Lynne Mowbray|

Brendan Locke may have only owned his Coldstream Street butchers shop in Yamba for a year, but he’s already winning awards for his sausages, in the northern rivers area.

Locke’s Butchery Yamba, recently became the Northern NSW Regional finalist in the Sausage King competition, taking out the gold award for their BBQ chicken supreme sausage and silver in the traditional Australian beef category.

“We entered in both the traditional beef and the poultry categories, in the sausage competition,” Brendan said.

“The traditional beef is a very tricky category because everybody makes a traditional beef sausage, whereas not everybody makes a gourmet sausage.

“Every single butchers shop does a plain beef sausage so the competition is very high, so to place second in that category is more valuable to me than taking first place in the chicken category,” he said.

Brendan said that he’s been in the meat game for the last 15 years starting off in the slaughterhouse and then worked for Australia Quarantine – meat inspecting, before getting into butchering, so he’s sort of covered ‘from paddock to plate’, within his industry.

He said that this is the first time that he’s entered the competition as he’s only had the shop for 12 months.

“To be able to use my recipes and ideas that I’ve had for years and go up against some pretty stiff competition with my first attempt in the first year – I’m pretty rapt,” Brendan said.

“We’ve got six different lines of flavoured sausages as well as traditional beef and pork sausages, for our customers to choose from.

“So drop in and see us and pick up some of our award winning sausages,” he said.