Year: 2023

We’re very excited to be celebrating the most exciting developments in UK hop farming for the next twist on our classic Heathen recipe, using Harlequin® hops grown and harvested in Herefordshire to create UK Hop Heathen (4.1%)!

These fantastic hops produce elegant Mosaic-esque tropical flavours, with a refined citrus bitterness and a delicate hedgerow character. On the brewday, we were really struck by the beautiful New World tropicality that filled the brewery – notes of stone fruits, notably mango and apricot, a hint of jamminess and a gently herbal character, with some zesty lemon lightly coming through in the hop back. Other than switching the Mosaic out for Harlequin®, the recipe otherwise remains the same as “regular” Heathen, so we recommend trying the two alongside each other to really pick up on the similarities and nuanced differences between the two!

Our hops specifically come from Townend Farm in Bosbury, Herefordshire, where they are grown and carefully tended to by hop growers Mark and Lesley Andrews. So as the crow erm… drives, they’ve travelled a mere 137 miles to reach us here in Sheffield!

Harlequin® has quite the family history – it’s a daughter of Godiva®, granddaughter of Jester®, and great-grandaughter of Cascade, and got its name from the remarkable patterns that can be found in the bracts that form the structure of each hop cone. Will Rogers, Technical Director at our hop suppliers Charles Faram, tells us more about the development process and Harlequin’s family tree:

“We chose to start with Cascade because it has great disease resistance, good yield, and is also is the hop responsible for craft brewing’s resurgence. When we grow Cascade in the UK, due to our northerly growing area, it ripens very late in the season. In Yakima it is a relatively early variety, ready for picking at the start of September. In the UK, to pick it when truly ripe, we pick it right at the end of September – weather at this time is unpredictable, meaning harvest can be difficult. Hops are diecious (there are female and male plants, but only female plants produce hops) so we made a cross with one of our male plants which demonstrated earlier ripening. The products of this cross were Jester® and Olicana®, both of which ripen earlier than their female parent, whilst also providing interesting tropical notes. Jester® has become the cornerstone of our breeding program as it is a great hop to grow, requiring less fertiliser and pesticides, whilst also producing good and consistent yields. Buoyed by the results of Jester® we decided to make further crosses and Godiva® followed, an incredible, strong plant with delicious grape and tangerine aromas and flavours, whilst also showing drought resistance in addition to Jester®’s virtues. Harlequin® is a further step on this path, having robustness to environmental factors, but most importantly it’s a hop that truly stands out both prior to and during the brewing process. Deliciously tropical with peach and passionfruit flavours, it stands comparison with the high impact hop varieties coming out of areas such as the USA, Australia and New Zealand”.

One thing that’s always been thrilling for us is to work with suppliers who are as passionate about their produce as we are about the beer we brew for you! There’s a gentle revolution going on in the UK hop world at the moment which combines sustainability and taking care of the environment with amazing flavour, and it’s really exciting to see the breadth of character that’s been quietly in development in recent years – it deserves shouting about!

UK Hop Heathen was brewed in cask, keg and can and released on April 3rd – cask was all spoken for by launch day, with kegs running low already and cans not far behind, so don’t hang around if you were thinking of ordering some! Trade customers can drop us an email at [email protected] or give the team a call on 0114 2812712, or cans are live on our online shop as well as from lovely indie retailers nationwide. Let us know if you need a hand finding the beer in your local area!

Cheers!

Team Abbeydale

We’re revisiting the OG Doctor Morton’s beer! Snake Oil was first brewed in 2008, and we’d never have predicted what it started! From “newfangled beers with weird pumpclips” to an extensive and entertaining series of easy drinking pale ales that sit happily within our wider range.

The Doctor Morton’s series was brought into being by our previous designer Ivan, who suggested a range based around medicine-show theme names. Our owner Pat wasn’t so sure at first, but certain customers of ours couldn’t get enough and so he eventually bowed to commercial pressure!

The range began life as the place for our brewers to try new hops in different combinations – almost all were, and still are, what we call here “cask pale specials”. They’ve always been really popular – strong sellers and a talking point for publicans and drinkers alike!

