Author: abbeydale.admin

We’re incredibly excited to share the news that we’ve been shortlisted in TWO categories at this year’s Brewers Choice Awards!

Firstly, we’re absolutely delighted to be up for Brewery of the Year, a huge honour as we head closer towards marking our first full year of employee ownership. We know we’ve got something special and unique here, reflected not just across our wonderful team but also in company growth, and to see that recognised is as humbling as it is rewarding.

And our treasured Black IPA, Black Mass, has been shortlisted for Beer of the Year too! Timeless, tasty, arguably unfashionable yet oozing its own sense of cool, it’s been part of our history since we first began and is a beer we’re incredibly proud of. Fun fact: our CAMRA brewery liaison officer Dave tells us it’s the only entry in the entirety of the Good Beer Guide which has its ABV specified to two decimal places (hey, that 6.66% is important!). Both categories look to be incredibly hotly contested with some absolutely fantastic breweries and beers in the mix – you can view the full shortlist here.

This is the third time we’ve had the privilege of being shortlisted for the Brewers Choice Awards, and we’re also really excited to find out who will be taking over our Jim’s title as Brewer of the Year, having brought home the prestigious glass tankard in 2024.

Organised by the team behind industry magazine The Brewers Journal, this year’s submissions were judged by a wealth of talent that included Lotte Peplow, Europe’s craft beer ambassador for the Brewers Association, Brew Resourceful founder Chris Lewington, Stuart Anderson (founder of one of London’s premier beer retailers Ghost Whale) and Alex Greig, the owner of the fantastic Fuggles Beer Cafe in Tunbridge Wells and Tonbridge. Tim Sheahan, editor of The Brewers Journal, chaired the judging session. The 2025 Brewers Choice Awards will be presented at a ceremony in London on the evening of 30th September. Wish us luck!

Cheers!

Team Abbeydale

Due to the growth of our business, we are on the lookout for a full time Brewery Operative to join our team!

The role is very hands-on and quite varied. The successful candidate will support our brewing and packaging processes to keep our busy brewery running smoothly from the ground up.

Key tasks will involve:

• Cask washing
• Packaging beer – cask, keg, can and bottle
• Warehouse work – regularly handling weights of 25kg+
• Preparing orders for dispatch
• Loading and unloading deliveries of raw materials and finished products – as such, a clean driving license and forklift truck license would be of benefit
• Utilising our in-house systems to accurately record all completed tasks
• Maintaining impeccable levels of cleanliness and hygiene across the brewery, including following health and safety and food safety procedures at all times

Please note this is not a brewing role, however you will be regularly working alongside our production team. Previous experience in food production/manufacturing would be an advantage, but is not essential as full training will be provided.

We are an employee owned company, so working with us means you will have a real say in how the business is run and play a meaningful part in its future. We are flexible and supportive employers who take great pride in training and developing our team. We recently won the Employer of the Year category at the 2025 SIBA Business Awards too!

Usual working hours are Monday to Friday (either 8am-4pm, or 9am-5pm), and evening and weekend work may also be offered at times.

Salary £25k / annum plus staff discount across the business (including at our pub, The Rising Sun), future potential for profit share and the opportunity to join a growing and progressive company which holds community, quality and above all its people at heart.  

If it sounds like you could be the reliable, diligent and proactive team player we are looking for, please send a CV with references and covering letter to marketing@abbeydalebrewery.co.uk with the subject “Brewery Operative application” by the closing date of Sunday 31^st August.

You are welcome to email us or call 0114 2812712 if you have any queries.

Cheers!

Team Abbeydale

The latest in our acclaimed Travel Poster inspired series of collaboration beers is out now… and you might just recognise our visitor to the brewhouse! We’ve recently welcomed Loch Lomond Brewery to create something delicious with us, and their Lead Brewer, Scott Murray, made the long journey to represent Scotland right here in Sheffield. If you’re thinking Scott looks familiar, that’s because he was once part of our brewteam too – so it was wonderful to invite him back and spend the day catching up as well as making a beer together.

Introducing Live, Laugh, Loch Lomond! A 4.2% single hopped pale made in the spirit of friendship, bursting with good vibes and just a touch of whimsy. A light biscuity base meets uniquely flavourful Krush hops to create a fruity little number with a luscious impact. A tropical aroma translates on the palate to bright and breezy notes of mango and pineapple, with a thirst-quenching finish. Available in cask only, celebrating not just the spirit of collaboration and community but our wonderful pubs too.

