Jaega Wise is the founder and head brewer at Wildcard Brewery in Walthamstow, East London—and increasingly, she’s also made a name for herself as one of U.K. beer’s public-facing ambassadors and true champions.
Wise has won accolades before: In 2018 she was jointly named brewer of the year, along with Fuller’s John Keeling, by the British Guild of Beer Writers. And in 2020 she picked up the Best Beer Broadcaster award for her work on BBC Radio 4’s “The Food Programme,” which she joined as a regular host in 2018. Recent episodes have addressed the challenges Black people face when entering the food and drink industries and the women calling out sexism in beer.
Wise has brought beer to our TV screens, too. Her credits include “The Wine Show” (ITV), “Food Unwrapped” (Channel 4), “Inside the Factory” (BBC), and “A Merry Tudor Christmas” (BBC), for which she recreated a Tudor-style beer.
In 2021, Wise’s outreach work continued with a co-hosting gig on Amazon Prime’s homebrew competition show, “Beer Masters,” alongside singer and beer fan James Blunt. Over the course of its five, hour-long episodes, she introduced beer styles, set challenges, judged beers, and explained the nuances of the brewing process. She even got to flex her Beer Sommelier muscles when challenging the contestants to pair their beers with suitable foods.
I’ve judged alongside Wise at beer competitions before, and know how expert her palate is. It was a real pleasure watching her put those skills to use on screen, all in service of opening this world up to drinkers who may not otherwise have much knowledge or context for the realities of the beer industry. More importantly, she has done all this on a mainstream platform, in front of a wider audience than many beer broadcasters and journalists ever manage to reach. For that she is to be commended, because it does us all a favor.
Words,Anthony Gladman