“E Ipsum Verum.”

Hand-painted in white, these words hang on the sky blue walls that house the production side of The Brewery of St. Mars of the Desert in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. Directly below them a long, slender, stainless steel vessel—referred to in this brewery as a koelschip (pronounced: coolship)—is collecting hot, sticky brown wort from today’s brew. After a few weeks of fermentation and conditioning, it’ll become a Belgian-style saison called Fieldmouse’s Farewell.

As the heat of the wort collides with the cold air in the brewery, a blanket of steam rises. At the opposite end of the closely-packed warehouse, a stationary canning line, a modest pair of conical-bottomed fermentation vessels and a solitary oak foeder fade into mist. Plump beads of condensation collect on the corrugated ceiling. Wiping the lens of my camera in vain, I attempt to capture the brewery's sole owners, husband and wife Dann Paquette and Martha Simpson-Holley, scrambling, wisp-like in the fog; connecting hoses and couplers, weighing out hops, digging out spent grain.

“I always think of it as meaning ‘the truth is, of itself,’” Martha says of the Latin phrase Dann painted on the wall when they were fitting out their brewery in late 2018. “To me, that means, if you look at something the right way, you will see it in reality. If you look at things the wrong way—which we all do, a lot, both in beer and in life—you will see a load of old bollocks.”

The saying, Dann claims, was spoken to him from the ether of sleep. He recalls to me a dream, wherein, surrounded by woodland, a giant grain of barley became manifest before him and spoke the words now painted on his brewery’s walls. Upon waking from the dream, Dann quickly wrote the phrase down and showed it to his friend, Brother Brian Rooney—a Trappist monk of St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts—who was able to translate the words and help interpret their meaning.

“You can write it off as fluff, but I don’t know any Latin so the fact it meant anything was meaningful to me,” Dann says. “And I think that being ‘true’ is really important, especially if you’re a creative person.”

The talking grain of barley Dann dreamed of was no stranger to either him or Martha. He had a name—Jack D’Or—and represented something incredibly significant to them both. Martha explains to me how, back in 2008 when they launched their previous brewing venture—Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project—in their former home city of Boston, they were starting from scratch.

“There was no money and no brewery,” she says. “We had to summon this whole suite of beers from nothing.”

The couple tell me how they willed Jack into existence through their writing, drawings and even a poem Martha wrote, which is painted onto another of the walls at their brewery. Just as he would later appear in Dann’s dream, they would first give life to him: a mystical, living grain of barley who to them represents the soul of beer.

“He wants beer to be made,” Martha says.

Dann’s drawing of Jack D’Or, which depicts the “golden barleycorn”—as Martha’s poem describes him—bathing in a mash tun, adorns the label of a deliciously crisp, bold, yet balanced saison-style beer of the same name. It would eventually obtain something of a cult status among beer-loving Bostonites, New Englanders and others lucky enough to find it on tap, or get their hands on a bottle.

“That first Jack D’Or was enlightening,” New England-based journalist Matt Osgood tells me in an email. “It was as if I had been eating home cooked meals and suddenly I was at a Michelin-starred restaurant. I miss that beer dearly.”

***

In 2015, after establishing a lofty reputation within North American craft beer, Pretty Things came to its end. Despite being in operation for seven years, Dann and Martha were never able to open a facility of their own. Instead, they made beer by brewing itinerantly at Buzzards Bay Brewing in Westport, to the far south of Massachusetts. Around a year before they closed, Pretty Things made headlines when Dann spoke out publicly against alleged illegal “pay to play” practices—claiming that certain local distributors and retailers were charging breweries for tap listings. Despite some of the negative media attention this received, Dann tells me it wasn’t a particularly major factor in their decision to move on. But it did have an impact, including for Pretty Things’ distributor, which was charged and fined.

“It made something we were enjoying less, less enjoyable,” he says. “It’s a mess, but ultimately it wasn’t our battle, it was just a chance set of comments that were picked up on social media, and we felt we were then duty bound to see it through.”

