Author: abbeydale.admin

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 sales@abbeydalebrewery.co.uk 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!

We’re just days away from releasing our much-loved flagship beer, Moonshine, in CAN!

May is set to be the month of Moonshine, with pre-orders launching on Monday 4^th, and the cans to be with you from Tuesday 12^th May!

Cans of Moonshine have been in the pipeline for many a, well, moon (sorry!) – but we’ve brought the release forward a little in the context of the current climate to offer you the option of continuing to sup our most popular beer from the comfort and safety of your own home whilst we all wait patiently for our glorious pubs to re-open.

This is a massively exciting step for us, as despite it forming over half of everything we make here at Abbeydale Brewery, we’ve never released Moonshine in smallpack before. Until a few years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to brew enough to keep the beer available to all of our pub customers and satisfy demand in bottle or can. However, the investment and expansion which has been ongoing for many years has enabled us to gradually increase production, and the addition of our very own canning line (which was already planned in long before lockdown) means that we can maintain our own very high standards and package beer the moment it’s ready, without compromising on quality or freshness. So, it has finally allowed us to take the step of getting Moonshine into can and keep full control of making sure that it reaches you exactly as we intend!

The only other option available to us previously would have been to send tanks of Moonshine away for packaging elsewhere – but Moonshine is so dear to our hearts that we did not want to do this and lose any element of control over the finished product. Every single pint of Moonshine that is supped is brewed and packaged right here at our very own brewery, not packaged or even contract brewed elsewhere (a solution some other breweries prefer to use). The compromise to quality that this could entail is something we simply would not tolerate.

We’ve also always preferred canning as a method of presenting beer to bottling, as our brewery owner Pat Morton explains – “Cans are light proof and there is less chance of extraneous air leaking in, both of which allow for a much higher quality finished product when compared to bottles. 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!).

The recipe is exactly the same as for the cask ale we all know and love. Usually, we would package into cask with a little yeast, for secondary fermentation to be encouraged (producing real ale). For can, we’ve simply removed the yeast and given it a bit of a sparkle within the brewery to bring you a product that is as near as dammit as you would find in a pub, and captured it at that pure, precise moment, ready for you to enjoy at your leisure.

A lot of you have been asking what this means for the rest of our core beers… and we’re pleased to say that cans of Absolution, Deception, Daily Bread and Black Mass are also on the way! We don’t have a date for these yet, we still need time to get 100% familiar with our canning line and make sure we are doing everything absolutely as we should, but we’ll be sure to keep you all updated on the progress.

We’ll be taking pre-orders for Moonshine cans from Monday 4^th May, with the official release being on Tuesday 12^th May – so we’ll do our best to get pre-orders shipped to you as close to this date as we can.  Trade customers can call us on 0114 2812712 or email us on sales@abbeydalebrewery.co.uk to find out more, with home drinkers being able to place their orders directly with us at abbeydalebrewery.co.uk/shop – cans will be priced at £15 for a 6-pack or £50 for a case of 24 cans.

We’re so excited for the next stage of Moonshine’s journey… it’s been such a big part of Abbeydale Brewery for the past 24 years (more on that here) and we can’t wait to see where the future takes us.

Cheers!

Team Abbeydale

With cans of Moonshine coming very soon (we should have a date for you by next week!) we thought we’d cast back our memories right back to the early days of Abbeydale Brewery, to tell you more about the beer that has become our beloved flagship, our biggest seller (it’s over half of everything we make here!), and Sheffield’s most iconic brew.

Moonshine was the first recipe our brewery owner Patrick Morton worked on when setting up Abbeydale Brewery back in 1996. Absolution was the first beer we actually brewed here, but Moonshine was already much more than just a gleam in Pat’s eye by this point. It was carefully thought out, though the level of its success was beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Following the success of Pale Rider, Pat’s first commercial recipe whilst he was at Kelham Island Brewery, and inspired by the likes of Brendan Dobbin (still a friend) at West Coast Brewing and Sean Franklin at Roosters Brewery, he wanted to reproduce that pale, hoppy, American hop flavour in a more acceptable (at the time) ABV of 4.3%. 

Patrick (and even more so his wife Sue) dislike the flavours given by crystal malts so prevalent in brown beers. Sheffield was a little unusual in having a taste for paler beers than the standard brown bitters enjoyed by the rest of the country, thanks to Stones bitter which was produced (and very popular) locally. So put together Sheffield’s acceptance of pale beers, Patrick’s and Sue’s dislike of crystal malts, love of American hops and drinkable more-ish beers and Moonshine was born.

