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Collaboration time again here at Abbeydale – and this time it was a particularly special one for us as it meant a reunion day in the brewhouse too!

In our first EVER four-way collab, three guys who spent time at Abbeydale earlier in their careers returned for one day only… Dave Kerr from Northern Monk, Richard Morley from Magic Rock, and Sam Lee from Siren all back in town, teaming up with our very own Jamie Memmott to create a hop forward, super juicy IPA that’s bound to knock your socks off.

We’ve got a pretty damn extensive hop store here, and the guys had free reign over the shelves. They’ve gone for four absolute powerhouses of the humulus lupulus world – Nelson Sauvin taking centre stage, backed up by Amarillo, Cascade and Galaxy, to provide a massive hit of gooseberry and grapefruit flavours with floral notes, passion fruit and orange lingering on the palate.

It was a great day having the old gang back together, and definitely an eventful brewday (particularly as Sam brought us all some of Siren’s new release Bourbon Milkshake, an 11% milk stout, to try, there’s probably a good reason why this isn’t described as a breakfast beverage) with everyone pitching in and Morley up to his usual tricks of trying to fix everything (even when it wasn’t necessarily broken…) Speaking of pitching, our house yeast has been replaced in this brew by US-05, which accidentally ended up on a van having a little tour around Sheffield shortly before it was needed in the beer! Thankfully our driver brought it back just in the nick of time and it’s now happily fermenting away.

We are mega excited to find out how this beer, named "4 Degrees of Separation", turns out! Keep your eyes peeled for details of where this will available soon… we have a feeling it won’t be around for long!

Please join us at the Devonshire Cat next Thursday 16^th March any time from 5pm to celebrate the launch of our fantastic new range as part of Sheffield Beer Week! The full range will be available across cask and keg. Open until 2am!

The Brewers Emporium range is a constantly rotating and evolving series of beers, where our brilliant brewers have been given free reign to select unusual and interesting ingredients to create exciting recipes for your drinking delights. The new beers will sit alongside existing core keg beer Heathen, an American style pale ale which is likely to be a familiar sight to many of you! Look out for Voyager IPA, Salvation stout, Reaper cereal (killer) beer and more!

Also being released under the Brewers Emporium banner is something we are all VERY excited about… our Funk Dungeon project, where we intend to explore barrel ageing, souring, and mixed fermentation beers. You can now follow the Funk Dungeon on Twitter @AbbeydaleFunk – look us up!

The artwork for the Brewers Emporium range has been created by artist James Murphy, who started working with us in 2016, beginning with the distinctive Heathen branding that has successfully launched our new and exciting craft beer range. James’ original and detailed work for the ever-expanding new range will allow each beer to stand out on bars and beer shelves across the country, with each beer represented in James’ characteristic, hand-drawn style.  An exhibition of James’ artwork will accompany the beer at our launch event next week, so come on down for what promises to be a brilliant evening!

It’s an exciting week at Abbeydale Brewery as we are hosting our friends Daniel Fermun and Iñigo Echeverria from Instituto de la Cerveza Artesana (I. C. A) and renowned craft beer bar Abirradero in Barcelona for a very special collaboration brew.

Today we are brewing something a little bit different to our usual beers… An unhopped fruited gruit that will be packaged with B’ Lambicus for an ever-developing flavour.

“Gruit”, or “Grut”, means herb – a popular addition to beers many moons ago. A brewers’ blend of herbs and spices often remained a very closely guarded secret, much like some breweries treat their hop additions today! After the passage of the Reinheitsgebot in 1516, the gruit ale gradually faded away into obscurity.

Our recipe is loosely based around I.C.A.’s incredible Neolithic style fruited gruit, Encantada. It is based on a recipe akin to one found in caves with remnants of early settlements not far from the Catalonian capital. Archaeologists found residual evidence of the oldest remains of brewing beer in Europe, a wheat and honey beer that was flavoured with thyme.

For today’s collaboration, we have decided to produce a beer a little more in tune with British tastes, based on a traditional ale, with mugwort, yarrow, juniper berries and heather flowers.  We are also using a small portion of lightly smoked malt to emulate the flavours of more ancient malt drying techniques.

The beer, coming in at a target 7.4% ABV, will be fermented with a mix of our own house yeast and a Belgian strain of Abbaye yeast for its ability to ferment higher gravity worts and alcohol. Towards the end of fermentation we will be splitting part of the wort off into wooden barrels with our house mélange of wild yeasts and bacteria and leaving it to age for a year or so – we aim to release it for International Gruit Day (yes, that is a real thing!) on February 1^st next year. In the meantime, the remainder of the wort will be fruited liberally with raspberries before being transferred with locally sourced honey and a secondary pitching of Brett Lambicus before being allowed to secondary condition in kegs, both for the purposes of ageing for the Brett character to shine or to be drunk fresh for a fruit forward beer.