By 2015 the beer industry was changing around them, fast. Consumer interest in the 22 ounce ‘bomber’ style bottles they put their beer into was dwindling in favour of 16 ounce cans—and at the time, Buzzards Bay had no plans to install a canning line. Palates were shifting too, with interest in historical English and Belgian styles waning, as drinkers began to prefer fruited sours and hazy IPAs. A cultural shift that in New England, Pretty Things was at the centre of.

“I was bored. I longed for more creativity and less box ticking,” Martha says. “It’s great when you’re building something, it’s challenging and fun and exciting. At some point that goes away and I think that’s usually the time to make a big change: you either go for a new big challenge, or move on in other ways.”

“I wanted to be a brewer first and foremost and never let anyone else brew a drop of Pretty Things, but there was this great sense we both had that we had done everything we wanted to do with it,” Dann adds.

“Pretty Things had taken us all the way from being literally broke, to giving us seven fantastic years, to these exciting opportunities afterwards. Things don’t need to last forever.”

““If you look at things the wrong way—which we all do, a lot, both in beer and in life—you will see a load of old bollocks.””

— Martha Simpson-Holley

As their former brewing operation dropped its final curtain, Dann and Martha called time on their life in the US, but not without leaving a considerable legacy in their wake.

I reached out to the New England beer community to gauge the lingering feeling surrounding the loss of Pretty Things even now, all these years on. Within minutes my inbox was overfilled with messages professing their admiration for Dann, Martha and the beers they made. There were anecdotes of meeting the couple for the first time, reflections on how they changed the game within the New England beer scene, and love letters to Jack D’Or himself. Although one note, from Connecticut-based beer educator and illustrator Em Sauter, struck a particular chord.

“I miss them madly,” it said.

Once their operation had wound down the couple travelled the world for almost two years to figure out what would come next. Before leaving they had one last party—a funeral, of sorts, for Jack D’Or, who lay in state in a coffin throughout—after which they drove all their belongings to charity shops, sold their house, and spent two weeks relaxing in Hawaii. On returning to Boston they drove down to Florida where they sold their car, before spending 24 days on a ship that eventually dropped them off near Rome.

After a time in Northern Italy spent working on a farm near Lake Garda, the couple moved on to the Austrian Alps, where they stayed for a winter. They backpacked through Thailand and Cambodia, then travelled back to Europe to devour cheese and cider in Normandy, and to take a beer pilgrimage into Franconia. Finally, they ended up in Berlin, after visiting 34 countries in total.

“Those two years were a total privilege,” Dann says. “We’ll never be the same again.”

Despite avoiding what they refer to as “craft beer” throughout their travels, A future that involved them opening another brewery, it seems, was destined.

“Most of the while we were pretty sure we wouldn’t be back in beer,” Martha tells me. “But it began to call us back again.”

***

Originally from the North East of England—her accent still wholly intact despite her years as an ex-pat—Martha emigrated to the US in 2002 to work as a virologist at Harvard University. In 2004, while missing the creature comforts of home, she attended NERAX, the ‘New England Real Ale Expo.’

“I was excited to go, being a Brit,” she says. “I dragged my US roommates who took one look at the beardy, farty assembled crowd and abandoned me to go drink cocktails in a bar down the street.”

Fatefully, Martha stayed, and it was there she first met Dann—a brewer of almost three decades. He still speaks largely with a Bostonian-lilt (“Maw-tha,” he calls to his partner across the brewery) albeit now with a few British inflections. They married in Martha’s home-county of Yorkshire in 2006, and there they stayed for two years. Eventually, Dann decided he was fed-up with country living, (“and we were broke,” Martha adds) and so they returned to Boston where they would go on to establish Pretty Things that same year.

When their travels concluded in 2017, accepting that what they wanted from life was a small, artisanal brewery that gave them total control over what they made, the search for a new home began. Initially, they worked their way along the cities and college towns along the US East Coast, but Dann and Martha never quite felt settled.

Returning to Europe, the couple tell me how they “fell in love” with a smallholding located in the Pays de la Loire region in northwestern France, connected to a village called Saint-Mars-du-Désert.