Although it was the first to be brewed and released, Snake Oil was not the first to be “invented”… many of the other suggestions were so off the wall that it was felt we needed to make sure people had a slightly more straightforward introduction to the series and understood the medicine bottle style theme. Most of the other beers which are now familiar names have somewhat more of an obscure name, such as Duck Baffler – what on earth is one of those?! – or they include some kind of joke or pun… Angler Management springs to mind! Brewery co-owner Sue recollects her favourite: “when making a beer flavoured with ginger, we gave a specific instruction that the beer should simply be called ‘Ginger Beer’ so that people would for once know what they were getting.  What did we get? Djinn Jar Beer!”

We’re continually evolving the range and adding new beers so the good Doctor can carry on his work inspired by the travelling salesman of yesteryear. Although the look has in recent years been updated by our designer James (now including a miniature portrait of Doctor Morton himself, our brewery owner Pat), we’ve kept a strong hold on the wit and eccentricities this series brings. They’re instantly recognisable, a distinctive range which sits happily alongside our other offerings.

Cheers!

Celebration time here at Abbeydale HQ, as our beloved Black IPA, Black Mass, has WON the Overall Champion prize of the bottle and can competition at the Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA) National Finals!

Black Mass initially came out on top in the Speciality IPA round of the North East regional bottle & can awards back in December, which meant that it qualified to go forward to the national finals, held in Liverpool at Beer X, the UK’s largest beer and brewing trade event. The judging panel is made up of fellow brewers and some of the country’s best beer experts, who blind taste every entry.

Our brewers Christie and Jamie made the trip across to the other side of the Pennines, where we first discovered that we won the Speciality IPA category on a nationwide level – something to be very proud of already – before scooping the TOP PRIZE in the overall bottle and can competition!

It’s hugely special for a beer that we love, and that we’ve been making for our entire 26 year history, to be at the absolute top of its game and gaining recognition at the highest level. We’re massively proud of our amazing team of brewers!

So what’s all the fuss about? A bit of a beast at 6.66%, it’s smooth and full-bodied on the palate. A hop forward character coupled with delectable flavours reminiscent of bitter chocolate, fruitcake and raisins, meets aromas of fresh pine alongside coffee and just a hint of burnt toast – it’s classic and familiar yet simultaneously unique and boundary defying. We took the plunge to relabel the dark, hoppy enigma that is Black Mass as a Black IPA last year (more on that here), so it’s absolutely wonderful to see this decision vindicated.

And if you haven’t tried it before, what are you waiting for! Cans are available via our online shop as well as from many of the lovely indie retailers we supply (let us know if we can help finding a supplier in your local area).

Cheers!

Team Abbeydale

We’re very excited to announce that we’ve teamed up with the wonderful Locksley Distilling Co to make our very own Heathen inspired gin!

Based just down the road from the brewery at the historic Portland Works, we’ve long been fans of Locksley’s flagship Sir Robin of Locksley Gin, and owners John and Cynthia REALLY know their stuff when it comes to flavour – their Raspberry and Cardamom gin and Morocello blood orange liqueurs are sensational, and Cynthia’s cocktails are absolutely legendary, so we really couldn’t wait to work with them to create a spirit that combines their gin expertise with our beery know-how.

We knew we wanted to make a gin inspired by one of our most well-known beers, so we took samples of Willamette, Mosaic and Nelson Sauvin hops which were made into nano-batches of distillate in Locksley’s vacuum still. The hops were cold distilled, which meant we got all of the flavour without isomerising the hops, so that the bitterness doesn’t carry through. The effect of this was mind blowing – the three distillates were so distinct from each other and truly captured the essence of the hop. Mosaic was the unanimous favourite (the other two were declared “too weird”!), which meant we were going to be making this a Heathen inspired gin!