This brew follows on from our Dan making the journey up to bonnie Scotland a couple of months ago, where the “away” leg of our collaboration resulted in the release of Rubus Black – a Cranachan Porter weighing in at 6%. This one can’t be bought from us directly (although members of our subscription box club will have found one in this month’s box!) but you can pick cans up from Loch Lomond’s online shop here. Rich and decadent, delicious oaty and infused with the tart sweetness of real Scottish raspberries. Some of this tasty treat is still quietly resting in an ex-Oloroso sherry barrel too… be sure to follow Loch Lomond to find out when this will be making an appearance!

Cheers!

Team Abbeydale

Beer festival season is well and truly in full swing, and next weekend we’ve got beer at no less than 5 fantastic events around the North of England!

First up is CAMRA’s Chorlton Beer & Cider Festival, which kicks off on Thursday 3^rd July and is held in the gorgeous surroundings of St Clement’s Church. Absolutely loads of beers to choose from including a wide selection of our own.

The absolutely stunning historic Merchant Adventurer’s Hall in the centre of York is playing host to a charity beer festival, with a fantastic list of cask and keg beer curated by our friends at Brew York, on Friday 4^th and Saturday 5^th July. A truly unique setting to enjoy a few pints! Over 70 beers will be available, including both a cask and keg from ourselves. Tickets are available here (at the time of writing, the Saturday afternoon session was already sold out, so don’t hang around if you’re keen to attend!).

And also on Saturday 5^th July, our pop up bar is going on tour to Roosters Brewery near Harrogate, where you’ll find our Robin and Sam slinging pints at Suds With Buds. It’s our first time pouring here and we absolutely can’t wait! The brewery line up looks absolutely sensational, and we’ll have four beers available including our beloved Moonshine, and our collaboration with Roosters themselves, Heading into Harrogate, on the bar. Plus there’s a great selection of street food on offer and some fab live music throughout the day too. Find out more and get your tickets here.

This one isn’t a festival, but a fantastic event nonetheless – community pub, The Fox & Goose in Hebden Bridge, is celebrating the UN International Year of Co-Operatives, and has chosen to showcase our Employee Owned brewery as a part of it! From 12-5pm on Sunday 6th July they’re hosting an afternoon of informal talks, music and pizza which includes a tap takeover featuring a whopping ten of our beers!

Finally, for something a little bit different (and ok this one isn’t quite in what we might call “the North”!), Moonshine and Discover Ossett are the beers of choice at The Gate to Southwell folk and acoustic music festival, a volunteer run event in beautiful rural Nottinghamshire.

Hope to see you at one of the above – please do tag us in your festival snaps to let us know where you’ve found our beers! You can find us on Instagram @abbeydalebeers.

Team Abbeydale

Rejoice! As we start to work towards our 30^th anniversary next year, legacy beers from the Abbeydale Brewery archives are being re-released, with a fresh new look.

First up… it’s the return of Holy Water! A much-requested favourite, and now brewed again to the original recipe, which dates back over 20 years. Packing a punch at 6.0% ABV but still wonderfully smooth and well-balanced, made using Willamette, Citra and Centennial hops. Notes of zesty citrus and juicy nectarine are backed up by delicately sweet orchard fruits, followed up with a gentle yet lingering bitterness. It’s an Abbeydale classic!

We know of many of our early regulars who have fond memories of this beer, so we hope to bring back a little nostalgia as well as welcome Holy Water to a new audience too. Holy Water could be thought of as a precursor of the IPAs we make today – stronger than our pale ale specials, and more heavily hopped too, it was originally created to be a more potent version of Moonshine (but not quite to the same extent as Last Rites, of course!). Typically, Holy Water would find an annual spot in the brew plan (including one brew on Valentines Day 2007 which we’ve hunted out in our archives – very fitting for this much loved beer!), but this release marks its first appearance since 2014.

Holy Water was also one of the first beers in which we trialled dry hopping – a small number of casks would be set aside from each brew, and different hops added directly to each. Back in 2008, Pat said of this exercise “I intend to continue these experiments but I think they will always be outside the mainstream of our work.” How things change!

