Raising a glass: 10 women in beer

17th November, 2015 by Lauren Eads

Annabel Smith

Role: Beer sommelier and founder of Dea Latis

Annabel Smith is a beer sommelier and founding member of Dea Latis – a group set up to educate women about beer and encourage them to embrace Britain’s national drink. Made up of brewers, beer tasters, publicans, writers and marketeers, Dea Latis is named after the Celtic goddess of beer and water.

“Dea Latis aims to challenge women’s ideas about beer and present it to them in a way that encourages them to taste it”, its webpage says. “We don’t expect change to happen quickly or easily, but that’s no reason not to try.”

Having worked in the beer industry for over 25 years, Smith began her career from the ground up working in pubs across the UK. She later worked for Guinness training more than 35,000 publicans how to pour the perfect pint of black stout Guinness, before moving to work for the then fledgling Cask Marque as a beer taster and a training manager. It was during her 10 year stint with the company that she became one of the UK’s first beer sommeliers. Now a freelance beer sommelier, Annabelle works as a writer, consultant, trainer and motivational speaker to both the beer industry and consumers, under her company name BeerBelle. She is also a member of the British Guild of Beer Writers.

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2 Responses to “Raising a glass: 10 women in beer”

Jaco Hamilton-Attwell says:

November 19, 2015 at 7:35 am

I think you missed an important one: Frieda Dehrmann from SAB/Inbev. She was SAB’s Consumer Science and Sensory Manager, but has since moved up the ladder to a position in SABMiller UK, but I am not sure what her new title is.

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Martyn Cornell says:

December 7, 2015 at 12:18 am

“it was a German nun in the early 17th century that was the first to discover that adding hops to beer radically increased its shelf life” Even ignoring “early in the 17th century” when you mean “some time in the 12th century” this is total nonsense: there is no evidence whatsoever that Hildegarde was the first person to discover this. She was the first person known to have written about it: but that’s a very different matter. And in any case, you don’t increase the shelf life of beer merely by adding hops to it: you have to boil the hops in the wort for it to work.

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