Category: News

Introducing Oktoberfest! Our Festbier is back for 2023 and it’s out now – balanced, clean and crisp, the colour of burnished copper, with a rich, bready aroma and a delicately spicy noble hop character. Full bodied, yet über-quaffable.

We reckon it’s the perfect addition to any celebration or gathering, and our team have been busily putting it to the test with some classic Beer Hall snacks! Here’s some suggested recipes for you to try at home…

Beer cheese dip

Add your butter and garlic to a small pan over a medium heat, and fry until the butter is melted and the scent of garlic fills the kitchen. Add the flour, salt and pepper, and whisk together to form a roux. Cook for a couple of minutes, then gradually add your Oktoberfest into the roux and whisk while it thickens.

Once it’s well mixed and a gravy-esque consistency, add your cheeses a small handful at a time and keep mixing until melted – be patient and take your time rather than turning the heat up any further. Once all the cheese is melted, serve and enjoy!

We dunked homemade pretzel bites into ours, which we made to this recipe with a sea salt topping (we don’t recommend the cinnamon sugar option for this particular purpose!). It would also be great with sausages dipped in it… read on below!

Beer infused Bratwurst

 

Method:

Combine all of your dried spices. Slice the pork into strips to allow easier mincing, then coat in the dry spice mix.  We’ll be mincing twice, once through a coarse plate, then through a finer one, which should ensure a really smooth wurst.

After the first mincing, add your ice cold beer – the colder the better. Mix well, then mince again through the finer plate. This would be a good opportunity to fry up a small amount of the filling in order to check the seasoning levels (and treat yourself to a tasty snack).  Remember that the flavours will develop somewhat. Once the seasoning is to your taste, mix the sausage meat with a food processor for 2 minutes, which helps the mixture emulsify and gives a smooth finish. Place in the freezer for half an hour, along with your sausage stuffer. 

Whilst the equipment is chilling, rinse the hog casings well to remove any salt, and leave to soak in fresh water.  Just before you are ready to start stuffing, place the casings on the funnel.

Slowly feed the mixture into the sausage stuffer, and once it starts to come through tie a knot in the end of the casing so that you don’t lose any precious stuffing!  This is a finickity job, which can require an extra pair of hands, but take your time over it, ensuring that the sausage skins aren’t too full or too baggy, and make yourself a really, really long sausage.

After this you’ll need to decide how long a Brat you want – for this style of Brat you’d normally expect this would be around 6-8 inches (15-20cm) long, but you do you! Pinch the sausage at the length you wish, then gently twist it until it forms a link.  Once you have a comedic length of sausages that look to be straight from a Punch and Judy show, hang them somewhere cool and dry for half an hour or so, then they’re ready to either chill, or get straight to cooking them.

Traditionally, a bratwurst is simmered for a period before being grilled – this ensures the centre has reached a safe temperature, and helps to avoid the sausages bursting. It also provides an opportunity to infuse further flavour into the sausages, so I like to poach them in beer!  Place them in a large cold pan with enough beer to cover them, and put them on a low heat until the beer is just below boiling point, then remove from the poaching liquor and allow to dry slightly.  After poaching they will be safe to store in a fridge for up to a week, or for a good few months in a freezer, or you can now put the sausages straight under the grill, into a frying pan, or, for preference, onto a BBQ.  Cook until the skin is golden and crisp, and serve in a crusty roll with sauerkraut, mustard, and of course more beer! We recommend a stein. Or as an easy snack, mix some curry powder and a little dash of vinegar in with some ketchup to make your own quick currywurst.

Let us know if you give either of the above recipes a try, or if you think there’s another pairing we shouldn’t miss!

Prost!

Team Abbeydale

May 29th-June 4th is National BBQ Week, and so we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to put together a few pairings with some of our tasty beers!

For the grillmaster – Heresy! For a crisp and quaffable beer to enjoy whilst you fire up the BBQ, you can’t go wrong with our lager. Clean and refreshing with a gentle sweetness and low bitterness, just right for working up an appetite!

Cheeseburger and Heathen – our all American hopped pale ale deserves an absolute classic of the grill to go with it, and what is a BBQ without a juicy cheeseburger?! With a pleasing bitterness and assertive hop character to contrast with the salty, savoury burger and cut through the char, and just enough sweetness to provide balance to whichever pickles or relishes you’ve added atop! We recommend a brioche bun to add just that finishing touch of sweetness.

Veggie skewers and Deception – for lighter options which are less rich and fatty than their BBQ counterparts, we recommend keeping it clean and simple with a gentle pale ale like our Nelson Sauvin hopped New Zealand pale ale, Deception. This won’t overpower the more delicate flavour of the grilled vegetables, but will work well whether you’ve got crunchy and sweet peppers or corn, whilst also being zingy enough to pair well with more earthy mushrooms or griddled aubergines.

BBQ ribs and Splendour – our zesty, orange infused dry hopped pale ale is just the citrussy sensation you need to complement some sticky, slow-cooked, BBQ ribs!

But really, when it comes to beer and food pairing, our best advice overall would be – there’s so much potential and no real right or wrong answers, so don’t be afraid to have fun and experiment.

Let us know what combinations you put together this National BBQ Week!

PS – we’ve helpfully put all of the above beers in a special “BBQ Box” on our online shop – a mixed case of 12 designed to make the beery bit of your party planning a breeze! Cheers!

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!