Copyright © 2005 the Brewery History Society

Ray Anderson left the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1972 with degrees in three science subjects, including a PhD in microbial biochemistry, and went to work at the Brewing Industry Research Foundation in Surrey. He has been involved in brewing in one way or another ever since. He began to investigate the industry's past in the mid 1980s when manager of Allied Breweries research laboratory and has since produced over forty papers and articles on various aspects of brewing history. Recent contributions include a dozen pieces for Alcohol and Temperance in Modern History. An International Encyclopaedia and a wide ranging synoptic chapter on industrial brewing in the soon to be published second edition of A Handbook of Brewing. Ray will be known to BHS members as Honorary President of the society.

Peter Brookes read Biochemistry at St. Catherine's College, Oxford and was awarded a PhD from the University of Bath for research on barley germination and malt quality. He worked for Allied Breweries and Carlsberg Tetley for over 30 years in a variety of technical and production jobs and finally was Director of the Tetley's brewery in Leeds. He was President of the Institute of Brewing from 1997 to 1999. Peter Brookes is co-author of the recently published Brewing, Science and Practice.

Mikulas Teich is Emeritus Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge, and Honorary Professor of the Technical University Vienna. His wide-ranging publications in the fields of history of science and technology include A Documentary History of Biochemistry, 1770-1940 published in 1992 (with the late Dorothy M. Needham). He also co-edited with the late Roy Porter twelve collections of essays bringing together comparative, national and interdisciplinary approaches to the history of great movements in the development of human thought and action.

Richard W. Unger holds a doctorate in economic history from Yale University. He has taught medieval history at the University of British Columbia for over 35 years. He is the author of a number of articles and two books on the economic and technical history of brewing: A History of Brewing in Holland 900-1900 Economy, Technology and the State (2001), and Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (2004).

James Sumner studied the history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge, and holds a PhD from the University of Leeds for work on standardisation, quantification and industrialisation in the British brewing industry around 1800. He is now Lecturer in History of Technology at the University of Manchester, where he combines responsibility for the UK National Archive for the History of Computing with continuing work on brewery and related chemical history.

Charlie Bamforth read Biochemistry at the University of Hull and he gained his PhD from the same department as an enzymologist. He joined the brewing industry in 1978 and held senior positions within Brewing Research International and Bass before becoming the first Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor at the University of California, Davis, in 1999. He was Visiting Professor at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. He is author inter alia of Beer: Tap into the Art and Science of Brewing, Standards of Brewing and Beer: Health and Nutrition. Bamforth is Editor in Chief of the Journal of the American Society of Brewing Chemists.

Peter Darby gained his BSc (Hons) in Plant Biology at UEA, Norwich in 1977 followed by a doctorate at the John Innes Institute, Norwich. After a post-doctoral year at the University of Keele, Staffordshire, he moved to the Hop Research Department at Wye College (now East Malling Research) in 1981, taking over responsibility for the breeding programme in 1984 and becoming Head of Department in 1993. His work has been recognised with several national and international awards including the 2003 Royal Agricultural Society of England Award for Technology for his development of dwarf hop varities.

Philip Talbot is a Chartered Management Accountant currently working as a lecturer in accounting at Keele University, in the School of Economics and Management Studies. He is currently completing his PhD at Warwick Business School entitled The Accounting History of the English Brewing Industry 1700-1939: An Exploration of Foucauldian Disciplinarity.