Sadhbh Warren

When it comes to beer, I wrote the book. Well, a chapter anyway - I recently wrote the 8 page chapter on Sydney’s best beers, numerous breweries and what to do when you're not drinking beer for the Ultimate Beer Guide (Aus and NZ). When I was a little girl I wanted to be a writer and write books about ponies. When I was in college I wanted to be a writer and drink beer. Now I am (technically) an adult I still want to be a writer. Beer and ponies are optional but encouraged. I’ve accepted writing involves a lot less ponies and beer and a lot more work than I had originally thought, but occasionally you get a dream assignment. If you flick to page 42 of the Ultimate Beer Guide , you’ll find my guide to brewing in Sydney. It took two months and far too many hangovers to research and write and I am looking forward to seeing if the ATO will accept receipts from pubs as tax-deductible. When I was writing this piece, I found 5 craft breweries I never knew about within 30 minutes ...

This piece on office friendships, workplace bullying and how to cope when good  working relationships go bad was an interesting piece to cover. I was only able to include a few of the stories I was told but - from the amount of responses I received to one simple tweet asking for people with experience of office bullying - it certainly appears this is an issue that many people deal with on a day to day basis.  You can find the full issue of the magazine on their website where you can see the full piece, or email me if you would like to see more.  A study by the Workplace Bullying Institute found that 35% of people have either been or are being intimidated in their workplace. Sophie* found this out the hard way when she was promoted over her former friend, Jenny. “Jenny became not just my enemy but an outright bully. She complained that it wasn't fair because I'd gotten all these lucky breaks and opportunities. She couldn’t see that the harder I had worked t...

“Hey, did you finish that book I gave you?” “…um. No, not yet.” “That’s okay, I won’t spoil the ending for you. Are you enjoying it?” “…um. No. Not really. I don’t think I’ll finish it.” Ouch. It’s a trivial thing but I always feel bad when someone doesn’t like a book I gave them, especially if I thought that they were a dead-cert to click with it. First comes denial – “Are you sure you are reading the right book?” That’s usually followed by the urge to defend the book (“Have you read the bit with the zombie space monkey butlers? Like, really read it? Twice?”), followed by the sheepish realisation that I got my friend’s reading taste completely wrong and probably wasted several hours of their time and they’d like me to stop going on about it now, please. I’ll admit to a touch of neurosis on this one but I think most people would agree that when you recommend something, you really hope that people will like it and it can be disappointing when they don’t. So cho...