Salut!

Last summer, we were invited to take part in the “Poet in Residence” project as part of Sheffield’s Year of Making programme (read more about the project at opusindependents.com/projects/wordlife/wordlife-projects/digital-poet-in-residence/) which was to culminate in a showcase of readings given at Wordlife’s 10^th birthday party in November.

We were paired up with the wonderful Gav Roberts, a self-proclaimed beer fan who brought with him an infectious enthusiasm and an absolute passion for his work.  As part of the residency, Gav had to spend a minimum of ten hours with us, learning about the way we work, interviewing our team and of course sampling some of our wares, which we’re sure he found particularly arduous…! We had such a laugh we’re thinking of taking him on permanently 😉

The reading itself took place at Weston Park museum, where Gav was let loose alongside the three other poets in residence – Charlotte Ansell, Gevi Carver and James Giddings, who had been working with Portland Works, Hope Works and Archipelago Gallery respectively. Not only was there a more traditional reading, inside the museum itself (a sell-out event!), but each poet had their work broadcasted on the side of the building… a triumphant spectacle indeed! It was a great night and felt like such a fitting tribute to our wonderful industrial city and its history.

We hear Gav’s also been working on an Abbeydale-themed epic, fitting in oodles of our beer names, which we absolutely can’t wait to hear!

A massive thank you to Now Then magazine and Wordlife for having us on board.

Cheers!

Ratebeer is one of the most respected worldwide websites when it comes to users rating beers they have had.  The scores are compiled completely by drinkers, so we are delighted to have scored highest amongst every brewery in the county. 

Take a look for yourself by following the link below (you will have to scroll the the US and Germany first!!!)

https://www.ratebeer.com/ratebeerbest/BestBeers-State2017.asp

We are absolutely delighted to announce that this week we are launching a rebrand for our renowned core range of cask ales – Moonshine, Deception, Daily Bread, Absolution and Black Mass. With the previous artwork having been in use since the brewery’s formation in 1996, we knew it was time to make a change. The new look is intended to refresh the range whilst paying homage to our rich history and ensuring that the familiarity with our most popular beers is not lost… and most importantly, the beers themselves have not changed one bit!

The new artwork has been created by local artist, well-known print-maker James Green, in conjunction with Field Design, a small design agency based at the Workstation in Sheffield. Jonathan Briggs, Creative Director at Field Design, said: “Going away from our first meeting with Abbeydale Brewery was a great feeling. We were being asked to update and freshen up a Sheffield institution. You can’t go into a pub in Sheffield (and beyond) without Moonshine or one of its partners on the bar. From our perspective, this was about embracing heritage and maintaining a strong link with Sheffield, to produce a set of designs that are both steeped in tradition yet fresh and bold.” The project, which has been ongoing for the past 6 months, rounds off our 20^th anniversary year nicely and seems a pretty perfect way to kick off year 21.

We feel the outcome of the project will allow us to cement our place in the current market, as a brewery with the experience and knowledge to consistently deliver a top quality pint, along with the drive and ambition to continue creating beer which excites the publican and beer drinker alike.

We hope you love the new designs as much as we do!

Cheers,

All the team at Abbeydale Brewery

Phew! What a year it’s been, and a worthy way to celebrate our 20th anniversary. We’ve sold over 2.5 million pints of beer, with over 50 specials hitting bars around Yorkshire and beyond. Our brewhouse production capacity has been increased by 25% with the installation of a brand new shiny 60BBL fermenter and conditioning tank. We also released our first ever small pack, including a triumphant return for old favourite Last Rites. We said goodbye to Brimstone, but bolstered our core range with our first permanently available keg… Heathen! 

We’ve created many collaboration beers with a whole host of lovely local business and fellow breweries. A particular highlight for us was being invited by our pals at Brewdog Sheffield to take part in the nationwide Brewdog Collabfest, where Iced Tea Dead People, our peach iced tea beer made with sencha from our lovely neighbours at Birdhouse Tea Co., went down a storm! It was also an honour to work with local music legends 65 Days of Static to brew up Red Parallax,  a Belgian style cherry red ale to celebrate their new album and worldwide tour.

It’s been a corker of a year for our two pubs, too. At the Rising Sun, we had a record-breaking Sunfest for the tenth year of the festival, and the Devonshire Cat has recently been given a sleek and modern new look in a total refurbishment!

So just what does 2017 have in store to beat all of that?! We don’t want to give away all our surprises just yet, but a little taster won’t hurt! Some of you may already know that for the past few months, we’ve been working hard finalising a rebrand of our core range. We’ve had the existing artwork for the past 20 years, and the time has come to make a change. We hope you’ll agree that the new artwork is in keeping with our character, and pays homage to the original design, but gives our beer a more modern appearance which is more reflective of the quality of the drink behind the pump clip.