Moonshine is also light on bitterness, and the emphasis has always been on late-added hops for flavour rather than hops added to the boil (which extracts maximum bitterness, something which can be off-putting to many people’s palates). Originally 100% Willamette hops, the recipe for Moonshine has changed ever so slightly 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.

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 then 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, but not too bitter beers. From there, many have moved, with us, on to more adventurous styles, including developing a taste for bitterness, high ABVs (remember Last Rites at 11% is essentially a very strong version of Moonshine), completely over the top hoppiness and even sour beers! Many others have loyally stuck with their first love… pale, now gently hoppy, not too bitter, more-ish Moonshine."

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, Moonshine has 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. It’s come a long way since that very first pint was sold on 2nd September 1996.

Today at Abbeydale Brewery we’re really proud that we can continue to produce such a consistent and popular beer as Moonshine, alongside the other pale ales we’re renowned for but also the more weird and wonderful styles that we love to play around with too. And we are very proud indeed to have been an early part of the uprising that has led to such a massive variety of beer being available in the UK today. And so, as we gear up for the next stage of the revolution and get ready to launch our flagship cask product in can, we hope you’ll continue to follow our progress. We’re SO excited to see where this takes us next…

As the bank holiday weekend approaches, we have put together some colouring sheets for you to get creative with!

The templates feature our favourite American Pale Ale – Heathen, an unknown Brewers Emporium beer and a blank can for you to go wild with!

We’re looking forward to seeing how you get creative and have fun with your designs, so please share them with us across instagram, twitter and facebook. There will be a prize for the design that impresses/amuses us the most, so get them to us by Monday 20th April to be considered.

Click on the image below to download the printable colouring sheets.

Three sheets in total, combined within one pdf file. Each sheet is standard A4 size (21 cm w x 29.7cm h). Images can be printed or coloured digitally.

Prizes available for 18+ and UK only.

Here’s what we’re doing at Abbeydale Brewery to try to bring a little bit of sunshine to your days.

We’re aware that we should all be doing our best to stay at home at all times right now, and your favourite watering hole is "out of bounds". Please don’t forget that you can still get hold of our beers to enjoy at home from our online shop at abbeydalebrewery.co.uk/shop and we can bring your favourite beer right to your door!

We are continually updating the offering on there (starting with the return of MOONSHINE MINIKEGS, which are available now, along with minikegs of our other core beers!). We would love to hear your ideas for anything we could add! Our can stocks are running a little low currently, but we’re working hard to get things back in stock!

We offer a courier service for delivery, taking all the stress out of ensuring you can get your beer easily. We’ve also just introduced free local delivery for all orders of over £25, so if you’re based in Sheffield and place a qualifying order please select this option. In light of the government announcement of Monday 23rd March, we have suspended the option of collection from the brewery with immediate effect. We aim to get all orders out within 2 working days, but please bear with us (especially if you’re not particularly local to the brewery) as we are collating orders by area. We are of course very carefully following all government guidance and have strict procedures in place to ensure we are all kept safe, and will continue to monitor the situation and do our best to adapt as quickly as possible. We know how important sitting down with a beer is, so we’ll continue to do everything within our power to keep it flowing!

We’re all in this together, and so we wanted to do something to help the rest of our amazing industry community. As such we’re starting a little initiative – for every order on our online shop from a member of the public totalling over £40, we will commit a forward credit of £10 to the pub you would normally drink our beer in, which the pub can claim from us when this has all blown over*!

Our pubs, The Rising Sun and the Devonshire Cat, are now closed in line with the government’s ruling of Friday 20th March. We will really miss them (along with all of our other wonderful pub customers) but we’ll keep you all updated when the times comes that we are able to re-open safely.

We always used to say that “There’s nothing more social than beer” and we’re really passionate about not letting this go despite the challenges our industry and the wider world is currently facing. Our business has been built on the strength of our community and it’s critical to us that all work together at this time. Please reach out to friends and family using phones, emails, chats, etc. And where we can, let’s help each other. If you ever fancy a bit of a chat, we’re here. Please feel free to reach out to us (who’s up for a Skype drinkalong at some point?!). We at Abbeydale would like to thank all of our customers for their loyal patronage and in these challenging times we send each and everyone our very best wishes.

We can’t wait to join you all for a pint when this is all over.

