Annabel enters the man's world of beer testing

Apr 1 2010 by Diane Parkes, Birmingham Post

Diane Parkes talks to one of the few female beer testers in the country.

Telling Annabel Smith I was not a real ale drinker was probably not the best beginning. The UK’s only female beer tester with quality auditors Cask Marque, Annabel dismisses such statements with a wave of the hand.

“When someone says ‘I don’t like beer’ it is like saying ‘I don’t like food’ because you can’t dislike all of them,” she says. “They are all just too different to taste the same. If you try them you will find a beer you love.”

And Annabel should know. As a woman who travels the country sampling cask ales she has drunk her way through thousands of different tipples. Over the five years she has been in the job, the 41-year-old has visited hundreds of pubs from Birmingham to Brighton and Walsall to Fort William, sampling up to 36 beers a day. And she is passionate about getting people to try cask ale.

“The problem is that they have an image, and that is an old-fashioned image,” she says. “It is not all men in sandals. We really need to get people to get past this image and try cask ales for the first time. They will be pleasantly surprised.”

Annabel herself is a convert. Brought up in Yorkshire she managed a pub for 12 years and admits that when she first began she had no taste for ale.

“The owner was a real beer drinker and we had a very high turnover of cask ales. He really encouraged me to try them and to become interested. By the time I left I knew a lot about cask ales.

“I then went to work for Guinness where I was training people across the UK to pull the perfect pint. But whenever I went into these pubs I was always asking them about cask ales. So, when this job at Cask Marque came up, a colleague pointed me in the direction, saying they had found the perfect job for me.”

And they were right. It is Annabel’s perfect job.

“Whenever I go to a pub I always drink beer,” says Annabel. “I don’t think I ever quite switch off my work mode though, as I can tell straight away if the beer is too warm or too cold, simply by holding the glass. The worst is when a few of us go out together and I have to tell them to put their thermometers away.”

Which brings us on to how to judge the perfect pint.

“The first thing we test is temperature,” says Annabel. “It is the key. A pint should be between 10-14 degrees centigrade. That is perfect for really developing the flavour. If it is too cold it can lose an awful lot of its flavour. I can actually tell by holding the glass but we have thermometers to record the exact temperature.