Jaega Wise: engineering graduate who gave up a City job to brew craft beer

Jaega Wise’s brewing days start early. When I join the head brewer at 8.30am at the Wild Card Brewery in east London, she’s already been at work for over an hour, preparing the fermenter and other vessels for making two batches of the company’s King of Hearts beer over the next 12 hours.

In the time between each stage of the process, she might be speaking to suppliers, checking financial spreadsheets or even restocking the brewery bar – all in day’s work when you’re in a rapidly growing startup and part of the exciting revival of microbreweries taking place across the country.

Such practical work is also a far cry from her first graduate job as a chemical trader in the City, which she took after completing a chemical engineering degree at Loughborough and a placement year with GE’s water division.

“I considered industry very heavily but I really, really wanted to be in London and it was really difficult to find a chemical engineering job here, hence why I went into a commercial role,” says Jaega. “I did that for about three years and figured it wasn’t for me. It was all in an office, it wasn’t very hands-on.”