The artwork has been reimagined by our designer James Murphy, and is intended to pay homage to – and sit beautifully alongside – our classic core range. It marks the first of a small series of legacy beers that have meant a lot to us throughout our history, which will be released as limited edition batches in the run up to our milestone 30^th birthday next year. Brimstone and Matins are also in the pipeline to join this historical line up, and we’d love to hear if there are any other beers from our back catalogue which stir up a strong sense of reminiscence for you!

Holy Water is available in cask (of course) right now, and for the first time ever you will soon be able to enjoy it in keg and can (including from our online shop) too – we’re currently taking pre-orders, and expect these to ship during the week commencing 14th April.

If you’re a trade customer who’s interested in becoming a stockist, please give us a call on 0114 2812712 if you’d like a cask or keg for your venue. 

Cheers!

Team Abbeydale

We are absolutely delighted, humbled and proud to share the fantastic news that we have been named the Employer of the Year! This accolade celebrates our pioneering transition to becoming 100% employee owned in 2024, recognising the commitment made by founders and selling owners Pat and Sue Morton to ensure a true legacy of independence and cement our people right at the very heart of the business.  

Earlier this week some of the team, including our Employee Reps Christie and Fin, headed over to Liverpool for Beer X, the UK’s largest beer and brewing trade event, where the SIBA Business Awards were held. These Awards aim to highlight the UK’s very best brewing businesses, pubs and retailers of independent beer, in an annual celebration known as the “Oscars of the beer industry” and judged by a panel of industry experts. We were thrilled to have made the shortlist and National Finals amongst some incredible company (more on that here), and to come home with a win was really the cherry on top.

The awards were hosted by Sunday Times Beer Columnist and acclaimed author and broadcaster Pete Brown, who said of our award “the judging panel were unanimous in their praise for Abbeydale who this year were trailblazers in the UK as the first employee-owned brewery, building a future for this much-loved brewery whilst giving back to the team who built it.”

Brewery Rep Christie took the opportunity whilst collecting our beautiful shiny new trophy to say thank you to Pat and Sue for their leadership and their trust in the team which has got us to where we are today – he speaks for us all in saying this award is for them.

Cheers!

Team Abbeydale

We’re thrilled to share the news that we have been shortlisted as finalists for three awards across two nationwide competitions, with the results due to be announced next week.

Firstly, we’re incredibly proud to announce that in our first year of being 100% employee owned, we’ve been named as finalists in the Employer of the Year category in the SIBA Business Awards. As the first brewery in the UK to move to becoming an Employee Ownership Trust, this demonstrates a genuine commitment towards ensuring a true legacy of independence and puts our wonderful team right at the very heart of the business.  

Also in the Business Awards, our beautiful Travel Poster series is up for Best Concept Design. Congratulations to our designer James for creating such a stand-out series – there’s so much hard work and research that goes into each and every design, and it’s great to see that recognised. You can read more about this range here.

The SIBA Business Awards will be held next Wednesday at Beer X, the UK’s largest beer and brewing trade event. Referred to as “the Oscars of the beer industry”, Neil Walker, SIBA Head of Comms & Marketing, said of the awards; “I can speak on behalf of the entire judging panel to honestly say this was the hardest judging year yet, with a really incredibly high level of entries across the board.” So it is a huge honour to have made the shortlist in two very strong categories – we’re up against some absolutely fantastic fellow breweries and are looking forward to celebrating with them, whatever the outcome. The awards will be hosted by Sunday Times Beer Columnist and acclaimed author and broadcaster, Pete Brown.

And in the Independent Beer Awards, taking place next Thursday, our Black IPA Black Mass has made the national finals, having come out on top in the Speciality IPA round of the North East regional bottle & can awards for the third year in a row!  These awards see beers marked against internationally recognised style guides, looking at appearance, aroma, flavour, aftertaste and saleability. The judging panel is made up of fellow brewers and some of the country’s best beer experts, who blind taste every entry. Black Mass is a beer which has been with us for our entire history as a brewery, so it’s one that’s pretty special to us. We can’t wait to find out how it gets on next week.

Wish us luck!

Cheers,

Team Abbeydale

Our much acclaimed Dark Mild is back… and it only took us 11 months this time, rather than the DECADE we waited previously! So we thought it was worth sharing the history of this deliciously humble beer again. From the archives, here’s the story of this particular Restoration. Alternative titles suggested by the team for bringing it back for a sequel included “Mamma Mild, Here We Go Again”, “2 Mild 2 Furious”, “The Mild Strikes Back”, “Mild Reloaded” and “Breath of the Mild: Beers of the Kingdom”.

