Author: abbeydale.admin

Just in time for the Christmas rush, we’ve taken delivery of a shiny new cask washer! Not only is it faster than our old equipment, increasing our packaging capabilities, but it’s more efficient, uses less water and safer chemicals, and is therefore more environmentally friendly too.

Yesterday a total of 112 brewer’s barrels of beer was racked into cask and keg – that’s the equivalent of a MASSIVE 32,256 pints and means our lads lifted approximately 21 tonnes of beer between them.

We’re soon to commission an equally shiny new keg washing and filling machine too, a much needed investment to increase our efficiencies and keep up with the growing demand for our delicious keg beer.

Safe to say our brewteam have definitely earned a pint this weekend!

Cheers!

Well that’s it folks, winter is most certainly on it’s way! Whilst we’re busily rustling up some seasonal brews to help get you through the colder months, here’s our pick of where to drink them in five great places around Sheffield to stay snug throughout Autumn and Winter…

The Rising Sun

Our very own pub, the Rising Sun, is the perfect venue for a delicious Sunday dinner or following a brisk and breezy walk out in the countryside. A real community pub, a warm welcome is guaranteed all year round, but in the colder months there’s also a roaring fire to warm your cockles around! 12 real ales are on offer, which always includes a great variety of our cask regulars and specials alike, plus lagers, ciders, keg beer and a carefully curated range of wines and spirits. Food is available all day, and the new seasonal menu focuses on hearty pub classics with a modern twist.

The Itchy Pig

A little gem of a micropub located in popular student area Broomhill. Landlord Ted and his team of lovely staff really know their stuff when it comes to beer, and this place prides itself on offering an ever-changing selection of keg and cask beer (very often including our seasonal specials!) as well as a cracking range of gins. As an aside, there’s also an excellent pork scratching selection (we recommend the Pig of Doom)!

(Photo credit: James Vanderhoven)

The Fat Cat

Run by our friends over at Kelham Island Brewery and widely regarded as one of the pioneers of Sheffield’s beer scene. Another pub with a proper fire, the snug side room is truly cosy and there’s always a lively atmosphere. We can recommend the Monday night quiz and curry too!

Three Stags Heads

Ok, so not strictly in Sheffield this one, but worth the drive out into the stunning Derbyshire countryside. The Stags was our very first customer back in 1996, and still showcases four of our ales, including their very own house brew Black Lurcher, a wonderfully warming, deep and roasty 7.0% stout. A totally unspoilt seventeenth century inn that’s packed full of traditional charm… just make sure your mobile phone stays firmly in your pocket!

Thor’s Tipi Bar

For their second year in Sheffield, Thor’s Tipi Bar will be open in the Peace Gardens from the 22nd November until NYE, bringing Viking inspired Christmas cheer (and plenty of beer) to the city centre. There’ll be a fire pit, fairy lights and furs (faux, of course!), with mulled wine and a hot chocolate station to provide that quintessential festive feeling! Large parties can book in advance now via Thor’s website.

(Photo Credit: Ben Hale Photography)

Over the past few months, you may have noticed that we’ve been releasing some rather intriguing and unexpected brews from our equally intriguingly named Funk Dungeon. Our brewer Jim is the brains behind much of what’s been going on in the slightly creepy space in our cellars, and he’s put this post together to give some insight into where we’re at with the project, with another post to come to let you know what to expect in the future.

A little introduction to the barrels themselves first. The majority of our oak stock is neutral in flavour. Exploring what each different barrel will lend to the end product is something we are excited to investigate as we continue to age our beers. The development of our secondary fermentation culture will be a big part of the project, highlighting healthy fermentation and great flavour. We will be learning as we go and working to repitch into other projects.

Our barrels are stored on racks created by a metal fabricator based just up the road from us. This has allowed us to increase our barrel quantity without taking up too much space. With Sheffield’s rich steel history, local industry is important to us, so we’re proud to have supported small business in this project too.

Anyway, on to the beers. Out in the wild (so to speak!) right now are…

Brett Tangerine Pale (7.3%)

We started off with two barriques of a pale, very lightly hopped wort, which was initially barrel fermented with Sacchromyces Bruxellensis Trois (recently reclassified from a Brettanomyces strain). In primary fermentation this produces a wonderfully orangey flavour. The fermentation took close to 40 days at 12°c, which is the ambient temperature in our cellar. As we sealed the barrels, a dose of Brett Lambicus was added for another 6 months before tasting again. The Brett has really worked it’s magic here and eaten up literally all of the sugar (the final gravity came out at 1000.67) leaving behind a beautifully dry beer. To finish, we dry hopped with Citra and added orange peel to enhance the fruity esters of the yeast as well as adding some sweetness to boost the body, before packaging into kegs. This beer is one of six we’ll be taking to the Eebria Taproom in London this Saturday 11^th November.