Once again they turned to their friend Brother Brian Rooney for advice. Dann brings the Trappist monk up often, speaking of him with great fondness; recalling stories of how he’d take the 4 a.m. starts in his stride while brewing together at Pretty Things. Behind the scenes, Dann was also involved with some of the work preempting the launch of Spencer Trappist Brewery by the monks of St. Joseph’s Abbey. Although he laments that after a “shake up” their friend was taken off the project at the last minute, instead assigned to lead the manufacture of the monastery’s famous preserves.

“It was definitely one of the high points of my career, secretly plotting with monks to get the first Trappist brewery in the US built,” Dann says. “It was surreal having a Trappist monk on our team.”

Brother Brian was able to confirm that St. Mars was indeed real; an 8th-century hermit—one of the early “desert fathers”, as Dann describes him—who inspired monasticism. It is these early monastic beginnings that would eventually lead to the industrialisation of brewing, and something the couple take a great deal of inspiration from.

“We eventually gave up on the site, slightly spooked by Brexit,” Dann says. “But we thought the village name was so incredible and so good for a couple of outsiders who were going to move somewhere strange and build a brewery.”

Setting their sights on the UK, they fancied perhaps opening a brewery in the countryside, but this wasn’t to be (“the challenges were too big and beyond our budget,” Martha says.) Turning their attention towards the cities, they looked at Manchester and Leeds but ended up preferring Sheffield’s more laid-back vibe. They eventually committed to a building in Attercliffe, an old industrial area to the city’s northeast. According to Dann and Martha, this was “just out of sheer exhaustion, really.”

“When we moved to the UK I have to admit we were feeling all at sea,” Martha tells me. “We’d built the brewery but it was still empty. Nobody knew us, nobody had been to visit us. We were feeling a bit lonely and I, in particular, was feeling really, really shaky emotionally. We’d spent all our money as well—we were all in.”

***

Ducking outside the brewery, its low ceilings shrinking under the denseness of steam, I find myself in a smallish yard. Currently occupied by a couple of parked vans, at the weekends (before global pandemics, anyway) it’s home to a couple of chunky wooden tables that seat eager drinkers. At just past noon on a clear January day, the small asphalt rectangle is being struck by the kind of clear winter sun that provides sharp contrast to everything it touches.

There are no other staff at St. Mars of the Desert—the couple does everything themselves. Behind me Dann continues to empty spent grain from the mash into smallish blue plastic cylinders. He shovels and drags repeatedly and purposefully, with the look of someone who has done this many times over, and knows they will do so many times again. Despite the physical work going on in the warehouse behind me, everything feels calm and as it should be.

To my right beyond a wrought-iron security gate, is a huge warehouse that once formed part of an old steelworks—as did most of the buildings here, helping Sheffield earn its nickname: “The Steel City.” Speaking to my dad, Frank, who lived there for most of the ’70s, he recalls Attercliffe as being “intensely industrial, very working class, and quite smelly when the furnaces were active.” Some of the buildings in Attercliffe are still scarred with black from decades of smelting.

On my left is a bright, fire-engine red set of double doors (“old brewery red” Martha calls it, referring to the signature colour of Pretty Things) that read “Welcome to Mars Brewery,” which lead to the taproom, along with some office and storage space. In front are a few old oil-drums, plant pots, and an old chest freezer all planted out—with, among other things, foxgloves, geraniums and primroses—by a friend of the brewery; brewer and semi-professional gardener, Dominic Driscoll.

““There’s a fine line between a shit brewery and our brewery.””

— Dann Paquette

“Straight away I knew I wanted to make a beer with Dann and Martha, I just fell in love with both of them,” Dominic, who works at Thornbridge Brewery in nearby Bakewell, tells me. “[We decided to] do a collaborative planting too. Obviously, I was pretty delighted. I wanted to make it as bee-friendly as possible, which they agreed with.”

Brewed just a few months after they opened, the result of their collaboration was a beer called Pépin (French for seed), a relatively low-alcohol Belgian-style pale ale, with a spoonful of sweetness and a light tang of bitter hops; perfect for lazy summer drinking. To mark the beers’ launch Martha screen printed 100 envelopes by hand, each containing wildflower seeds that were handed out to lucky customers on the day.

