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The world has seen women pass on beer-brewing skills and knowledge to their daughters for eons.
A pair of auspicious events recently converged to provide a platform to celebrate that alignment and offered an opportunity to thank the women on whose shoulders we stand, whenever we raise our pints.
Mother’s Day and the American Homebrewers Association’s National “Big Brew Day” May 7 and 8 cast light on a special debt craft beer lovers owe to women and mothers.
In her carefully researched work “Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600” (NY: Oxford University Press, 1996), Judith Bennett reminds craft beer fans of our roots. Roots that reveal that for most of recorded human history women have been responsible for supplying the world’s beer.
Whether one looks to brewing goddesses, medieval English brewsters, or the women asserting themselves throughout modern craft brewing, the story of women in brewing is an integral thread of human history itself.
In many ancient societies, beer was considered a gift of joy and spirituality from the heavens. In ancient Sumer and Egypt, the gift of fermentation was bestowed upon humanity by goddesses, and in both societies its earthly production was entrusted to females.
The Sumerian goddess Ninkasi watched over all brewing activities as her profession. In Egypt, the goddess Hathor was known as “the inventress of brewing” and “the mistress of intoxication.”
During the first millennium A.D. in mainland Europe though, beer production became recognized as a profitable profession. Taxing and distribution practices led to large-scale brewing, and the home-based female brewing industry all but faded in Europe by 1348. The Plague reopened some doors, but women’s political influence faded again upon the rise of brewers’ guilds, which formed to navigate mounting brewing regulations.
The impact of industrialization is still seen in the rate of women in the craft beer industry, who are outnumbered by men at a rate of 3 to 1. According to statistics the Brewers Association published in September, female-owned breweries make up 23.7% of all craft breweries.
From brewing icons like Independence and The Alchemist to newcomers like Stodgy Brewing in Fort Collins, local favorites like 300 Suns, Bootstrap and Primitive Beer, and persevering maltstresses like Twila Soles of Grouse Malt House in Wellington, amazing women-led and -co-owned enterprises underpin the modern era of craft beer and its future.
The coincidence of “Big Brew Day” on May 7 and Mothers’ Day on May 8 offered a special platform to celebrate women and mothers in our history of beer. Longmont’s Indian Peak Alers homebrew club and Boulder’s Hops, Barley and the Alers joined ranks for Big Brew Day at Stark Fixtures in Longmont to support brewers of all genders.
After a grilled breakfast for early-arrivers, the clubs fired up seven kettles with all-grain batches of both AHA featured beers (CommUNITY Lager and Dark Inception Imperial Porter), a hometown mead and a New Zealand hop IPA.
While nationwide the number of women taking up the homebrew hobby remains low, a new female member joined the IP Alers during their May 7 festivities. The club is also actively exploring ways to foster more interest among local marginalized-gender beer lovers, including presenting at Ales4FemAles events at Left Hand Brewing and engaging in focused diversity and inclusion outreach, notes Elizabeth Burgess, the club’s vice president.
Homebrew clubs provide a vital way for women to recapture the experience of beer, namely through opportunities clubs offer to understand the sensory experience of beer. In this area, women are advantaged with a superior sense of taste and smell, and a greater ability to remember and recount sensory experiences. These skills have earned women valued seats on educated beer sensory analysis panels around the world, including local beer celebrity Julia Herz, who recently became executive director of the AHA.
Women, including mothers, have been active agents in the history of beer. As a class, women have been hindered by centuries of economic and social institutions around beer, but they are challenging the status quo in the craft brewing industry. And through those efforts, women continue to fully engage in the work of modern brewing, from the field to the malthouse, to the brewery floor and the front of the brew house.
Beer was born of female ingenuity. And as IP Alers members enjoy their beers brewed over Mother’s Day weekend, they will be embracing an institution handed down by their own mothers and the innumerable women in whose shadows craft beer stands today.
Cyril Vidergar can be reached with ideas and comments at beerscoop@gmail.com.
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