Methuselah 2 (8.1%)

For this one we took the first runnings of our core dark beer, Black Mass. It first went into a French oak barrel in August 2016, with the startings of our house culture of Brett and Lacto strains. After a couple of months this was split between a pair of American oak barrels to spread the culture, before being topped up with pre-fermented Black Lurcher (a 7% dark ale) and repitched with additional yeast blends from other barrel fermentation projects. 6 weeks prior to racking into cask, the beer was flavoured with vanilla, cocoa nibs and sour cherries to add some sweetness and round out the flavours better. The result is an 8.1% stout with the wild yeast apparent on the aroma and a fruity palate, where the barrel character has contributed well to the final flavour without any overpowering woodiness. The final pH has come out at 3.92 so whilst it’s not overly sour there’s a fresh tart nature that balances well with the oak character and stout backbone of the original brew. This beer made its first appearance on cask at Salford Independent Beer Festival and went down really well.

Cheers!

BEHOLD our most recent transatlantic collaboration! After visiting Ass Clown Brewing in North Carolina last year, we were absolutely blown away by their astonishingly tasty, culinary inspired beers, dreamed up by head brewer Matt. For his trip back across the pond to visit us here in Sheffield, we really wanted to make the most of his remarkable knowledge and bring the worlds of beer and food together. The result? A bacon and ice cream stout, weighing in at 7.1% ABV.

We got in touch with our good friends at Whirlow Hall Farm Trust, who provided us with 30kg of locally reared, high welfare smoky bacon (according to Matt, using unsmoked bacon results in beer that tastes of hotdogs, not quite what we were aiming for!) which was BBQ’d outside the brewery by our Sales Director and Pitmaster Dan. Dan has long wanted to create a hearty, meaty beer, so this was a bit of a dream come true. 10kg was added to the hopback during the brewday itself, overseen by our brewer Scott who devised the recipe along with Matt, with the remaining 20kg (well, let’s say 19ish… sandwiches may have happened) being used to add it’s delicious smoky flavour during fermentation. The ice cream character is present in scoopfuls, with plenty of vanilla and lactose in the recipe for a velvety, sumptuous mouthfeel.

The incredible artwork has been created by Jake Baggs, who has worked with Ass Clown on a number of projects in the past and has given our collaboration a fun yet slightly subversive image which fits it absolutely perfectly! Here’s a sneak peek at his initial ideas below…

We can also recommend “going the whole hog” and ramping up this ridiculous flavour combination even further! Ted and the team at the Itchy Pig micropub in Broomhill (Sheffield CAMRA’s current Pub of the Month!) hosted us for a fantastic evening of bacon beer ice cream sundaes, using Sheffield’s favourite Our Cow Molly ice cream and complete with salt and vinegar pork scratching dust sprinkled atop the concoction (we’re really not sure why this worked, but trust us, it was epic.

The beer is available now and is absolutely flying out of the brewery. Who ever said pigs can’t fly?!

Cheers!

We are thrilled to announce that we have been selected to take part in Brewdog Collabfest for the second year in a row, following on from the success of last year’s Iced Tea Dead People peach iced tea brew!

Full details of the beer we’ve made with our friends at Brewdog Sheffield this year are still under wraps (although there’s a cheeky clue in the photo!), but get yourself down to any Brewdog bar nationwide between October 20th-22nd to try it! We’ll be hosting a Meet the Team session at the Sheffield bar from 8pm on Friday 20th, so hope to see plenty of you down there.

We’re in some absolutely epic company this year as you can see from the image above – for more information, check out this blog from Brewdog HQ.

Bring it on!

Brewing is full of surprises. Sometimes, things don’t quite go to plan. And sometimes, things go absolutely, totally and catastrophically wrong. One of the main challenges facing a brewer is what to do to correct things when they aren’t quite as expected… luckily, it can be one of the most fun parts too!

A couple of weeks ago, we were brewing our usual Wednesday Moonshine – 30 brewers’ barrels of the stuff, to be precise. We got mashed in, started to run off, and everything was ticking along nicely… until the steam boiler gave up.

