Please join us in offering a warm welcome to the following new members who have joined the Guild in the last couple of months. Part II to come tomorrow.
Danny Savage is one of the BBC’s north of England Correspondents and as such has reported first hand about the issues faced by the pub industry since the pandemic. His first job after school was as a full time barman in a real ale pub in Suffolk. It started a life long interest in finding a good pub and looking out for high standards in beer quality. He works for BBC national news reporting primarily for television and radio. He lives in North Yorkshire where beer is, in his opinion, quite rightly served through a sparkler. He is an accomplished public speaker and guest university lecturer.
I started my career as a lab tech at Wilsons Brewery , Newton Heath in 1974 spending a very happy couple of years there before going to Heriot Watt for 3 years. I then joined Fullers in Jan 1981 and became brewing director in 1999 before retiring in 2018. I still do some brewing consultation and formed a company Think it Brew, I also write the occasional article mainly for the Brewers Journal. I have drank a few beers in my time and enjoy a pub lunch.
James Crowden. More of a cider man. He was born in the Westcountry and started working on farms in 1960’s in the Tamar valley. James soon developed a penchant for cider whilst involved with Turkey plucking, harvest work and sheep shearing in Somerset and Dorset. He worked on the cider presses at Burrow Hill Cider farm for twelve seasons and realised there were very few books on cider and so he tried to remedy that with Cider the Forgotten Miracle 1999 Ciderland 2008 which won the Andre Simon Food and Drink Award. His latest book Cider Country was published in 2021. He has done much historical cider research and has shown conclusively that the 17th century ‘cider boys’ pioneered a technique for making sparkling cider and wine that we now know as methode champenoise whilst Dom Perignon was but a small lad. www.james-crowden.co.uk
Amy Lo
Amy Lo: experienced journalist with a focus on food, drink and her Cantonese heritage, with work in the Guardian, Metro and Pit. Amy is working on a book on the emotional connection of the meals she grew up with, being published by Saturday Boy Books. www.amylo.co.uk/
I have worked in beer pubs since 2007, and now run a freehouse, The Hare on the Hill, with my partner in Bristol, and am also a freelance writer. Having been diagnosed with ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome since 2019, I write about the impact chronic illness has on those working in hospitality generally, and the industry specifically.
Damian Kerlin is a LGBTQ+ writer and journalist. As well as managing his own blog, www.damiankerlin.com, Damian has written for Attitude, The Belfast Telegraph, Daddi Life, Gay BoyBible, Every Day Magazine, Gay Community News, Left Foot Forward and Adoption UK (to highlight only a few…).
Damian is also host of LGBTQ+ docu-series podcast ‘Memories from the Dancefloor’, an ACAST production, celebrating the history of LGBTQ+ venues from the staff and patrons themselves.
Dan Saladino is a food journalist and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme. His first book, Eating to Extinction: The World’s Most Endangered Foods (and drinks) and Why We Need to Save Them is an epic journey into the history, culture and future of food, and involved 15 years of travel and story collecting. Since publication by Jonathan Cape in the UK and FSG in the United States, Eating to Extinction has won multiple awards, including: Winner of the prestigious Wainwright Prize for Conservation and Nature and The Fortnum & Mason Book of the Year. The book has also been the subject of articles in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Economist, Financial Times, Literary Review, New Scientist, Scientific American and Washington Post.
Dan honed his journalistic skills on BBC Radio 4’s investigative series Face the Facts before specialising in food and farming stories more than a decade ago. Dan has been listed in the ‘Progress 1000: The Evening Standard’s Most Influential People in Food and Drink’, The Telegraph’s Food Power List and he is the recipient of a James Beard Awards (America’s most high-profile award for food journalism).
Dan’s work in radio has also been recognised in multiple awards, including his efforts to document the loss of biodiversity around the world, in which he has travelled through Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas recording the world’s most endangered foods and the disappearance of traditional and indigenous food cultures, which provided the inspiration for Eating to Extinction. In 2012 the Guild of Beer Writers awarded Dan the Molson Coors Award Silver Award for Writing in National Media, for his edition of The Food Programme, The New Beer Frontier, exploring the rise of the craft beer movement in the US and the UK (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01gf4l0).
Dan has also presented and reported for programmes on the BBC World Service and also BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme and From Our Own Correspondent.