pulp). When all the apples had been processed we would stir in a couple of sachets of “Champagne yeast”. Unsurprisingly ,the fermentation was slow to take off; the apples had been washed in sulphited (Campden Tablets) water and the oxygen content of the must was negligible but we had no understanding of the importance of yeast count at the beginning of fermentation. Nevertheless it always produced an acceptable alcoholic beverage and in some years the tasting depredations (by me and Dad), were sufficiently restrained to leave enough for straining and bottling.

Dad, though, was very much a three or four pints a night man and regarded drink made from fruit as decidedly inferior to “Bitter”. Barbara Castle’s edict of 1967 forced him to re-think his drinking routine, he limited his pub consumption and supplemented it with pint and (I think) 2 pint bottles of Whitbread Pale Ale (often not finished on the night and re-sealed with plastic closures). These were a fabulous source for a somewhat thievish, enthusiastic, teenage beer taster; I still remember the aroma of English hops – probably Fuggles and EKGs. At some point Dad became aware of home brewing and bought a book on the subject, which was actually dreadful, but we didn’t know that at the time. This prompted the start of a few years of brewing “Double Daphne”; it was based on Edme’s 2lb tins of malt extract, diluted and boiled with crystal malt and hops from the home brew shop – 2oz of yellowing hops in a clear plastic bag with a piece of folded cardboard stapled over the top, as often as not hung in the shop window – the hop character of the resulting beer was somewhere on the spectrum from non-existent to unpleasant. Dad found it drinkable but was soon adding sugar to the wort so that the beer was stronger and he didn’t have to drink so much of it. Eventually the combination of the decidedly inferior product, my mother’s impatience with the smell and mess, and our lack of enthusiasm for bottle washing, resulted in home brewing being phased out in the family home.

Eventually, when I was 18, I went to work for my father’s scissors making business (more on that here). As I had a facility for arithmetic I was put to work converting £.s,d to decimal, and other general book-keeping tasks as well as all the manufacturing processes. When I was about 26 I enrolled to study pure and applied mathematics “A” Levels, and the following year I entered Sheffield University as an undergraduate, leaving three years later with a degree in electronics and computer science. I had also gained a fair amount of brewing experience, brewing full mash recipes initially from Dave Line’s books. I quickly found a job as a process control engineer and two weeks later I was in South Carolina commissioning dispensing systems in textile factories. I was doing that and similar work for seven years when, co-incidentally, I was offered the job of brewer at Kelham Island Brewery and took it.

After four and a half years, I decided to leave Kelham Island and start my own brewery. I found an industrial unit on the south side of Sheffield and my father agreed to buy it and rent it to me, as well as enabling me to buy the brewing equipment of Leaking Boot brewery which was closing down. This was basically four old 5 barrel cellar tanks which had been converted into rough approximations of a HLB, a mash tun, a hop back and a copper along with a heat exchanger, cellar cooler, and 80 firkins.

The mash tun referred to was originally a Grundy tank. Leaking Boot Brewery had removed the domed top with an angle grinder, then used the grinder to cut a few dozen slots in the dome to the mash tun floor; it was simply dropped, convex side up, into the remainder of the tank. Its performance was somewhat unsatisfactory; the slots were much too wide and a significant amount of grain passed through to flow into the copper – this is a bad thing – so I obtained some curtain netting from a Sheffield distributor (free because it was to be used in a brewery!) and the first few brews originated from this Heath Robinson horror. Meanwhile I commissioned a new floor from a laser cutting firm near Crystal Peaks, a 3mm stainless steel plate with concentric rings of narrow slots – still far from ideal but a huge improvement on its predecessor.

One of the original Leaking Boot Grundys still serves as a caustic holding vessel in the Conditioning Tank room, another was “stretched” into a 10 Bbl HLB (we wood lined it for insulation, the staves being cut by the joiners who then occupied what is now our brewhouse) and this is still in occasional use on double brew days.

The heat exchanger kept going for over ten years but it became more and more temperamental – it was finally retired when we commissioned the new brewhouse in 2008.

Some of the Leaking Boot firkins may still be in our cask inventory but I imagine most will have disappeared by now, the same applies to the 150 firkins I bought from Wards when they closed in 1999.

Anyway, we got everything set up and that was where it all began – by August 1996, we’d made our first sale (I had to buy a mobile phone as there was no landline), and so Abbeydale Brewery was born.”

We’ll leave it there for now, but there’s much more to tell – we’ll be sharing our stories of our origins, including those of our very first beers (which still form part of our core range today, 25 years later), over the coming few months, so watch this space.

Cheers!

Our Hidden Treasures of Sheffield series continues! This time we’ve chosen to shine a little spotlight on a real tucked away local gem… the Simpkins Sweets factory.

Located on an innocuous side street in the Hillsborough area of the city, Simpkins have been producing travel sweets for generations, and this year celebrate their centenary!