Our chosen hop distillate was added to Locksley’s classic London Dry style base – the botanicals for which are juniper, coriander seed, cassia bark, angelica root and liquorice root. We thought about what flavours Mosaic hops add to beer and what would complement this in a gin – they’re renowned for their punchy tropical character, so after rigorous taste testing (such an arduous task!) we settled on papaya and pink grapefruit. This was all meticulously blended and bottled at 40.0% ABV.

Batch 1 absolutely flew out, so we’ve had batch 2 distilled! It’s an exclusive run of just 60 bottles, and it’s available now on our online shop (as well as from Locksley’s direct). It’s also available at our pub, the Rising Sun, so do pop in to try the perfect serve, over ice with tonic, and garnished with a slice of fresh pink grapefruit. And who’s going to be the first to try a beery gin cocktail?! We reckon it’d work wonderfully with a good splash of Heathen, topped up with grapefruit soda!

Cheers!

We may have mentioned this a few times already (!) but just in case you missed it, the ninth Sheffield Beer Week is coming up, from Monday 6^th – Sunday 12^th March. And we’ve brewed a new beer in collaboration with Sheffield Beer Week & local craft beer festival Indie Beer Feast especially for the occasion.

Cloud Peak is a 4.8% heavily hopped Mountain-style session IPA, (not quite a West Coast, not quite a NEIPA, but merging the two somewhere in the middle). We’ve used over 17g/l of Citra, Cascade and Mosaic hops, including loads of Cryo! To put that into perspective, that’s around the amount we’d use for our big-hitting Deliverance DIPA series, so we’ve really taken the hopping levels to new heights (see what we did there) for this one. It also allowed us to make full use of our fantastic new whirlpool, which helps us get the very best from those aromatic little lupulin nuggets.

Flavour-wise, expect a hop forward beer that’s packed with ripe mango and juicy pineapple character. Soft, smooth and fluffy, with a crisp, bitter finish making it perfectly well-balanced. It’s also vegan friendly and gluten free.

The beer launches officially at Indie Beer Feast on Friday 3^rd March (that’s THIS FRIDAY!! So head here quickly if you’d like to buy a ticket!), and will be pouring at Hop Hideout too from the same date. The first cask will be available on Monday 6th March at our very own pub the Rising Sun, before heading out more widely across cask, keg and can.

Trade customers can pre-order the beer now by chatting to our fab sales team on 0114 2812712 or dropping an email into [email protected]. And cans should be live on our online shop from Monday next week too!

Cheers!

Sheffield Beer Week takes place from Monday 6^th-Sunday 12^th March this year, and we can hardly believe it’s the NINTH one! We’ve started getting some exciting plans in place to celebrate our wonderful beery hometown – here’s what we’ve got coming up.

First released last year and back by popular demand, our homage to our city’s rich brewing heritage Sheffield Rocks is now available in keg and can, and if we may say so ourselves we reckon it provides the perfect liquid warm up to the festivities. It’s sold out to trade customers in cask already, but if you’re looking for a pint of it you should still be able to find one – Sheffield venues who have taken a cask or keg so far include… the Rising Sun, the Dog & Partridge, Shakespeare’s, the University Arms, Pangolin, Industry Tap, Kelham Island Tavern, the Wisewood Inn, Dark Horse, Craft & Berry, the Riverside, the Commercial in Chapeltown, Two Sheds, Craftworks, and Neepsend Social, who will be pouring the beer as part of their Sheffield showcase. You can read more about the inspiration and story behind this beer here. And of course, it’s not only available in our fair city – pubs and bars as far afield as Manchester, Stevenage and Nottingham know that Sheffield Rocks, too!

We’re delighted to have been invited back to local craft beer festival Indie Beer Feast, and will be pouring both days (Friday 3rd & Saturday 4th March) at Trafalgar Warehouse in Sheffield City Centre alongside a cornucopia of magnificent breweries from all around the country (plus some excellent food stalls, which we’re very excited to sample the wares of!). Tickets are available here. 

On Saturday 4th March from 5pm, our Funk Dungeon Lead Brewer Jim is hosting a pop-up tasting at Hop Hideout with a chat about the project and the exciting developments we’ve got coming up with our mixed fermentation beers… plus free samples of our latest release! It’s a peach tea saison, aged in barrel along with cider lees from our pals Duckchicken Cider, and promises to be rather special indeed.

