Black Sheep

For all the team are well versed in this acceptable range of flavour and condition, Senior Brewer and taste test facilitator, Alex Brandon-Davies, is wonderfully welcoming and egalitarian in the approach he takes to us newcomers. Clipboard at the ready, he begins by saying “as new members of our tasting panel you need to know what we’re scoring here. We score for haze, out of four, condition, out of seven, and an overall subjective score, also out of seven– anything below a four is a fail, nothing ever gets a full seven, six is very good– and then we'll give it some descriptors as well, the wordier the better, we like to use our vocabularies”. 

Mention of black pepper, burnt match, grass and grape is bandied around as we work our way through Best Bitter, Respire, Guzzler and Holy Grail until eventually we arrive at Riggwelter, a beer that is 27 years old on 31st of January 2023. For those not yet (but soon to be) familiar with what’s arguably the most iconic of Black Sheep’s beers, Riggwelter is a strong ale, ruby in colour with layers of roasted malts giving rise to notes of coffee, roasted licorice root, banana, and raisin. It is, put simply, sublime, and so moreish as to earn its name, an old norse farming term that referred to a sheep that had toppled (‘velte’) onto its back (‘rigg’), and been rendered incapacitated by the weight of its wet, wool fleece. 

“When we first started, we just did a best bitter and a special ale, which was Black Sheep ale in the bottle” says Jo. “Off the back of the success of these two beers, we saw some increased demand, and had a couple of local beer festivals asking if we could supply them with a stronger beer, and we’d have to tell them, ‘well, we don’t actually do one of those’. So there were conversations around maybe needing a stronger beer to complete the range, and eventually, we made a brew that was first mashed on 31st January ‘96, and launched in cask on 19th February at The Maltings in York.”

Jo chuckled at this point, consulting a piece of paper that he reveals to be a log, written by Black Sheep’s original head brewer Paul Ambler, in May 1996, and which charted the development and reception of Riggwelter. Jo reads some of the final lines aloud for us. “Everything worked fine,” Paul writes, “except that our Yorkshire square yeast, which had never previously been offered such a banquet of fermentable sugars, yielded 6.4% alcohol by volume. Tasting results from both brewery staff and customers were enthusiastic.” No surprise there. 

Over the better part of the last three decades, Black Sheep’s range has expanded beyond Best Bitter, Special Ale and Riggwelter, but now, I am interested to hear, it is in the process of contracting. This isn’t indicative of decline per se, but rather the precarious position in which pubs now find themselves. Jo says that cask consumption hasn’t recovered from the COVID years, and reckons it's still down 20-30% not because the style has declined in popularity, but because a combination of the cost of living crisis and rampant staffing shortages across the hospitality sector has meant pubs can’t afford to remain open seven days a week. This is, of course, bad news for cask, which needs to be consumed quickly once opened. 

“In the modern world we live in, with all the cost pressures that we're seeing, we have to try and be efficient in the way that we produce beer”, says Jo. This efficency has been more than smart, or even agile, the brewery has been both brave and gracious in considering modern challenges as an opportunity to blend tradition with innovation, and grapple with modern problems using a tried and tested tool kit.

 “When we came out of lock down, we needed to change the direction of the business a little bit and make it fit for the future”, says Jo. “So that was most of what I was doing last year, and is what gave rise to Respire”, a completely carbon neutral cask beer that involved reviewing the carbon footprint of everything from production methods, ingredients, and packaging, and extensively researching what high quality carbon credits could support offsets while helping environmental initiatives in Yorkshire. The final result saw Black Sheep partner with the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust. “We’ve also set ourselves some goals that are in line with North Yorkshire's Net Zero targets. The UK’s national net zero target is 2050, but North Yorkshire's is more ambitious. It's 2034. So we said, ‘okay, well, Yorkshire set that target. We need to align with what Yorkshire needs to do, because we're in it. So let's try and do our bit’”. 

The Black Sheep team are currently working on bringing Respire to bottle format, and it should be available in supermarkets from late Spring. In the meantime, get yourself to any Black Sheep stockist, support your local, and petition your landlord to consider carbon neutral cask.