A green printing company and a firm which trains people how to taste beer are among the winners of the Queens Awards for Enterprise.

Print firm Seacourt, of Cowley, Oxford, will receive a sustainable development award, while beer-tasting trainers FlavorActiV, of Chinnor, are to receive the prestigious award for innovation.

The awards were announced on Saturday - the Queen's birthday - and directors of the two companies will attend a reception at Buckingham Palace later this year for winners from across the UK.

Seacourt, which employs 22 people at Horspath Road industrial estate, was the environmental prize winner in the 2005 Oxfordshire Business of the Year Awards.

Managing director Gareth Dinnage said: "It's great to win this latest award. We feel we are leading the charge in Oxfordshire to encourage more businesses to become sustainable."

He explained that sustainability was a major selling point at the old-established print company, which has been pursuing a green policy since 1997.

He said: "In the last three years, we have reduced waste going to landfill by 80 per cent.

"Now we use 100 per cent renewable electricity and we use 85 per cent recycled material. On top of all that, our premises are now carbon neutral."

It is the second Queen's Award for FlavorActiV, employing 12 people at its Oakley Road headquarters.

In 2005 it won an award in the export category. About 95 per cent of its sales are made overseas. Founded in 1996, the company exploits research by its director Dr Bill Simpson to identify and stabilise flavours in beers, helping brewers maintain consistency in their product or even to design new drinks.

The company targets the world's 12,000 largest brewers and trains their tasters.

It makes 39 flavours and has produced chemicals to help tasters identify positive and negative beer flavours - all of them named, the most unattractive being 'baby vomit'.

Marketing manager and beer flavour consultant Adam Fenton said: "Brewers have to achieve consistency of quality for each batch, each site, and from time to time - and whenever they introduce new machinery."

Another winner in this year's innovation category is Nanoanalysis of High Wycombe, a subsidiary of Oxford Instruments, based in Tubney Wood, near Abingdon.

It has come up with a radical new cooling technology for electron beam analytical microscopes.