Charlie Bamforth is Distinguished Professor of Malting and Brewing Sciences at the University of California, Davis and Honorary Professor in the School of Biosciences at the University of Nottingham. He is immediate past President of the Institute of Brewing & Distilling (headquarters London) and was for 18 years the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Society of Brewing Chemists. He has been in the industry since 1978, at the Brewing Research Foundation (twice) and Bass before moving to the US in 1999. Charlie has published extensively on beer and brewing – and even more so on football.
Johan Swinnen is Professor of Economics and Director of the LICOS-Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance at the KU Leuven; Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels and part-time Visiting Professor at the Centre for Food Security and the Environment (FSE) at Stanford University. Earlier he was President of the International Association of Agricultural Economists (2012-15), Lead Economist at the World Bank (2003-4) and Economic Advisor at the European Commission (1998-2001). He also is a regular advisor to institutions such as the FAO, World Bank, EBRD, OECD, etc.
He is the President of The Beeronomics Society, and has published “The Economics of Beer” (2009, Oxford University Press); “Beeronomics: How Beer Explains the World” (2017, Oxford University Press) and “Economics of the Craft Beer Revolution: A Comparative International Perspective” (2018, Palgrave Macmillan).
He has also published widely on global value chains, standards, international development, agricultural and food policies, political economy, institutional reform and trade. Recent books include “Global Supply Chains, Standards, and the Poor” (2007, CABI); “Political Power and Economic Policy” (2011, Cambridge Univ Press); “Quality Standards, Value Chains and International Development” (2015, Cambridge Univ Press); “The Economics of Chocolate” (2015, Oxford Univ Press); “The Political Economy of Agricultural and Food Policies” (2018, Palgrave Macmillan).
Kevin Verstrepen is Professor in Genetics and Genomics at Leuven University and scientific director at VIB (Flanders Institute for Biotechnology). He also serves as the director of the Leuven Institute for Beer Research and as Honorary Professor at Nottingham University. Kevin Verstrepen graduated with a PhD in molecular genetics from KU Leuven in 2003. He served as a fellow at MIT before setting up his own lab at Harvard University in 2005, which he moved to KU Leuven in 2009. He won several awards, including the Harvard Derek Bok Award, EMBO YIP and General Biology Prize of the Belgian Academy of Science.
Esko Pajunen (1945) graduated as biochemical engineer from Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) in 1970. Having served HUT as Senior Assistant in biochemistry, Esko joined in 1973 The Biotechnical Laboratory of The Technical Research Centre in Finland (VTT) as scientist for process technology in brewing and malting. In 1978 he was appointed R&D Director in the Finnish Food Industries Federation. In 1979 Esko joined the Finnish brewery Sinebrychoff as R&D Manager and thereafter in 1987 he was appointed Production Director during the construction of the new greenfield brewery in Kerava. In 1992 Esko started as SVP R&D being also responsible for the reconstruction and modernisation of Vena brewery in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 2006 Esko moved to Carlsberg to head the Carlsberg Research Center as VP R&D until his retirement in 2009.
Esko Pajunen joined EBC Biochemistry Group (later EBC Brewing Science Group) in 1978, was elected to EBC Council in 1988, to chair the EBC Technology and Engineering Forum in 1991, to EBC Vice President in 1998 and EBC President in 1999 until 2003 and later to EBC Executive Committee until 2011. During 1987-2010 he was chairman and director of Panimolaboratorio, the joint research organisation of the Finnish breweries and maltings. He received the Finnish Award of Engineering 1995 on Immobilized Yeast Maturation Process. Esko was also a member of the Supervisory Board and the Research Strategy Committee of the Brewing Research international (BRi) during 1997-2008. He is member of IBD, ASBC and MBAA as well as a member of the Chevalerie du Fourquet des Brasseurs.