“I’ve been lucky enough to work with some amazing breweries in my career, but this remains my favourite collaboration by a country mile,” Dominic says. “To have contributed a little something to the magic and story of SMOD makes me very proud.”

After stepping out for a few minutes Martha arrives back at the iron gate, three bulging paper bags in hand. Dann pauses his work, takes three glasses from behind the bar in the taproom and heads back into the brewery where he pulls us each a measure of beer from one of the fermenters. We take a seat in a corner of the taproom; which is painted in the same vivid sky blue as the brewery, although with the sun hitting the walls through its tinted glass windows, it’s somehow even more vibrant here.

“When we were travelling, we would encounter the colour blue a lot, more than any other colour,” Martha says, setting down the bags that contain fist-sized ham rolls from Roses Bakery in nearby Atlas (“we wanted to open our brewery there just because of the name,” Dann adds.) “We just loved it. It spoke to us of hot countries, sunshine, richness, and it sets off that red, and beer, and everything really well. It just ended up being where we wanted to be.”

Dann sets down three stemmed goblets, the brewery's logo printed on them in SMOD blue, as it’s known. The typeface is Dann’s own artistic handwriting, which also features on all of their cans and merch alongside his drawings. (Behind the taproom is Martha’s screen printer, where she mixes the paint herself.)

Inside each glass is about two fingers of a sparkling golden lager called Hopfenpils, topped with about three times that of foam. It rasps and snaps with the spice and herbaceousness of German Tettnang hops. Dann attempts to tell me he thinks it’s too bitter but as I shovel mouthfuls of salty, mustard-slathered-ham into my mouth with one hand, and wash it down with pristine pilsner in the other, it falls on deaf ears.

Bar the sounds of our chewing and sipping, and Dann’s attempts at self-depreciation, the taproom is silent now. The old wooden furniture is empty, the decorative hops adorning vintage Belgian tin signs have long since faded from verdant green to dull brown. The blackboard normally listing what’s pouring is half erased, expectant of the new beers it will inform customers of in future. They had planned to have a short break before opening again in March 2020, but the bastard virus put a stop to that—for now.

I had visited a few months before though, on a Saturday, and experienced the taproom in full swing. People glugging down saisons, tripels, New England IPAs and 19th-century imperial milds with abandon, shortening the brewery's name from “Saint Mars” to just “SMOD” with each passing reference. This is a happy place.

***

Sheffield has a rich and well-established beer culture—in 2016 it was described by the author Pete Brown as “the world’s best beer city.” It is well known for its excellent pubs serving sublime pints of cask ale. Hostelries like The Rutland Arms, The Kelham Island Tavern and The Fat Cat—the latter also home to the vaunted Kelham Island Brewery—are a handful of good examples. It’s home to more traditional breweries like the aforementioned Kelham Island, ultra-modern craft breweries such as Lost Industry, and those that straddle both worlds such as Abbeydale, which has been brewing here since 1996.

“I love the scene here, the massive variety of old pubs and the great beer drinkers who seem to frequent all of them,” Dann tells me before Martha interjects. “It was a bit scary though because we’re doing something different, and uptake by the locals of craft beer is not huge and still very niche, internet-based and male.”

Despite having a vibrant and well-grounded scene, when it comes to beer, Sheffield is not always spoken of in the same manner as nearby Leeds and Manchester, or places further afield such as London and Bristol.

“I always found the scene friendly and welcoming yet a little insular,” Jules Grey, proprietor of bottle shop Hop Hideout, and organiser of Sheffield Beer Week, tells me. “It's always been a very keen and price-conscious beer market. Maybe partly down to its industrial past and big service job sector playing a role in people's overall disposable income.”

There are few people more in tune with Sheffield’s beer culture than Jules, though she’s modest about her influence. When she moved back to her home city around 2011 she found the beer scene to be in a “familiar and cosy rut.” When asked how that’s shifted over the last decade, she points to the influence of Abbeydale, and to Thornbridge—the latter who, despite brewing a few miles away in Derbyshire, have found their spiritual home in Sheffield thanks to its handful of pubs here.

