Steel City Brewing is a new brewing company with a very new world outlook on life! Rather than buying our own brewery - with all the associated cost and hassle that entails - we have decided, initially at least, to become what's known in Europe as a "Cuckoo" brewery as we're going to be using the brewplants of some of Sheffield's best Craft Brewers such as Little Ale Cart and the Brew Company. This will allow us to benefit from their experience and knowledge of craft brewing and combine this with our desire to make exceptional beer! We both love hops and dislike crystal malt so the majority of our beers will be pale and hoppy or, in our opinion, part of a growing UK style which we call "Mid-Atlantic"; I admit the name may appear a little out of date owing to the quality hops from New Zealand but I think it's a fair enough analogy as it's based more on style than the source of the hops involved. In our opinion the style is a crossover between American pale ales and UK pale ales in that it borrows the hopping rates, techniques, attitude and (usually) hop varieties of the States whilst leaving out all that horrible Caramel, Crystal, Victory and Rye malt they add to their hoppy beers for a reason I can only guess to be trying to achieve balance between the malt and hop. “Mid-Atlantic” combines the UK's growing love of extremely pale beer with the American ethic of large-scale hopping and, in doing so, has created a style of beer which is easy to drink, full of hop flavour uncluttered by dark malts and importantly in these image-obsessed times a delight to behold atop a bar. It's becoming extremely popular in the UK at the expense of old-fashioned “brown bitter” and, in our experience, is rarely to be found outside of these Islands and thus we can legitimately claim it to be a new style of beer, one we have invented, and one of which we should be justifiably proud. Read more about it here. Our beers will, at first, be brewed under our host's license and so will be, for tax reasons, their beers although we promise categorically that we will always devise the recipes - or translate old ones - and physically brew our own beers (we do the hard work but the host brewer technically brews the beer for duty reasons) as we are both in this for the challenge of making a thing of beauty and not the money! We are now in the process of setting up our own company whereupon, although the beers will still be crafted in Sheffield at our host breweries, they will be sold under our own company name in our own casks and brewed under our own license. Why not just set up our own brewery? Well, both of us have "proper" jobs and, whilst we basically live and breathe beer, neither of us are ready to take that plunge just yet so this opportunity seems like an ideal way for us to dip a toe into the market, see how things go, and in a few months' time decide what we want to do. Neither of us are new to the beer scene, Dave having been brewer at the award-winning Moor brewery in Somerset whilst Gazza has worked with various brewmasters over the years as well as having been a cellarman and head barman in a number of pubs, so we know how much hard work this entails and aren't going into it blindfold. So, what's the reason behind setting up this brewing company? Basically we are both huge fans of hops and there just aren't enough brewers in the UK using them and even fewer using anywhere near the amount we'd like to see (and taste!) so, rather than moaning into our beer, we thought we'd do something about it and brew some of our own! For a full definition of what we intend to do see our Philosophy page or Info Sheet, but to summarise we shall be experimenting with brewing techniques and hops to try and produce beers that we ourselves want to drink... and, as we are both notoriously difficult to please beer-wise, to brew beers that we enjoy would be an achievement in itself! We now have a "mini-kit" to enable us to play around even more by brewing a different 10-gallon batch at the same time as the main brew is happening; we will be using this small kit to produce some unusual and stronger brews and to test out experiments to see if they work before we commit to a full brewlength!