Secondly, keep your eyes peeled for news on our upcoming #FunkDungeon project. Intrigued? You should be! 

We’ve also got yet more exciting collaborations in the pipeline and a plan for Heathen to be the start of a brand new range, with more artwork from the wonderful James D Murphy.

It’s gonna be a good ‘un!

With very best wishes for the year to come,

From all the team at Abbeydale Brewery

Earlier this month, our brewer Jamie and office manager Laura popped over to Huddersfield for an away brewday with Ryan at Beer Ink. The beer? An imperial s’mores stout, enriched with lactose, cacao nibs, marshmallow goo and a cornucopia of lovely biscuity malts. Doesn’t that sound, quite frankly, DELICIOUS. Guaranteed to leave you wanting “s’more” (#sorrynotsorry for the terrible pun!)

We arrived at Beer Ink on a gloomy Huddersfield day in high spirits despite the grey weather. The first job of the day was to prepare the grist, and thanks to the complex malt bill we had a full malty rainbow, with grains ranging from a pale beige to a rich roasted brown. The mash tun was packed absolutely to the brim by the time we were finished in order to provide enough sugars for the yeast to nibble on to create our hefty 9% brew!

It was really interesting to work on a brew kit that’s so different to our own… During the boil, Jamie got busy grafting and dug out the mash tun, something we don’t usually have to do here at Abbeydale thanks to our handy rake arm! Christmas tunes helped greatly and the vessel was empty in no time.

Whilst we waited for the transfer to the fermenting vessel to complete, we spent some time in the small but perfectly formed tasting room (well worth a visit – look out for open days next year!) and sampled Beer Ink’s imperial coffee stout and the much acclaimed One Armed Bandit, an imperial fruit sour aged in Bowmore whisky barrels that tasted reminiscent of Love Heart sweeties.

We had a SUPER day and even managed to fit in a trip to some of Huddersfield’s finest bars to toast our creation. Already looking forward to Ryan’s return trip next year for Abbeydale x Beer Ink #2!

Cheers!

Laura

We are excited to announce that over the festive period we will be appearing on THOR’S TIPI BAR for its first year in Sheffield! Located in the Peace Gardens in the very heart of the city centre, this Viking-inspired pop-up bar offers “cosy log fires, twinkling lights & Christmas cheer in abundance”.

As well as beers from ourselves and our friends at Brass Castle, there’s also mulled wine, cider, a hot chocolate station where you can choose your own toppings and an outdoor winter barbeque from Cow Boys (www.cowboysburgers.co.uk).

THOR’S will be open from 10.30am to 11pm daily from 24^th November to 31^st December (closed Christmas Day).

For more details, visit www.thorstipi.com.

When you first think of pairing beer and food, many people might not be able to imagine any further than a curry with a pint of lager. However, in recent years with the upsurgence of craft brewing, the wealth and breadth of flavours now possible in our humble beer is absolutely beyond compare, and we at Abbeydale believe that beer can do an incredible job at complementing and contrasting with a massive array of foodie flavours. And so we’ve paired up with the super-talented and imaginative culinary team at the Showroom to put together a very special menu:

Puffed beer crackers with ale-e-oli dip

Duck ballotine, goats cheese, beetroot, almond and cherries

Paired with Red Parallax, 4.8%, a Belgian style cherry ale brewed in collaboration with local music legends 65 Days of Static.

Sea trout, mango salsa, coriander crisp

Paired with Bear Hunter, 4.1%, a Mount Hood and Azacca hopped pale ale.

Venison ragu, parmesan mash, romesco cauliflower, vegetable crisps

Paired with Full English Breakfast Stout, 4.9%, a dark beer brewed with coffee, maple syrup and smoked malt.

Grilled mackerel, tomato, feta crumb, basil

Paired with Hop Smash, 7.4%, a grapefruit IPA brewed in collaboration with Kuhnhenn Brewing Co from Michigan.

Rabbit loin, pancetta, spiced carrot, rabbit jus

Virgin Tripel Saison, 8.5%, a spiced Belgian saison with cardamom, star anise and liquorice root. Brewed in collaboration with De Noord-Hollandse Bierbrouwerij.

Spiced plums, brimstone sabyon, iced yoghurt, malt tuille

Double Brimstone, 8.1%, a strong American Brown Ale and part of our 20^th anniversary celebration series.

Finally we’ll be finishing off the meal with Last Rites truffles, made with our sumptuous 11% barley wine.

The event is taking place on Saturday 26^th November and there are still a few tickets available! Please call the Showroom directly on 0114 275 7727 or visit the box office to book.