“[St. Mars] have brought a refreshing growth in consumer interest for classic styles such as lager and Belgian inspired beers, but done very much through their own lens,” she says. “I think that's translated authentically and chimed with a lot of people here too.”

Could the arrival of Dann, Martha and The Brewery of St. Mars of the Desert be the missing piece, cementing the Steel City in people’s minds as one of England’s best beer destinations? More likely, they've added another layer of excitement and intrigue to an already buoyant scene. Try as they might, they did not arrive anonymously. The lofty reputation of Pretty Things following them across the Atlantic, with rumours of their new brewery soon appearing online.

I remember learning of their arrival for myself a few months before they were due to open. Although eager to get the scoop on their new operation, locals like Jules (correctly) advised me to ease off until they’d properly settled into their new home.

“Initially we thought SMOD were really brave for setting up in an area of Sheffield which otherwise doesn't have much going for it,” Abbeydale Brewery’s Laura Rangeley tells me. “[But] they’ve really helped to inject some enthusiasm for and excitement about our city, and make it more of a destination for beer lovers across the country.”

***

Those who’ve followed Dann and Martha since their Pretty Things days will find no shortage of nostalgia in the paraphernalia scattered around the taproom. The tap handles and logos affixed to the front of the bar all bear the red, five-pointed tree logo of their old brewery. It’s difficult not to notice the similarities—and differences—between their old and new logos, but Martha assures me that there’s nothing sinister behind the austerity of the new design; once a flowering tree, it is now pruned and bare.

“In our creative relationship, we always have fights based on me wanting to add and Dann wanting to subtract,” Martha says. “I had all these ideas about adding leaves to the Pretty Things tree, but in the end, it just came out and was simple and lovely.”

High on a shelf behind the bar among the old brewery regalia sits a photo of Dann and venerable New England brewer Tod Mott. Alongside them is celebrated beer writer, Michael Jackson. When asked about the photo, Dann tells me it was taken at the 1997 Great American Beer Festival, and how he met Michael on a handful of occasions before his passing in 2007. The first time was in 1993 when he was among a handful of folks who shared a Harvard Lager, bottled in 1957.

““Dann and Martha are two of the best people in the beer world.””

— Ron Pattinson

Another well-respected writer who is often brimming with praise for Dann and Martha is beer historian Ron Pattinson. “We would fly him over either to brew or for the launch party of the beer,” Dann says, before adding that Ron would almost always choose to visit for the party. It’s a relationship that has continued at St. Mars, having brewed an imperial mild using a recipe from 1832 they named ‘XXXX Ron’ in 2019.

“We pretty much fucked the brewery with all the whole leaf Goldings but it tasted amazing,” Ron tells me, adding that the 1832 mild is his favourite of the recreations he’s made with the couple. “Dann and Martha are two of the best people in the beer world.”

With today’s brew of Fieldmouse’s Farewell—another legacy from their Pretty Things days—safely tucked away in its fermenter, Dann rings a bell that hangs by the brewhouse, a few feet from the koelschip. A small ritual to mark the end of the working day, and the transition to rest.

Heading back into the centre of town, we stop for a beer and a chat at The Beer Engine. The pub is rapidly filling up with thirsty football fans wearing the red and white stripes of Sheffield United FC, eager for pre-game pints of cask ale, their thick Yorkshire accents hanging in the air. Taking in the scene, I’m about to remark how Sheffield must feel a world apart from Boston, but before I get the chance, Dann says something that stops me mid-thought.

“There’s a fine line between a shit brewery and our brewery.”

“I think it sums up how we feel about beer, and brewing,” Martha interjects. “There’s always going to be a literal line in our brewery where infected beer is on one side and clean beer on the other, and sometimes we won’t be aware of where that line is. I firmly believe that magic only happens when things are a bit messy and mad.”

“I’d rather play with fire and fail more often,” Dann adds. “Am I presently doing it? A little, but I want to do more. As a beer drinker my ideal beer is probably infected. Now that’s ‘verum!’”