Let’s hear it for ‘the whirlwind’

And he finds time to pack in his other love in life — Sheffield United Football Club. On the day I met him in Sheffield he had travelled the evening before to Liverpool to watch his team play Everton in the Carling Cup and got back home at 1am. But he was up, full of enthusiasm, a few hours later to take me off to his latest enterprise, a small brewery on the Welbeck Abbey estate in Nottingham.

Wickett is a former economics lecturer in Sheffield whose love of good beer and good pubs encouraged him in 1981 to take over a pub in Sheffield he renamed the Fat Cat and then in 1990 to build the Kelham Island Brewery next door.
Friends told him he was mad to contemplate running a brewery committed to cask beer. Sheffield was on the point of losing two Bass breweries and one each from Ward’s and Whitbread, and the advice from all and sundry was that nobody wanted to drink real ale any more.

He proved the Jeremiahs wrong. The brewery was a roaring success. It was one of the earliest of the new breed of micros and it encouraged other beer lovers to follow Wickett’s path. In 1999 he was forced to abandon the original brewing kit, which could produce 20 barrels a week, and move to new premises a few yards away with five times the capacity. When Kelham Island won the Champion Beer of Britain competition in 2004 for its Pale Rider ale, he was on the national map. Further expansion was needed to knock out 150 barrels a week.

He prefers to deal with genuine free traders who talk about beer, rather than discounts, and he avoids the giant pubcos.
Lesser mortals might be satisfied with that level of success but Wickett found time to run and regularly visit a pub, the Old Toad, he owns in Rochester, New York State. Again, he proved the doomsters wrong who said it was impossible to run a British-style pub with cask beer in the US.

In 2004 he acted as a consultant when the Thornbridge Brewery was built in Derbyshire. It went on to become one of the most innovative speciality breweries in the country.

Then the blow fell. In 2010, Wickett went to hospital because he thought he had arthritis and learnt he was suffering from bone cancer. Lesser mortals would have retired but Wickett was determined not only to carry on running his pubs and brewery but also to expand his activities.
He was offered a fresh challenge by Welbeck Abbey, a vast country estate owned by the Dukes of Portland, where the Harley Foundation runs a School of Artisanal Food. Students on courses at Welbeck can learn such skills as bread and cheese making and charcuterie. The school was keen to add a small brewery and Wickett responded by offering kit from Kelham Island. He also had just the right person to run the brewery.

Earlier this year he was contacted by Professor David Hornby, of the microbiology department at Sheffield University, who said he had a brilliant student destined to get a first-class degree but she only wanted to work in brewing. “I’ll sort her out,” Wickett said, and arranged for the student, Claire Monk, to work for a short time at Kelham Island.

“It was cold and raining and I thought a few weeks of cask washing would end her desire to be a brewer,” Wickett says. “But she loved it and quickly learnt the skills needed to become a professional brewer.”

Then came the call from the Harley Foundation and Wickett had a brewer (Monk) ready to work in a restored barn at a former abbey. The 10-barrel plant opened in June and Monk has brewed four beers that have met with great acclaim. They are on sale in 50 pubs in the area and available in bottle form in the Welbeck Abbey shop.

More students are on their way. Back in Sheffield, Wickett helped create an MSc course in brewing at the university. The course starts next month and will include a six-week residential stay at Welbeck where
students will work alongside Monk.

This frenzy of activity is all the more remarkable when you consider it has been organised by a man in a wheelchair who has spent several months in hospital this year, but with a mobile and laptop by his side. Wickett’s passion and commitment have not gone unnoticed. In July he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group.

As he accepted the award, the applause rolled on for minute after minute. As Robert Humphreys, secretary of the group, said: “There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.”