Without steam we couldn’t bring our wort up to the boil. Boiling is an absolutely essential part of the brewing process – amongst other things, it sterilises and stabilises the wort, evaporates off unwanted volatiles that can lead to unpleasant aromas, and isomerises the hops which allows them to add their bitterness and temper malt sweetness.

And so we were faced with a decision. Pour almost 5000 litres of wort down the drain, take the hit on wasting a tonne of grain and be short of beer a couple of weeks down the line – or work together, pool our skills and make the best out of a bad situation. Ever the optimists, we chose the latter.

After relieving the local supermarket of literally all of their live yoghurt (containing souring agent lactobrevis), the wort was transferred to a fermenting vessel via the heat exchanger, bringing the temperature down from around 65°C to 41°C. At the same time, we purged with CO2 to reduce the oxygen content of the beer, to limit the risk of the development of butyric acid which gives off a distinct “baby sick” character – not exactly what we were aiming for! In addition to this we transferred with a small amount of lactic acid, which lowered the initial pH to around 4.5, and lactobacillus plantarum to work with the bacteria in the yoghurt to facilitate the souring process.

The following day, with the emergency engineer having tended to the boiler’s every need, we were back up and running and so were able to transfer the (now pH 3.3) wort back into kettle and boil it up to stop the souring process and ensure a sterile environment was retained. Having brewed a gooseberry saison the week before, with sturdier yeast than our house culture (which loses it’s appetite very rapidly at pH values of under 4), we were able to skim off some surplus to pitch into the new sour brew.

It’s worth noting that a year ago, we simply would not have had the knowledge to pull this off and would have had no choice but to throw the beer away. The fact that we were able to salvage this brew (despite having not used this method before, our previous sours being created in the kettle) and make something creative, delicious, and just the kind of beer we all want to drink, is testament to our brewers’ thirst for knowledge and development and the freedom we have here to experiment and have a go! (Although admittedly, we would generally not be encouraged to play around with quite this volume of beer!)

The result of all this? Unbeliever 3! Given that there’s rather a lot of this brew, we’ve taken the decision to split the batch into three to give us more opportunity to experiment with flavours – and our brewers have created some tasty combinations for you to pucker your face around!

Introducing…

Unbeliever 3.1 – a tropical sour with oodles of mango, passionfruit and pineapple.

Unbeliever 3.2 – dry hopped with Sorachi Ace.

And Unbeliever 3.3 – inspired by breakfast! With blueberries, oats and vanilla.

Coming soon – watch this space!

Our charity beer has officially now all SOLD OUT and left the building, and so we are delighted to be able to announce the total monies raised at Sunfest this year!

First up – our Cavendish Cancer Care collaboration brew. We made the biggest batch possible on our brewkit of the deliciously hoppy Triple C, and it’s gone down a treat with pubs as far afield as Newcastle, Coventry and Caernarfon (with plenty being supped in Sheffield too of course!). 10p from every pint sold will be donated straight to the charity – a grand total of £1064. In addition, the Cavendish Cancer Care team were a valuable presence over Sunfest and they raised £939.70 during the festival, from a combination of cake and pork pie sales, the VERY popular tombola (which became almost a competitive sport at times!) and donations from part used beer tickets.

Seven Hills Womens Institute were invited by Cavendish to take over the cake stall for Sunfest Saturday and raised a whopping £600, which will be split equally between Cavendish Cancer Care and Mental Health Action Group Sheffield. Whirlow Hall Farm raised £800 after all costs, to go straight to their charity, Whirlow Hall Farm Trust. And finally, the ever popular Rain Rescue dog show raised £457 on the Sunday of Sunfest, and there were lots of waggy tails on the day, so another great success. Congratulations again to our 2017 Best in Show Champion, Digby!

A huge thank you to all of you who joined us for Sunfest, donated your beer tickets, munched on a hog roast sandwich or a beer brownie, or paraded your pooch in the dog show. And also of course to all of our customers who have had Triple C on their bars in recent weeks.

Keep your eyes peeled for details of further fundraising events later in the year, as our relationship with our official charity partners for 2017, Cavendish Cancer Care, continues!

Cheers,

Laura

As you may have read in our blog post last week, our brewer Jim and myself have recently been over to Barcelona to brew with the team at Instituto de la Cerveza Artesana (ICA), following on from ICA’s trip to us in February where we created our own interpretation of their renowned Encantada beer.