And finally (for now), we’ve got a brand new beer coming up, which we’ve brewed in collaboration with Sheffield Beer Week and Indie Beer Feast, celebrating our community and the ethos of the festival. Cloud Peak is a 4.8% heavily hopped Mountain IPA, which launches officially at Indie Beer Feast on Friday 3^rd March, with the first cask being ready for pints at the Rising Sun on Monday 6th. More info on this very special beer coming next week!

Do make sure you check out the full events listings on the Sheffield Beer Week website here – there’s absolutely loads going on all across the city and more being added as we get closer to the festivities. We hope to see you there!

Cheers,

Team Abbeydale

It’s not long until 2023’s Sheffield Beer Week kicks off, and we’ve brought back a very special collaboration brew to celebrate the heritage, and historic traditions, of our wonderful beery home town.

Originally brewed in 2022, Sheffield Rocks is a 4.1% dry hopped pale ale. Our suppliers Murphy & Son’s dug in their archives to help us recreate a traditional Sheffield water profile, with added sodium chloride to ensure the best possible starting point for our heritage brew. The malt grist is similar to that of Heathen; primarily low colour Maris Otter but with a good amount of caramalt for a light biscuit sweetness. With Tradition and Goldings hops added to the kettle, before dry hopping with Pilgrim and Cascade to provide our own modern twist, the beer has been fermented using our own house yeast. It has a mild bitter character, with an IBU of 28, and is “liquid gold” in colour with a slight hop haze. The result is an overall balanced and quaffable beer – perfect for a session, characterised by drinkability.

This beer was originally brewed in collaboration with Stuart Noble, who’s career in the brewing industry began in 1974. Having started at John Smith’s, Stuart has worked for Courage, Bass Charrington in Runcorn, Bass Stones in Sheffield and finally Bass HQ in Burton on Trent before joining us at Abbeydale in the mid 00’s. His job at Bass was to look after the way all the beers were brewed, auditing and checking consistency across the different sites, so his beer knowledge and commitment to quality is second to none. Stuart provided some training and consultancy work for Kelham Island Brewery where he met Pat (Morton, our brewery owner, just in case you’re new around here!) and they’ve been firm friends ever since. Stuart has provided training for us here in beer appreciation (a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it!) and worked with the brewing team directly too, usually making Moonshine! A brewing consultant for us over the entirety of our history, he’s even a regular at the Rising Sun too!

The inspiration behind Sheffield Rocks comes from the rich traditions of our home town, especially Stones, which was one of the very first pale beers to go against the tide of a world of brown bitters. Before WWII, most of the beer that could be found in Sheffield was dark mild – low in alcohol and salty, to provide much needed salts back to busy steelworkers! Following the war, the then head brewer of Stones invented a light beer, which was revolutionary at the time and took Sheffield by storm. It came to be seen as a huge step change leading the way to pale, hoppy, drinkable beers being at the forefront of our drinking habits… a path which our brewery owner Pat undeniably took another step towards. It was a hugely popular beer – Stones was eventually taken over by Bass and brewed in five different breweries in the Bass group, at a volume of around 3 quarters of a million BBL per year (that’s over 200 million pints!). Bass subsequently decided that Worthington was going to be their flagship beer, and the advertising for Stones gradually declined. The original cask Stones was only brewed at Cannon Brewery on Rutland Road (opposite the Gardeners Rest pub, well worth a visit if you’re in the area!) which closed in 1999. After the closure, Stuart transferred the brewing of it to Burton on Trent, until eventually the volume became too small to be sustainable for them, and moved to Everards in Leicester until it dwindled to less than 50 BBL per week. A version of Stones Bitter, using the classic branding, the original recipe and even the original yeast strain, is now brewed by our friends at True North, in partnership with Molson Coors.

Sheffield Rocks is our homage to all of this wonderful history – the essence of the archetypal Sheffield beer for the twenty first century!

The 2022 brewday team – almost a century of experience here!

