The Cottage Cookbook team headed down to Kelham Island yesterday to sample a few beers at the Steel City Beer & Cider festival.
With over 250 beers and 50 ciders to try, choosing which tipple to sample next can be quite overwhelming. With so much on offer you need to plan your purchases wisely as even the biggest drinkers out there will only be skimming the surface of all the liquid goodness on offer here. Luckily all the drinks can be purchased in 3rds, so you can maximise your tasting abilities before potentially falling over. Paying the extra 50p for the programme on entry is a good idea, as the tasting notes help you to find out exactly what is on tap and where you can find it. The beers are also colour coded according to type, so it is quite easy to identify all the pale, ruby and stout beers by their signs at the bar. My preference was for the light green markers, as these denoted specialty beers, which offer your palate something a bit different to the norm.
The festival is sprawled over the various buildings and outdoor areas of Kelham Island industrial museum. There is a large marquee in the courtyard, a keykeg bar and an upper hall, where live music is performed in the evenings. It is worth wandering around the site to see all the festival has to offer, as there are stalls selling street food and brewery memorabilia. The Millowners Arms pub is also on site, where Bradfield Brewery are selling a selection of their cask ales.
The KeyKeg bar in the Brearley room had a good selection of keg beers on from breweries including Abbeydale, Saint Mars of the Desert, Left Handed Giant & Wander Beyond. Lost Industry’s Praline Stout had already sold out by Thursday afternoon, so I opted for a Cherry Tonkoko from Brew York. It was probably not wise to start with a 9.5% stout, but having drank the original Tonkoko before, I did not want to miss the chance to sample the cherry edition.
We then took time to wolf down a wood-fired margherita from the Sunshine pizza van. There is quite a selection of food available at the festival including bratwurst, burgers and burritos. Kevins Pies were upstairs with some impressive looking sausage rolls and Oddfellows chocolate had a stall selling a range of sweet delights including scorpion death chocolate.
The bars in the marquee and the upper hall display the beers in alphabetical order by brewery name. This means you have a good chance of hunting down any beer you discover in the programme. The cider bar is also upstairs in the upper hall next to the bottle bar that sells a selection of world beers. You pay for your drinks with vouchers that you purchase from a stall in the marquee. Fortunately, your entry fee includes £5 worth of beer tokens, so you can recoup some of your initial costs. Your beer glass is also refundable and worth £2 if you remember to hand it in on your way out.
We did not visit the River Don steam engine this year, but it is worth a gander if you have not been to the Kelham Island museum before. The engine is operated at set times during the festival and is located in the engine room near the far end of the marquee.
The beers that we tried varied in brilliance, but we managed to get quite a few scored on Untapped (a beer rating app for certified beer geeks). One of the beers we both enjoyed was the sour by Top Rope brewery called Mega Sours: Macho (Raspberry). At only 3.7% it proved that beer does not need to be strong to be packed full of flavour. Other highlights included Chin Chin’s Dead Disco stout, with touches of chilli & chocolate and a 12% bourbon aged imperial stout called Necessary Evil by Thornbridge.
The festival is running until the 19th of October 2019, so there is still time to go down there and see the range of beers for yourselves. We have tried such a small percentage of the available brews, we may have been tempted to return…. But we don’t think our livers would appreciate it!
More details can be found here: steelcitybeerfestival.co.uk Â
@sheffbeerfest
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