One of the main purposes of our trip was to celebrate this first collaboration, and learn more about the history of Encantada. As part of this, we were honoured to be able to visit the Cova de Can Sadurni, where the original remains of the oldest beer in Europe, the inspiration behind Encantada, were found. We took with us a few litres of our version of the brew, and the limited edition that we have barrel aged here at Abbeydale, for the team working on the excavations to try. I studied history at uni, so the history geek in me was SO excited for this trip!

The cave itself is located in the picturesque mountain municipality of Begues, about a 40 minute drive from the centre of Barcelona. The journey there was beautiful, (if a little hairy at times, not the widest of roads!) winding up through the mountains with stunning sea views and Barcelona city stretching out behind us. There was a short walk up to the cave once at the site, where we did some foraging for the berries that go into the beer!

The site is managed by Archaeological Collective CIPAG, who have worked at the site since 1978. Since then, they have found over 30,000 fragments of prehistoric material at the cave, including numerous human burials and the vessel which the oldest evidence of fermentation was found upon, which we were actually allowed to hold (inner history geek in massive overdrive at this point!). The cave is absolutely awe-inspiring, cool and silent in contrast to the raging heat outside, and it sounds clichéd but you can really feel the impact of the passage of time in there. This year’s dig was imminent when we visited so the whole team, led by Manel and Pablo, had transformed the cave into a hive of reverent activity. We’ll definitely be watching out keenly for what they discover this year!

Our own version of Encantada went down well with the team – we were very pleased (and a tad relieved!) to discover that they felt we’d done their beer justice. Although the main batch of our Encantada is now sold out, we snuck some away into barrels back in March – the first of which was put into keg and sent to Abirradero – but the rest is still ageing in a variety of wood with carefully selected additions in each one. Look out for these super special releases coming later in the year!

Cheers!

Laura

Remember back in February when the team from Instituto de la Cerveza Artesana (ICA) and craft beer bar Abirradero in Barcelona came over to brew the absolutely delicious Encantada with us?

Well… myself and our brewer Jim have just made the trip over to Spain for the return leg of the collaboration, including hosting a Meet the Brewer in Abirradero, showcasing four of our beers!

This will be the first of three posts from our visit, focusing on the event itself. Look out in a couple of weeks for loads more info on a very special trip we were lucky enough to be able to take to learn more about the history of Encantada, and also of course for details of the beer we have made with ICA.

Abirradero opened in 2015 as one of the instigators of the Barcelona craft beer scene. The emphasis at Abirradero falls keenly on gastronomy, and a commitment to flavour in everything they do… they even make their own sodas! Well over half of the 40 taps that line the bar are dedicated to their own beers brewed just 10m down the street at ICA, with styles ranging from a seaweed gose to an imperial ice cream stout. The menu is similarly wide-ranging, with flavour and innovation always being right at the forefront. Many of the dishes incorporate beer too, including Encantada battered calamari! We were lucky enough to make our way through most of the menu during our few days there, and seriously cannot recommend the bar enough for both beer and food… everything was exceptional.

Onto the event! We sent four different kegs of our beer along with cases of Heathen and Voyager cans, in our first ever international export, so it was already a really big moment for us. Our Encantada, of course, made the trip (as did a very special one off keg of barrel aged Encantada), along with plum porter Salvation 3 and Voyager 3 IPA, hopped with Galaxy, Lemon Drop and Centennial.

Having covered the bar in Abbeydale merch and decked out the staff in Moonshine t-shirts, we were ready to kick off the event. There was a great turnout and loads of interest in what we do as a brewery. The fame of ICA’s Encantada in Barcelona meant that many people were keen to try the “new” Encantada all the way from Sheffield, and from there we were happy to persuade them to sample our other brews… we even managed to convince a Guinness drinker to try a Salvation 3 (and are happy to say he enjoyed it)! Our beers were all met with a great reception from the locals, and a Sheffielder even turned up!

We were particularly honoured to have been introduced to special guest Manel, head archaeologist for CIPAG and the Cova de Can Sadurni, the site where the oldest remains of beer ever found in Europe and which inspired ICA’s Encantada was discovered… more on that in our post next week.

A huge thank you to the team at ICA and Abirradero for inviting us to showcase our beers internationally for the first time ever, and for being such fantastic hosts.  We had the best time!

Cheers!

Laura