Sheffield Rocks is available now in cask, keg and can – via our online shop in can here, and to trade in all formats by contacting our friendly sales team ([email protected] or give us a call on 0114 2812712).

Did you know that February marks New Zealand Beer Month? Curated by the New Zealand Beer Collective, this year the focus is on showcasing breweries right here “that have kiwi brewing at their core to support some splendid NZ offerings” – so we were asked to put a few words together about one of our most well loved beers!

For 15 years now there’s been a superstar amongst our core range.  A secret weapon we keep in plain sight, packed full of tasty New Zealand hops, redolent with aromas and flavours of gooseberry and grape. Twice Champion Beer of Sheffield, and a firm favourite amongst both staff and customers… it is, of course, Deception!

The story of Deception starts way back over fifteen years ago, when we were trialling some new hops in a series of specials.  Friend of the brewery Stuart Noble wouldn’t stop talking about a new hop from New Zealand, Nelson Sauvin, a hop that supposedly brought with it flavours of Sauvignon Blanc, and so we thought we’d give it a go.  Our hop suppliers, Charles Faram, also knew how much our brewery owner Pat loved experimenting with new varieties and so were happy to help us get our gauntlet gloves on some. We brewed one full brew length of it, sold out of it within weeks and promptly had to brew it again!   

We then had so many requests for it we brewed it every year. (As a slight aside, the following year, word on the street was a hop called Citra and we used that in Duck Baffler – another perennial beer.) Deception remained an annual release until 2013 when we were finally able to pin down a regular supply of Nelson Sauvin and fulfil the demand all year round!

Deception was (and we suppose still is!) one of the longest standing beers in the UK to make use of Nelson Sauvin. Paul Corbett, Managing Director at Charles Faram, tells us of how Farams have been stocking and selling New Zealand hops since 1996, following a “drop in” visit by Tom Inglis (a New Zealand grower, who was on holiday in the UK – sounds like Tom takes a similar approach to holidaying to our Pat & Sue, who can never resist an opportunity to chat beer whilst in new climes!). The early varieties such as Pacific Gem, Green Bullet and Pacifica were all good sellers for Farams, but without reaching the same levels of impact as Nelson Sauvin. Nelson Sauvin was first grown in 2000, but was kept for the New Zealand home market until the acreage became large enough to export, so Faram’s had to wait for a few years until they managed to get some in 2004. Initial volumes from New Zealand were very small but everyone who used it, loved it. It was a fantastic hop and the lovely Sauvignon Blanc-esque flavour really helped to spark a new wave of flavours in beer. As the years went on, demand increased and it became a big challenge to get enough to keep everyone happy (we probably didn’t help matters here!).

To meet this high demand, the existing farms in New Zealand have over the years invested in new wirework, kilns and picking machines, and there have even been whole new farms established to help ensure the supply of Nelson Sauvin and other fantastic New Zealand varieties. This has led to a higher and more well-established acreage, which means that there’s finally enough to go around for all us brewers to experiment with! 

Whilst Deception has formed part of our regularly available range for a decade now (and was the very first beer our brewer Christie both bought for himself, and also served a pint of as a bartender at the Kelham Island Tavern, showing how it holds many fond memories for others in the team too!), in more recent years we’ve experimented with variants of this popular classic, releasing “Double Deception” (a bold and boozy 8.2% DIPA) and “Dry Hopped Deception” to showcase Nelson Sauvin at its fruity, fantastic finest.

As of January 2023, we’ve also made the decision to add Brewers Clarex to the Deception recipe, reducing the gluten without making any change to the character or flavour of the beer, which hopefully means more of you than ever before will be able to enjoy this delicate, delectable pint. If you’d like some cans for yourself, they’re available via our online shop as well as from many of the wonderful indie retailers we supply (let us know if you’d like some information on stockists in your area!)

Where else would you like to see us take this NZ hero of our range?

Cheers!

This post was originally written for and shared on the NZ Beer Collective’s website here. With thanks to Paul Corbett and the Charles Faram team for their valuable help and insights.