The company has been owned by Simpkin family since they were founded in 1921. Set up by A. Leslie Simpkin in 1921, the company was originally based in a grocer’s shop in Pitsmoor, which Leslie then entrepreneurially swapped for a factory! Bringing the shell of a burnt down old refrigeration company back to life, business grew dramatically overnight, supplying barley sugar style sweets largely within the pharmacy sector rather than being in direct competition with other large confectionery manufacturers. You’re probably very familiar with Simpkins sweets without even knowing it! The original “travel sweets”, their round gold tins are a household feature globally.

Leslie was joined by his sons Neville, Brian and John over the years, with John Simpkin taking over in 2002. Today John’s son and daughter, Adrian and Karen, are joint Managing Directors. Three generations, 100 years, but still using their grandfather’s original recipes.

Simpkins now employ over 50 people from the local area, and Adrian tells me that it’s not unusual to have generations of the same family working there – they’re a very close knit community. The business has survived a world war, a huge recession, and now a pandemic, and Adrian says it’s all down to the staff and the wonderful team spirit they share… as well as a good product, of course!

You might have spotted that the pumpclip for the beer features a mountain in the background, and be thinking “I know Sheffield’s hilly, but there’s nothing THAT big in Hillsborough!” Well, this element of the design is in tribute to Simpkins’ Mount Everest connection – they were the official supplier of the first ever ascent in 1953, and allegedly some of their sweets were left at the top! A huge accolade to be chosen for such a momentous journey, although I hear that in true Yorkshireman fashion John wasn’t delighted at having to give his stock away to Tensing’s team for free!

Just like us, the company is very proudly Sheffield, with the family taking every opportunity to give a shout out to Sheffield steel in top notch restaurants around the world – discovering on a second visit to Chicago that one such venue had updated their cutlery upon their recommendation!

The beer itself is a delicious and delicate 4.1% pale ale, in the classic Abbeydale Brewery style. Notes of red berry and gentle citrus flavours combine with a tasty residual sweetness. It’s available in cask only, and is being released this week, so look out for it popping up on a bar near you.

And if you have a hankering for some sweeties after all that, you can pick up some from the Simpkins range here – we heartily recommend the Hangover Drops!

A rare opportunity has arisen to join the management team at our lovely community pub, The Rising Sun, located in the leafy suburb of Nethergreen, Sheffield. Owned by us here at Abbeydale Brewery since 2005, The Rising Sun underwent a refurbishment a few years ago to add additional dining space and has since grown its existing reputation as a destination real ale pub to incorporate a quality food offering and dining experience. We balance both the traditional and modern in the venue and specialise in real ale and keg beer with 26 lines in total. As well as plenty of Abbeydale beers, we look out for the best of guest breweries too. We work closely with local suppliers – so local some of them are our customers! 

We are looking for an additional Duty Manager to support the General Manager in the everyday running of the venue.

We’re looking for someone who has at least 1 year experience working at no lower than Duty Manager level in a hospitality setting, with food offering, and has experience with the following:

• real ale and cellar management
• stock systems and management
• processing weekly admin
• managing & interpreting basic financials 
• staff training & development
• team leadership
• managing bar & floor shifts to ensure the quality of the overall customer experience
• health & safety procedures
• site audits

You will work closely with the existing Duty and General Managers to ensure the smooth running of the business day to day, to provide an enjoyable customer experience. You will need to lead by example and be organised, responsible, trustworthy, a great communicator and be willing to really take ownership of your role and duties. There is the opportunity for career progression for the right person and we are always happy to discuss personal development and training opportunities.

Holding a personal licence would be beneficial.

We offer 28 days holiday per annum plus staff discount, for use at both the venue and the brewery online shop. The role involves working 45 hours per week on a rota basis which covers daytimes, evenings and weekends. Salary will be £23,000.

The pub is easily accessible by public transport, with reasonable opening hours and a parent company (that’s us!) that invests heavily in staff training and progression.

Please apply by sending your CV and covering letter to [email protected].

Our Hidden Treasures of Sheffield series launched in March last year, just two weeks before lockdown gripped the nation. With pubs now starting to re-open, and our cask production starting to increase (hooray!), we thought a great place to pick back up our weekly cask specials was by bringing back the first of this series, which didn’t get much opportunity to shine last year, but has a story to tell that’s very important to the essence of what we’re all about here at Abbeydale Brewery. 

The Hidden Treasures series is inspired by our strong sense of place. Our beloved hometown has such a rich history, and so much of the everyday is overlooked in favour of more glamorous, visible landmarks. We wanted to shine a light on the bits of our city that we think are truly special, and that you might not necessarily have come across before. The beers themselves will be the classic, sessionable pale ales that we’re so well known for, but that we also don’t get too much cause to shout about every day. Here’s to the humble, the timeless, and the dependable.

