Jan 8, 2019
Today’s guest is Julie O’Grady, Head of Sales, Marketing, and Events for Liverpool's Neptune Brewery.
Although Julie is relatively new to her current full-time role at Neptune, she’s been part of the brewery since it opened in 2015, as she and her husband, Les, founded the brewery together.
For the first few years, Julie was working full time for the NHS, then Liverpool City Council, and would help out with brewery on nights and weekends. (She'd squeeze in a few tweets during her lunch break is well!)
Julie’s involvement in the beer community goes beyond Neptune though. Just before the brewery opened, Julie founded Ladies That Beer, a meet-up group for beer loving ladies based in Liverpool, because she noticed a lack of women at the beer festivals she was attending.
From its beginnings is a social group, Ladies That Beer has taken on new aims to engage, educate, and empower women who love beer.
Hence why Julie was one of the co-organizers of the event I recorded at today, the Ladies' Big Beery Meet-up. Julie from Ladies That Beer and Alix Shaw from the Crafty Beer Girls (who you heard from in Episode 002 of Beer with Nat) planned this event in Manchester to bring beer loving ladies from across the country together for an afternoon.
And that’s where I recorded my first ever live episode of Beer with Nat! (It's pretty similar to a regular episode, but with a few more woos and claps from my ever-so-engaged audience! Thanks all!)
In this episode, Julie talks us through her and Les's decision to open Neptune Brewery (and the fun story of where the name came from!), along with what it was like to balance the brewery work and her full-time job, to when she knew she was ready to make the transition to beer full-time.
She tells us what aspects of her work she’s most passionate about, what she likes to get up to outside of beer, and what she enjoys best about being a part of the beer industry.
Here she is...