We are the champions

Just what does winning Champion Beer of Britain mean if you are a small brewer? Adam Withrington visited Kelham Island Brewery in Sheffield to find out.

On Tuesday August 3, Dave Wickett was about to go on holiday. He had a 6.20am flight from Manchester to Ibiza booked for himself, his wife and his son for the next day.

While attending to a bit of business in the office above his pub - the Fat Cat in Sheffield - situated right next to his brewery, Kelham Island, the phone rang. He expected it to be his head brewer, Paul Ward, who was at the Great British Beer Festival (GBBF) in London, telling him how their beer Pale Rider had performed in the strong ale category.

Instead it was a wholesaler: "Well done Dave, you must be really pleased," said the voice. "With what?" asked Dave. "Did we win the strong ale section then?"

"No you've won the champion beer, Dave!"

Speaking two months later Dave still can't believe quite what happened on that day - when Kelham Island's Pale Rider was voted the Champion Beer of Britain. "It was just so overwhelming," he says. "I didn't know how to react. Suddenly you realise that your whole future is going to be different." The phone calls from the wholesalers didn't stop coming. Within 10 minutes he had sold a week's supply - 50 barrels worth. Within a day he had received orders for around 500 per cent over the amount that Kelham Island could possibly brew.

"The following day was hectic but enjoyable. I had about 100 congratulatory emails, from people who knew me at school and from other brewers and pubs. They came from all over the world - I had one from Japan saying, 'I saw you won and I love your beer and I now want to import it'. It was the same from Italy, Canada and the US," he explains.

But surely Dave, who owns another bar in Sheffield as well as a real ale pub in Rochester, New York State, now feels like many other Champion Beer of Britain winners? However nice it is to win, victory is bittersweet, because you can never fulfil demand. Indeed, last month David Grant, general manager at Moorhouse's brewery told The Publican: "Winning awards like Champion Beer of Britain can be a double-edged sword for a smaller brewer. It is a nightmare to cope with the demand generated and they can lose volume because everyone wants that brand for the next six months."

Dave disagrees that there are any serious downsides. "To be honest, people have asked me whether this win is a one-off and whether this upsurge in demand will last," he says. "But this was Pale Rider's 17th win at a beer festival. I discovered from my discussions with previous winners like Harviestoun, that the demand for your beer is still there a year on. Wholesalers are interested in more than your award-winning beer - most of the inquiries we have had included orders for beers other than Pale Rider."

However, Dave believes that Kelham Island's inability to give everyone what they want is a problem. "It's a real shame. Some people have been ringing up with orders for 600 casks. A couple of years back we got excited at taking orders for six."

So what is the solution? The only way the current brewery site can grow is by doubling the height of the current tanks and removing the first floor. Dave has a builder looking at that idea right now and apparently it is a "real possibility".

In the beginning​

The Kelham Island Brewery started life in the beer garden of the Fat Cat pub. To understand why you have to look back to the 1970s, when Dave was a lecturer in the economics of brewing at Sheffield Hallam University. "It's difficult to imagine what it was like at that time, but hardly any pubs here had real ale. You would have, say, 100 Tetley pubs in the city and they would all sell Tetley's. Most were keg and it was same with Whitbread pubs."

Dave wanted to open a freehouse to offer a choice of real ales. So when the pub that was to become the Fat Cat came on the market in 1981, it was snapped up immediately. "I put beers in there that I liked, that I had been tasting at beer festivals, like Timothy Taylor's Landlord and Theakston's Old Peculier.

"On the opening night I put Fuller's London Pride on. People said I was mad, going with a London beer - they should have seen the queue going 200 yards down the street!"

The Fat Cat won an award for best pub in Sheffield from the local branch of CAMRA in the first year of business.

Despite this Dave had a burning ambition to sell his own beer in the pub, but in the mid-1980s the pub trade in Sheffield, like every other city, was dominated by the tie. "If I opened a brewery then I would have to sell all my beer here, which really went against the principles I had in the first place of offering choice."

However, this all changed one morning in 1989 when he read the front page of The Times. "It said the Beer Orders were coming in," says Dave. "So I called my wife immediately and said I was setting up the brewery."

Kelham Island started off with a production of 20 barrels a week, and it lived in the shadow of Sheffield's four biggest breweries: Whitbread, two breweries owned by Bass - Hope and Cannon - and Ward's. But within a period of nine years all these breweries had closed.

"Suddenly we were the biggest brewer in Sheffield and we were operating out of a space the size of a double garage," recalls Dave. Kelham Island had to move to a bigger premises - luckily there was a space next door to the Fat Cat that was available for purchase and in 1999 the brewing equipment was moved across. The new building allowed increased production to up to 50 barrels a week. "I was quite happy moving along with that amount," he says. "But now with this award, it's all changed."

Branching out​

"I have another pub in Sheffield, which is about as different from the Fat Cat (pictured)​ as you can get," Dave enthuses. "It's an American style sports bar, with about 50 TV screens. The city never had a proper sports bar before it opened. I will not dumb it down, I insist on quality - we always use fresh ingredients for our diner food. I like doing things that are completely different. Which is why I love my pub in Rochester, New York so much. I love going out there and seeing how it's doing. I like to employ British staff, mainly students, and there is a great atmosphere there. When it opened in 1990 it was the first real pub in America."

Dave's career as an entrepreneur could take another step up the ladder if current negotiations to buy a new bar are successful. The whole Kelham Island section of Sheffield is being regenerated and the main work will involve building new blocks of flats. The council estimates that about 3,800 more people will soon live on the doorstep of the brewery and the pub. If this wasn't exciting enough for Dave, one of the new luxury blocks will have a bar on the ground floor.

"Because I have been involved in the planning for the whole area I was asked if I was interested in taking on the bar," he explains. "The development project will be huge. There used to be a big waterwheel next to the brewery building - that is being rebuilt and as a result the council asked if we wanted free power from the wheel. It's very exciting and the whole area will change beyond recognition."

Key quality​

Despite these other business interests Dave's heart still lies with beer. So how does he view the beer market as a whole? For Dave quality is of prime importance and he feels that licensees are responsible for most of the crimes visited upon real ale.

"The fact is that most breweries in Britain brew good beer. We have all probably had a bad pint of beer from a brewery that produces good beer - I've tasted some foul beers and I know they have been brewed well so it just mean