The award-winning brewer told The Morning Advertiser (The MA) she developed a passion for food and nutrition at school, which lead her to studying chemistry and biology at A Level and sparked an interest in genetic engineering.
Young then earned a biotechnology degree from King’s College London, where she also discovered a love for real ale. Inspired, she pursued a Master’s in brewing and distilling at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University.
Returning to her hometown of Bristol, Young started her brewing career in the lab at local brewery Smiles, though the start of this journey was not as smooth sailing as first hoped.
Reflecting on her time at Smiles, the brewing director says: “There was a bit of reservations about actually letting me brew, but I chivvied and nagged until they let me do it, and I was bloody awful.
“Digging out the mash tuns, getting inside the fermenting vessels to clean it, it was very physical. The malts sacks were 50kg and you’d have to hoist and then drag it across. So, I wasn’t the most efficient brewer they had.
“But I did love the environment and the fact we were making great beers that were being enjoyed in the pub. It’s job satisfaction I still have with me today; you create something that people absolutely love.”
After working at Smiles for a year, Young then joined Brewing Research International (BRI) near Redhill, now Camden BRI, heading up the core research team at its pilot brewery.
It was here the industry stalwart made some life-long contacts that have helped her during her career. Though Young says she was always looking for an opportunity to get back into commercial brewing.
After what Young playfully describes as “several failed attempts”, her chance finally presented itself in 1999, when Fuller’s were looking for a new young brewer to be part of a “succession plan”.
She continues: “The brewing director was retiring and John Keeling was stepping up, so they were looking to take someone on [as part of that].
Brilliant experience
“It was my training programme to become the next brewing director and because people knew that, they helped me on my journey, but it did involve doing all the shift brewing, working on the cask line, dealing with the ullage.
“I also worked in bottling for a while and was really just very hand on, which was brilliant experience.”
Hands on experience like this is something the leading brewer adds every person in a position of leadership within the industry should have behind them: “I really believe that in brewing, you need to have come up through the ranks. You can’t expect all your team to do it if you haven’t done it.”
After managing some big projects at Fuller’s, including the installation of a new tank farm development in 2006, Young found it difficult to navigate returning to brewing after having her second child and made the decision to take some time away from the industry.
She went on to train to become a physics, chemistry and biology teacher in a secondary school as this fitted in better with family life, but Young says the “call of going back to the brewery was too great”.
The brewing expert then re-joined Fuller’s after five years of teaching, working her way up to head brewer, before joining St Austell in 2020 after the sale of Fuller’s brewery to Asahi in 2019.
While Young says her world “fell apart” when the Fuller’s brewery was sold, she felt “very lucky” when St Austell Brewery approached her with an opportunity to “go back to her roots” in the West Country.
However, taking over the role of brewing director was bittersweet, as her predecessor had passed away from cancer: “I was very proud because I was asked by Roger [Ryman] to do this role. So I felt I was keeping his legacy and the breweries for him.
“Not necessarily in the same way because I knew there was work to be to be done on it, but, I was honoured [to have been asked].”
Since becoming brewing director at St Austell, the beer connoisseur has found the most pressure in her role comes from economic challenges.
“You want to give the sales teams what they want, and it is harder for them to sell beer in the current climate with the cost of living, so there’s a lot of cost pressures.
“If beer is made by people who aren’t passionate about it, it comes through.”
St Austell brewing director Georgina Young
“We’ve had the energy crisis, there was Covid, the prices of raw material last year and then this year it’s national insurance and the people crisis.
“At St Austell we are continuously beating that drum on beer quality and never compromising really.
“But we all live in the state of ‘perma crisis’ and we all feel the pressure”, she explains.
And this pressure can be alienating, the beer expert adds: “There are certain things you have to do as a leader that mean you are on your own.
“You’re not ‘one of the lads’ anymore, and so you can’t really behave like that, you have to always be very conscious of doing the right thing and leading by example.”
Though with a wealth of experience in the sector, Young says one of her key strengths is bringing people together: “I enjoy having a happy team and seeing the satisfaction of the beers going out, whether that’s in a cask, a keg, bottle or a can, at the end it’s that satisfaction of the customer enjoying the products we make.
“But it is a team effort. If beer is made by people who aren’t passionate about it, it comes through.
“We’ve brought some people in who have really helped take us to the next level from a quality point of view. There was nothing wrong with the beers we were making, but we are now working to a higher standard with our food safety.
“The wonderful thing about this industry is we make all these beers within specification but the biological process offers a slightly different character.”
This, Young adds, makes the connection between pubs and breweries really important: “We’re trying to get that passion across to everyone in the pub to understand the way that they look after the beer can affect it.
“The brewery is the beating heart and the pubs are the really great shop windows for these amazing products, along with the food and all the experience you get with it.”
Young’s passion for the brewing industry is palpable, and she has achieved a lot during her career, not least becoming St Austell’s first female brewing director and being given a lifetime achievement award from the Brewers Congress in 2023.
Very lucky
But maintaining her strong family bonds while having a successful career is something she is very proud of: “Having got to the level of brewing director, I feel very proud of that, and having done it with a husband and two children who still talk to me most of the time, because you do make sacrifices along the way.
“I’m sure I’ve missed the odd nativity play or sports day but I’m hugely appreciative of the people who have helped me along the way and believed in me, especially my husband, I’m very lucky.”
However, that drive to succeed has not faded, something Young muses surprises her at this stage in her career: “I still feel I’ve got something to prove when, actually, I probably should just relax and enjoy it a bit more.
“Brewing has always been my calling, but I suppose I’ve always been slightly in the shadows.
“I’m really proud of taking my learnings and now being recognised for always being the one behind the scenes and sort of coming out of the shadows.
“I can’t take credit for Tribute or Proper Job or Anthem. London Pride was made so long ago nobody can really take credit for that, but we are continuing to make high quality beer.. To me, that’s more important than being the creator of this beer or that beer.”
While the well-established brewer says she is not off climbing mountains every weekend, she does enjoy switching off with a good book or Pilates, though the lines between personal and professional often blur and the brewing director can also be found at local CAMRA meetings.
Home life also looks a little different now compared with the start of her career, as her two children are older, but Young is excited about having more time for herself in the future: “I don’t have a massive list of hobbies because there just hasn’t been time to do that, so I’m looking forward to having time to do some travelling or more leisure activities at the weekends.”
Though she acknowledges the industry, like her home life, is different now, mostly due to legislative changes: “It’s really sad that a lot of brewers, especially craft brewers, are falling by the wayside or have been gobbled up into the global corporations. There’s a lot of focus now on making sure breweries are operationally efficient.”
Looking to the future of brewing, Young encourages women joining the industry to use their voice and speak up if something is not right, in particular regarding equal pay, as this is something she would have liked the confidence to have done when she started her brewing journey.
Intended or not, Young has helped carve out the path for women in brewing and seen great success, both personal and professional, along the way. One thing is for certain; the industry will continue to see great things in beer while she leads the charge.
