John Rowling is past President and co-founder of CAMRA BC (the Campaign for Real Ale Society of British Columbia) and a co-founder and long-time director of Victoria's Great Canadian Beer Festival Society.

Rowling was born in the United Kingdom, in Sidcup, Kent in the suburbs of London on May 11, 1940. He survived the Blitz and a bomb that destroyed all the houses on his street save his family home. Rowling studied at London University, graduating with a B.Sc. in Geology in 1962. He emigrated to Canada later that year to pursue graduate studies at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) in Fredericton. After four years at UNB, Rowling settled in Calgary, working as an exploration geologist for Chevron and other companies for the next 20 years. In 1988, he moved to Victoria to take up a position in the Petroleum Geology Branch of the BC Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources, continuing there until his retirement in 1997.

In 1968 Rowling married Carol Graham, and they had three children and six grandchildren. Carol passed away in 2022.

Rowling has been a beer and pub enthusiast all his life. From Canada he followed the activities of the UK's Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) movement. His brother Rob had joined CAMRA UK in 1974, later becoming President of the Boston, Licolnshire branch. Shortly after his move to Victoria, John learned of the existence of a CAMRA Canada and signed up. On April 7, 1990 at a meeting at Spinnaker's Pub in Victoria, Rowling along with his wife Carol and Phil Cottrell and Dave Preston founded a CAMRA Victoria branch. The group opted for independence from the eastern-based CAMRA Canada and in September 1990 registered CAMRA BC as an incorporated society, with its own constitution, by-laws and finances. Rowling served as the first President from 1990-1992, with a further term in 2000-2003.

Rowling and other CAMRA BC members participated in Victoria's first beer festival in July 1992. The experience inspired them to create an annual festival under CAMRA's auspices. Starting in 1993 as the Victoria Microbrewery Festival, it showcased BC's craft breweries, while also bringing in a smaller number of brewers from other provinces and the USA. In 1995, the event was renamed the Great Canadian Beer Festival (GCBF) and a separate body, the GCBF Society, was spun off from CAMRA to assume ongoing responsibility for planning and organization. Rowling and Gerry Hieter were for many year the main organizers, and Rowling remained a GCBF Director until 2018. In 2019 the GCBF Society disbanded and a new organization, the Victoria Beer Society, took over responsibility for the festival.

Rowling was a frequent contributor to CAMRA BC's newsletter, What's Brewing, launched in June 1990 under the editorship of Phil Atkinson. (CAMRA UK, CAMRA Canada and CAMRA BC all had newsletters by this same name.) With the very first issue of What's Brewing BC, Rowling started the long-running column that would eventually become The Hopbine, "a fresh gathering of news and gossip"). In his column Rowling brought together short news items, announcements, reviews, comments and opinions on happenings in the beer world; he continued to write it until the end of 2003. From about 2004-2015, Rowling regularly wrote about beer and the BC craft beer scene for Victoria's Eat Magazine, and during the same period he was the BC correspondent for the California-based Celebrator Beer Magazine.

In 2002, Matt Phillips of Victoria's Phillips Brewing Company created a special beer to honour Rowling as "a trailblazer and true champion of the craftbrewers' art" – Big Bad John's Traditional English Barley Wine. "Giants fear him / Taste buds applaud him" declared its label. In 2018 Rowling stepped down from the Board of the GCBF Society. The following year, Rowling and Gerry Hieter were presented with Legend Awards at the BC Brewing Awards, in recognition of their contributions to BC's craft beer community.

Jim Rimmer was born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1934. In 1950, he undertook a six-year apprenticeship with local printer and publisher J.W. Boyd and Sons. He subsequently worked for seven years as a journeyman compositor for several BC newspapers, including the Vancouver Province, Vancouver Sun, and the Williams Lake Tribune. From 1972 to 1999, Rimmer ran a freelance design office, working as an illustrator, graphic designer, and type designer; some of his more notable commercial designs include the logo for Canadian Pacific Airlines, and the provincial mark for British Columbia.

Rimmer designed and cut his first typeface, Juliana Old Style, in 1980. In the years following, he designed and produced numerous faces in both metal and digital format, including proprietary fonts and typeface revivals. For several years during the 1980s Rimmer worked with Giampa Text Ware, operated by Gerald Giampa. Rimmer designed digital type fonts with this firm and its successor, Lanston Type Company. He was an active member of the American Typecasting Fellowship beginning in 1984, and founded the Rimmer Type Foundry in 1998.

In 1974, Rimmer founded Pie Tree Press, named after an old apple tree in his backyard, the fruit of which was used to make pies. As Pie Tree Press, Rimmer printed numerous broadsides and books, including Alison’s Fishing Birds, commissioned by Colophon Books. He subsequently produced four major limited edition publications, for which he did the typesetting, illustrations and book-binding: Shadow River: the Selected and Illustrated Poems of Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (1997), A Christmas Carol (1998), Leaves from the Pie Tree (2006), an autobiographical work including “how-to” knowledge, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (2008). Rimmer was working on the design of the ‘Dubloon’ typeface for a fifth book, Treasure Island, at the time of his death (this font will be released as the “Rimmer” typeface).

Over the course of his career, Rimmer taught drawing and typography classes at many local colleges and universities, including the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, Capilano College, Kwantlen College, Simon Fraser University, and the University College of the Fraser Valley. He also held workshops in hand-setting, printing, and book-binding. Rimmer’s work earned him awards from the Creative Club, Graphic Designers of Canada, Art Direction Creativity in Illustration, and the American Typecasting Fellowship. A series of broadsides designed for Westgraphica, now Karo, earned him the “Communication Arts Award of Excellence” in the self-promotion class. “Rimmerfest : An Evening to Celebrate Jim Rimmer and His Many Contributions” took place on November 25, 2006; the event was organized by Simon Fraser University Library. In 2007, Rimmer was made a fellow of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada.

Jim Rimmer passed away in New Westminster on January 8, 2010.

The BC Book Prizes, including The Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, are presented annually at the Lieutenant Governor’s BC Book Prize Gala in April.
The awards carry a cash prize of $2000 plus a certificate. The exception is the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, which is a separate prize category. Prizes include: Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize, Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize, Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize and the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, and the Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award.