For this beer, we’re taking you right back to the pre-Abbeydale Brewery days, as far as the 1950’s, to be precise. Here’s the story of Family Heirlooms and Tuneful Endings…

Before being in the brewery business, Patrick Morton, his dad Hugh and brother Chris all worked together on West Street, where they carried on the quintessentially Sheffield family tradition of being cutlers. Hugh had been there since the 1950s and was joined by his two sons a couple of decades later. 

Manufacturing scissors was the primary operation, and what the Morton’s made were among Sheffield’s finest. The problem with this was that they made things that lasted forever. They were also expensive, and unable to compete with cheap imported scissors which were inexpensive enough to throw away and replace. They tried other things like hand-made Bowie and tool-steel commando knives for the American custom-knife market. Making folding knives was a step too far with the machinery, and probably know-how (and, at least in Pat’s case, patience!), they had available. In the last few years the shop did more scissors, knives, and sheep shears repairs than selling new products.

Mortons, the shop on West Street, soldiered on regardless, selling an amazing collection of bric-a-brac and cutlery, often bought by the hundred-weight at auction from Sheffield’s dying industries.

The writing was on the wall. Pat and Chris both went to Sheffield University within a year of one another in the early 1980s, and Hugh, along with Pat and Chris’s mum, Dolly, finally had the business to themselves. In the 1990s, Hugh eventually gave up with cutlery and he and Patrick set up Abbeydale Brewery in 1996 (Hugh being instrumental in this, having a lot of confidence in a business where people consumed the product and then came back for another!). Dolly was the sales force of our local little brewery in days where the big breweries dominated all beer sales.

By the 2000’s Abbeydale Brewery was well established and growing. Chris (following a stint in IT), worked alongside Patrick, and Hugh finally retired. Chris was the Rising Sun’s first landlord when Abbeydale Brewery took it over from the Sheffield University Union. However, deciding that he much preferred to drink it rather than have much to do with making beer, Chris eventually left the business and now runs his own web software business, Plan Alpha Systems. Pat was joined by his wife Sue, and the two of them continue to lead us ever-forwards to this day.

So what about those tuning forks sculptures? They appeared without fanfare when the now ‘Morton Works’ was redeveloped into flats and a bar (the name always amused Hugh, as he’d only ever leased the building!).  You can find them on West Street, at the top of Bailey Lane between ‘Morton Works’ and what used to be called the Labour Exchange. No-one seems to know much about why they are there. This is where we come in to bring a lost story back to life!

Here’s the answer to the puzzle. In 1974 Chris became an apprentice tuning fork maker for Ragg Tuning Forks, then on Little London Road in Woodseats. He still got to do grinding and hitting things with hammers; so that satisfied the Sheffield ‘gene’. A couple of years later Chris, utilising Pat’s knowledge of physics and electronics, sorted out how to get an oscilloscope and a frequency generator to do the final tuning-fork tuning. Tuning fork making got underway for a while at the factory on West Street. The discovery of hundreds of part-manufactured tuning forks became a real inspiration for the builders who found them when redeveloping the building, and clearly they deemed them important enough to commemorate forever as a part of Sheffield’s industrial heritage.

Who made the tuning fork sculptures?  We’d love to know…

Family Heirlooms and Tuneful Endings is a 4.1% pale ale, hopped with Eureka, Enigma and Dr Rudi hops. It’ll be available in cask only from the week commencing 3rd May.

So confirmation has now been received that pubs are able to open for outside service from Monday 12^th April – that’s next week! And we’re happy to announce that one of the pubs that will be doing so is our very own community pub, The Rising Sun. The Moonshine has been safely delivered (hooray!) and the team have been working incredibly hard to make their beer garden a welcoming space to while away the day with a pint or two!

The pub will be re-opening for drinks only initially, although we’ve got our pals at Proove Pizza on board who will be setting up their outdoor pizza oven every weekend to enjoy alongside a beer. (The plan is to re-open the kitchen when indoor service is able to recommence, hopefully from the 17^th May – so we’ll have our legendary Sunday dinners back just as soon as we can.) And no need to book, so please just head down to see landlord Garry and the team – and keep an eye on the pub’s website and social media for all updates regarding opening hours and so on.

Of course the Rising Sun is not the only one to be throwing open if not its doors then at least the garden gates, and our team of drivers are back to full throttle and have been busy delivering delicious fresh cask and keg beer to pubs around our city and beyond! Sheffield CAMRA and This Is Sheffield are just two organisations that have been putting together lists of places that are able to re-open local to us, so do check that out too, and let us know where you’ll be heading for a beer!

Our online shop remains operational as always for beers at home, so if you’re not feeling quite ready to head out just yet, we’ve got you covered with a yummy range of cans. Our newest beer is an easy going session IPA called Emergence, brewed especially to celebrate being able to cautiously yet joyfully move into the new normal – the perfect beer to share in good company!

Anyway, here’s hoping for some beer-garden-friendly sunshine to enjoy – although I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for a pint whatever the weather!

Cheers,

Laura