The Sheffield Beer City Report, first published in 2016, is now being revisited, revised and updated, to be launched at the 2024 Sheffield Beer Week.
The report will once again be written by award-winning, Barnsley-born beer writer Pete Brown, and has again been commissioned by Professor Vanessa Toulmin, Director of City, Culture and Public Engagement at the University of Sheffield. Jules Gray, founder and director of Sheffield Beer Week and owner of Hop Hideout, completes the team behind the report.
“The first report had a huge impact on how Sheffield is seen, particularly in terms of the Visitor Economy,” said Professor Toulmin. “But the numbers in it are now nearly eight years out of date. It’s clear that the report is valuable, so we have to have an updated version.”
“A great deal has happened in the beer world since 2016,” said Pete Brown. “Sheffield is still a great city to drink beer in, but like everywhere else, brewing and hospitality have been hit by Covid and the cost-of-living crisis. Some brewers have closed, but other new ones have opened. I get the sense that the Sheffield beer scene is actually more interesting and diverse than it was, even more of an attraction to the city and the region than it was in 2016, but I’m very keen to put some numbers on that and dig deeper.”
The team will be exploring the Sheffield beer scene at this week’s Steel City Beer and Cider Festival, held at the Kelham Island Museum from Wednesday 18th to Saturday 21st October. They’ll then be gathering data from brewers to produce an up-to-date snapshot of current activity and trends, and exploring deeper themes including the role of brewing in the regeneration of parts of the city, and the increasing role of women in the industry.
The 2016 Sheffield Beer City report found that:
- The Sheffield city region could claim the title of birthplace of the UK craft beer revolution.
- Sheffield had one brewery for every 23,991 people – 4.7 times more brewers per capita than Greater London.
- On a typical day 400 different unique beers were available in the city’s pubs.
- The city region’s breweries turn out over 1,000 different beers each year.
As well as the report, in 2024 there’ll also be a series of podcasts and other online materials that will dive deeper into some of the issues explored in the report.
The report will be launched at the next Sheffield Beer Week, which will be taking place from 4 to 10 March 2024.
Really looking forward to it. The stats are great.
No doubt Sheffield is an amazing place for beer, that’s speaking as as a Lancastrian who lived there for a few years in the early 2000s. And genuinely not wishing to start a beery war of the roses, it would be interesting to compare the metrics with Manchester’s; the other great contemporary northern beer town. Breweries, pumps, beers available etc.
Equally the pro rata stat is also interesting . Kendal for example with a population of nearly 30,000 and 4 breweries has one for every 7,400 people.