Team Abbeydale x

*Max. credit per venue of £100 available

This Sheffield Beer Week (March 9th-15th), we’re keen to be involved with and help to spread the important message of inclusivity, accessibility, acceptance and friendship for all who are involved in the beer industry. Brewers, publicans, bottle shop owners, beer writers, and of course, beer drinkers.

And so our special release for this year is Not Just A Phase, a 4.3% pale ale brewed in collaboration with Sheffield’s very own Out & About, and The Queer Brewing Project (head to their pages to find out more about their hugely valuable messages, and the work they’re doing to bring them to the industry as a whole). It’s both a call to arms and a celebration of diversity, and is also both vegan and gluten free, released in cask and keg formats.

We welcomed award-winning Lily Waite of The Queer Brewing Project along with Michael and Heather from Out & About to the brewhouse on a stereotypically Sheffield rainy day in February, where we were all treated to a lovely straightforward brewday (not often the norm on collaborations!) powered by cheese toasties from our friends at Dead Donkey.

Not Just A Phase is hopped with Amarillo, Chinook and Mosaic, to bring a zesty orange and grapefruit character, with a hint of sweetness in the backbone from the use of Munich malt and Caramalt. Overall, a deliciously quaffable, refreshing and fruity pale ale that’s incredibly accessible, and as Lily puts it “this beer is a bunch of queers planting a flag in the ground that the LGBTQ movement across the beer industry is, well, not just a phase”.

Coming later in the year we’re teaming up again to produce something from the Funk Dungeon project too! Watch this space for more details…

The official launch party of Not Just A Phase is taking place at the Devonshire Cat on Friday 13^th March, as part of a tap takeover showcasing a variety of other beers that have been brewed by LGBT+ people. All are very welcome!

Photo credit: Lily Waite

We’ll also be pouring our collaborative brew at Indie Beer Feast this coming weekend (March 6th and 7th) alongside a whole host of other tasty treats, so do pop along for some pre-Sheffield Beer Week shenanigans! Tickets are still available for both Friday sessions at the time of writing although advance tickets for Saturday have now sold out. Please do pop by and have a beer at our bar!

Cheers!

This year, the 29^th March sees five of our team – Laura, Jim, Scott, James and Tommy – take on their biggest challenge yet, The Sheffield Half Marathon. The team have been out training hard in all weathers (thanks, Storm Dennis!) and are well on track to achieve their goals. Please head to https://justgiving.com/fundraising/team-abbeydale-brewery to help us in our fundraising efforts – it really does make a difference. 

And so with just 5 Sundays between now and #TeamAbbeydale heading to the start line, we thought it only fit to share with you why we’re asking for your support.

Two years ago when our Events Manager, Carly, joined the team she managed to wrangle 10 of us into taking part in the Sheffield 10K raising over £1500 for Cavendish Cancer Care. After being diagnosed in 2015 with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and back fighting fit she saw an opportunity to build on the relationship Abbeydale Brewery already had with them and give something back. At the time she wrote:

“It is my belief that we need to raise two things to help a charity not only sustain itself, but to grow; money (of course) and awareness. I chose to get involved as I think it’s vital that people are more aware of them, I was lucky that I already was. You get so much information within those first few weeks of a diagnosis, I hope that if someone reads my story it registers on different level in some way.”

Back to the run, and the team were given three options; 1) run it, 2) come down and cheer us on/volunteer or 3) donate… which is what led to ten of us lacing up our running shoes and taking part!

One of those 10 was Laura, our Office & Communications Manager, who having never been ‘a runner’ before got well and truly bitten by the running bug and it quickly became obvious that this was going to be a new passion, despite being in no way a natural runner! After completing the Sheffield 10K in 2018 along with 3 other runs around the county, she decided 2019 was going to be the year she ran over 500km, including once again the Sheffield 10k raising vital funds and awareness for #TeamCav and ultimately joining local running club Steel City Striders.

With what some describe as a beautifully scenic route with gorgeous views…while we’re more inclined to count the inclines (!) this year’s half marathon is sure to be 13.1094 miles of pure Sheffield love. The support, not only in donations, but in the number of Sheffielders who line the way. Thank you in advance for any words (shouts) of encouragement, sweets, songs, and most importantly smiling faces! 

We reckon if each of our beloved Abbeydale fans (based on our Facebook followers!) donated the value of their favourite pint *cough cough Moonshine* we’d raise an astonishing £22,586! If that figure isn’t worth the cost of just one extra beer then we’re not sure what is!