Sheffield Beer Week (SBW) 2025 kicks off on Monday 10th March, with venues around the city hosting a cornucopia of beer related events for the enjoyment of locals and tourists alike. It’s hard to believe that SBW only began in 2015 when it has become such a firm fixture for beer drinkers in the Steel City. Speaking to Jules Gray, the owner of Hop Hideout and the force behind SBW, it’s obvious what has made this event resonate so well with the city of Sheffield and its people "I’m just grateful for anyone who wants to get involved… but it is organic participation. The first year we did it we only had about 10 venues, now it’s over 30… but it’s not prescriptive. I’ve never wanted it to be like that, it’s for the community, by the community”.
For the community, by the community, Sheffield can really get behind that. The culture of the steel city is forged by decades of collective action and community response to hardship. 19th century, close, terraced housing built for factory workers fostered tight knit communities where people learned to rely on each other for things like communal childcare and ingrained an ethos of ‘what we have, we share’. That community spirit has served the city well through World War 2 bombing campaigns, devastating floods, and even Margaret Thatcher. There are 2 ways to respond to hardship, to close ranks and look after yourself, or to stand in solidarity with your fellow man, come what may. Sheffield has always chosen the latter. Jules’ response when I ask about whether it was hard for her to find the motivation to persevere with SBW after the pandemic in 2020 epitomises this. “I just felt in my stomach and in my heart….I just felt deep down that I had to try and support people. I was trying to condense (and share) all of the confusing information going around, and just trying to put positive messages out there too…I was emailing venues to check up on people…I do appreciate some people went the other way because they just felt like they had to just look after themselves. But for me, that wasn’t the right decision, for me it was about helping everybody else because we were all in it together”.
There’s a fallacy in both the beer and wider hospitality industry that a new venue opening nearby, could be a threat to an older existing venue's viability. Often, this couldn’t be further from the truth, as Jules says “you need more than a handful of venues in one place to become a trail, or to become a destination where people will make the effort to travel to you”. People’s drinking habits have changed, gone are the days where people sit in the same pub all night, modern drinkers like a ‘pub crawl’. This is especially apparent here at The Crow, we’re an ideal launch pad for a pub crawl into Kelham Island, and we’re lucky to have fostered a relationship with other nearby independent venues such as The Kelham Island Tavern and The Shakespeares where we all communicate and help each other out when needed. We all understand what is at stake here. Pubs are closing at mind boggling rates and the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.
Jules states this mentality as a large part of her motivation for starting up Sheffield Beer Week “when I started (SBW)....to be honest, I felt Sheffield had a great beer scene but people didn't really seem like they talked to each other very often, you’d go to other cities and there were lots of collab brews and joint events, but Sheffield felt silent, like you never saw any cross collaboration between breweries and venues, and I thought that was a real shame….so that’s what it (SBW) is all about, fostering community across people in the trade, but also the people you meet across the bar in the pub. You get to know them and all of a sudden people become regulars, people become friends”
Despite the name, Sheffield Beer Week is about so much more than just beer. Whilst pairing events and takeovers with high profile breweries are at the forefront of SBW, beer is put in a position where it is able to reach its fullest potential, that of a conduit. A conduit for conversation with both friends and strangers, and for supporting local independent businesses which have been at the heart of our communities for decades and in some cases centuries. Jules is aware of just how important this is. “We've got pubs that have been around for 100s of years, think of all the people that have passed through them, the stories they have to tell…. There are always connections to the history of a place and its pubs”. Sheffield even owes its title of “the home of football” to a pub landlord. The oldest football ground in the world, Sandygate in Crosspool, owes its location to the owner of the Plough Inn who allowed a newly formed cricket club, Hallam, to play on the field he owned adjacent to the pub. Hallam FC were then formed in 1860 and played the first game of football between two organised teams, against Sheffield FC, at Sandygate on Boxing Day 1860.
Sheffield Beer Week is an opportunity for us to celebrate our city, a city which is proud to support a plethora of independent pubs, breweries and shops which few other places can boast. It’s an opportunity to make new friends, form communities, and in doing so forge a new history. So here’s to Sheffield, a city of full pint pots and even fuller hearts.
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