This post was originally published on 1st April 2024.

We’ve been having a mild disagreement. You’ll have to excuse the puns – we’ve been working on them for some time.

We last had a mild available in early summer 2014. Dr Morton’s The Wrong Stuff, as it was cruelly named, was a bit of an experiment for us at the time – a somewhat controversial style with a fusty reputation, and a hard sell. But the times they are a’changing after all, and mild is finally having its day – a revival, a resurgence, a renaissance. We’ve formed two distinct “camps” amongst Team Abbeydale, one side hankering after that smooth, sweet nectar served in a dimpled glass, donning our flat caps and kicking up a grass roots movement for mild, evoking charming pubs of yore with a roaring fire and horse brass galore… and on the other side, the sales team, still traumatised by their past memories of a beer that outstayed its welcome.

The pro-mild side of the fence has finally got their way. And almost a full decade later, or 3,577 days to be precise, a Mild is back on our availability list.

Introducing Dark Mild, from our Restoration series, brewed using entirely UK grown ingredients. Characterised by a smooth, malt-driven sweetness, balanced by a touch of roast character and hints of coffee. The ultimate British hop, the unsung hero that is Fuggles, were added to our beloved hopback. These delicate hops provide a grassy character and a gentle bitterness in keeping with the traditions of this historic style, with a finish that invites you straight back for more. It’s classic, comforting, rounded and mellow. 4.0% ABV, vegan and gluten free. Anyone else thirsty?!

Mild at heart or mildly perturbed – which side are you on?! We’d love you to let us know. Dark Mild launches TODAY, April 1^st (and no, it isn’t an April Fools), – cans are available from independent retailers, including from our online shop, or give us a call on 0114 2812712 if you’d like a cask for your venue. Our sales team are still mildly unconvinced (I’m nearly done, I promise), and I’d love you to help me prove them wrong! [*Edited to add on 01/04/24 at 12.37 – cask all gone, thank you Mild Things!]

Cheers!

Laura – A Mildly Delighted Marketing Manager

PS – Such has been my yearning for a mild that I first started writing notes for this blog post in February 2021. Once it was (a little reluctantly) agreed that this beer could be added to the plan, we came to officially give it a place it on our recipe database. A list of beer styles is pre-populated for us to choose from… and out of 43 in total ranging from imperial stout to gruit, there was no option for mild! Consider this heinous oversight officially rectified. The mild comeback is well and truly on.

We’re very excited to announce that for the first time, we will have our very own brewery bar at the Great British Beer Festival – Winter edition, taking place at Magna in Rotherham from Wednesday 12^th – Saturday 15^th February! We’ll have a great selection of beers across both cask and keg on the bar, including Deliverance IPA (one of our highest rated beers of all time!), Last Rites Barley Wine, and of course, plenty of Moonshine!

It’s the debut for our shiny new events bar, which we’ve had specially commissioned to ensure we can look our best when pouring at events such as this. It’s super snazzy and we can’t wait to pull some pints from it!

In addition, we’re taking over the CAMRA Discovery Bar on Saturday 15^th. Come along to hear from Team Abbeydale about our long-standing love of hops, and how we have been at the forefront of hop usage and development for the last three decades. We’re incredibly proud of the diverse range we’re bringing along for this bar, all of which say something different about our brewery and the hops we use. From Black Mass, a beer we believe to be one of the world’s first and longest standing Black IPAs, to a 3.9% pale ale from our Through the Hopback series featuring UK grown Ernest hops, and samples of our alcohol free Nelson Sauvin Sparkling Hop Water too! Plus, we’ll have a selection of hops for you to be able to experience our ingredients in their purest form.

The team from the brewery and our pub, The Rising Sun, will be around on our bars all week to chat about our beers and our new status as Co-Owners of the business.

Of course, there’s beer from a huge range of breweries from all around the UK too (you can find the full beer list here), as well as an international bar and a dedicated Champion Winter Beer of Britain bar too where you can head to sample all the nominees and winners!

Tickets are available here, buying in advance gets you a little discount and the ability to beat the queues, or you can pay on the door too. The ticket price includes your souvenir festival glass, and all the entertainment of the event too – there’s some fantastic live music lined up! We really hope to see you there!