By Stephen Beaumont
www.worldofbeer.com
Cruising the M1 motorway from Burton-Upon-Trent towards northern North Yorkshire, my eye fell upon a small sign indicating the turnoff for the town of Masham. A quick glance at the clock, followed by a rapid review of the day's itinerary, steeled my resolve and kept the car's wheels running straight. Masham would have to wait.

And wait it did, until I encountered the next exit sign announcing the near presence of this modest two brewery town. One exit I could resist, but two definitely meant moving the day's events back an hour or two. Brakes were hit, wheels swung right and I was on my way to the Black Sheep Brewery.

Fast forward two years and, once again, I'm running late. This time, however, instead of me going to Black Sheep, Black Sheep is coming to me. Or rather, Paul Theakston, owner of the 11-year-old brewery, is coming to meet me for lunch at beerbistro, the downtown Toronto beer cuisine restaurant in which I'm a partner. Lunch is slated for noon and as I leave my home, less than a 15 minute walk from the restaurant, the bells of the nearby church are already beginning to toll I had missed meeting the brewery boss during my 2002 detour, oddly because he had been visiting my native land of Canada, where his Black Sheep Ale has been selling for some time, alongside occasional appearances by the darker, stronger Riggwelter and the kitschy but thoroughly enjoyable Monty Python's Holy Grail. Lunch was an opportunity to finally connect the brewery with the man behind it.

And an interesting fellow Paul Theakston is. You might recognize his last name from Masham's other brewery, T&R Theakston, renown for the molasses-y strong ale, Old Peculier, although Theakston himself has nothing to do with that operation today, and hasn't for quite some time. After a lengthy period of what the Black Sheep website refers to as “often acrimonious battles,” T&R Theakston was sold in 1984 to Matthew Brown, and then resold three years later to Scottish & Newcastle. According to the British beer consumer group CAMRA, S&N moved the bulk of Theakston's production around a bit over the following 15 or so years, but kept the Masham site as a working brewery and visitor centre. Recently, S&N sold a majority interest in the company back to the Theakston family, maintaining for itself a minority stake and distribution rights for the brands.

Genuinely enamoured with Masham (which is pronounced, by the way, as ‘massam'), Paul Theakston decided in the 1980s that although he wasn't interested in the job he had been offered by S&N, he wasn't through with brewing, even if others in his family were. With this in mind, he purchased the remnants of the town's former Lightfoot Brewery and embarked upon a lengthy period of brewery rehabilitation which included, again according to the website, battles with legions of rats that had taken up residence in the building while it was used as a grain storage building. At the end of it all, the Black Sheep Brewery was born.

As hard as it is to imagine the sharp, craftily designed brewery, restaurant and gift shop I visited as a neglected and dilapidated storehouse plagued with vermin, Theakston assured me over lunch that's exactly what the landmark, circa 1917 structure was when he first took it over. His mindset was, he said, to return to his family's brewery roots, and to my mind, he has since proven true to his words. Openly dismissive of flavour-challenged, mass market brews and an ardent proponent of cask-conditioned ale — “Really the best way to drink beer,” he told me at my unfortunately still handpumpless bar — Theakston says that from the outset he wanted Black Sheep to be the kind of traditional country brewery his forefathers used to run. Evidence of his success in so doing may be found in both the bottle and glass.

When at the brewery in ‘02, I sampled three of the brewery's caskconditioned ales and each one showed beautifully. First up was the 3.8% alcohol Black Sheep Best Bitter, a light copper ale with a perfumey nose and faintly fruity, light, minerally body accented by a generous hand with the hops. This was followed by the superbly balanced Special Ale, a 4.4% alcohol treat that mixes a healthy fruitiness with caramelly malt in the aroma and a dry, malty body with the same kind of minerally character I noticed in the Bitter. (Only later did I learn this is the same beer bottled as Black Sheep Ale, a fact which did not surprise me since the flavour profile did strike me as most familiar.) The final cask offering of the day was Riggwelter, a 5.7% alcohol strong ale with nutty and roasty notes in the nose and a round, fruity, slightly tannic body.

The fermenting method which provides the Black Sheep ales with their robust character is what Paul Theakston smilingly refers to as the ‘Yorkshire stainless rounds' system. Which is to say that the brewery employs the same Yorkshire Squares process made famous by Tadcaster's Samuel Smith Brewery, in which the open fermentation takes place in shallow containers and the yeast is allowed to gravitate off the tanks through pipes to a raised deck, where most of it settles. But rather than rely strictly upon the traditional square fermenters made of Welsh slate, as does Smith's, Black Sheep has modified the practice through the use of round, stainless steel vessels, although they do maintain a trio of squares in the brewery.

For those most familiar with the gentler taste of a London bitter such as Fuller's London Pride or Young's, the aggressive character of a Yorkshire bitter can come as a bit of a surprise. Stick with it, though, and the taste can become quite habit forming, not to the exclusion of softer southern English bitters, of course, but as a pleasing complement.

The good news for Americans is that while you will still have to cross the pond for a pint of cask-conditioned Black Sheep beer, Theakston told me as we lingered over coffee that he was preparing to ship keg beer to the U.S. for the first time. “It's a bit of an adventure, given that we don't really do kegs,” he said, “But demand has been such that we thought we'd give it a try.” The beer to watch for will be Monty Python's Holy Grail, a fruity-hoppy bitter that falls between the Black Sheep and Riggwelter in strength, and was specially commissioned for the comedy troupe's 30th anniversary. It is the brewery's best seller in the U.S. market.

Black Sheep is a true Yorkshire gem and, as I can well attest, certainly worth a detour off the M1.
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