Brewing Pioneers: Teri Fahrendorf
This week we’ll be getting to know Teri Fahrendorf, one of the first female craft brewers in the United States. She was the founding brewer at Oregon’s Steelhead 31 years ago—her third brewing job. By the time she stepped away from that job seventeen years later, she had amassed the kind of resume that would have made her a first-ballot hall of famer (should such things exist in beer): she brewed one of the foundational IPAs in the Northwest, oversaw the expansion of Steelhead to five locations in two states, earned eight GABF medals herself while the company collected another sixteen over the span. She was also the first female class president of the Siebel Institute, the brewing school she attended in 1988.
All of those accomplishments are impressive, but it’s what she did next that has had such lasting influence. In 2007, following a road trip around the country as a visiting brewer, she founded the Pink Boots Society. Even then, 20 years after she started working as a brewer, it was still very rare to find women in the brewhouse. Pink Boots is dedicated to supporting, educating, and advancing women in the beer (and later wider alcohol) industry. From an initial list containing sixty names, there are now thousands of members worldwide. Women are still underrepresented in breweries, but they’re no longer uncommon. Because of the way Pink Boots has accelerated this evolution, it’s no exaggeration to say that no single brewer has had a bigger effect on the course of American brewing than Teri Fahrendorf.
She did all of this the hard way, too—as a working brewer who had to enter the job market, competing against men for positions as a brewer. In the three posts that follow, Teri describes her life, challenges, and triumphs as a working brewer.
When I started this series with Suzi Denison, who co-founded New Albion, I imagined they’d look like profiles. Yet listening to these women tell their stories, I realized it was best to intervene as little as possible. So in the posts that follow, you’ll mostly hear Teri’s voice. Here’s the first installment, covering her early life and education.
Early Life
Teri Fahrendorf was born in 1960 in Wisconsin, growing up in a German-American family. As such, she became aware of beer at an early age. It wasn’t a big deal and she described a typical experience. “I remember being twelve and my family went out to pizza to this restaurant in Milwaukee. My father ordered a pitcher of beer and six mugs. The waitress said, ‘There’s only two adults.’ And he said, ‘Either you bring the kids glasses, or they’re drinking out of ours.’ So there was no taboo with alcohol and it was perfectly fine and a part of many meals.”
On another occasion, she discovered a little literature from the hometown brewery. “I remember going to a church rummage sale and finding this little blue booklet: How Beer is Made. I was so excited and I bought that little booklet and brought it home and I was going to learn how beer was made! I was about nine years old, right? So I get home from church and I’m looking at it and it must have been an information booklet from Miller. It talked about mash presses and big machines, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, you can only make beer if you have a factory!’”
She enjoyed making things, including bread, which her parents let her make when they were not home. (“You can’t bake it until we get home,” she reported them saying, “because you’re too little to use the oven by yourself.”) That interest in craft turned to fermentation in college, first with jug wine.
“In college, this gal gave a speech in speech class on how to make balloon-jug wine. Oh my gosh! I went and bought some Welch’s grape juice concentrate, baker’s yeast, and a balloon that day. I had a gallon jug and sugar, and that’s all it was. It made some pretty strong stuff. You get your gallon jug and you put your balloon over it and the balloon would swell up and when the balloon shrunk down it was ready to go. I assume the CO2 just leaked through the balloon at some point. That was my first foray into liquid fermentation.”
It intrigued her enough that a few years later she continued making wine. “I interned at Honeywell for computer programing in 1983. One day I was bored and looking through the yellow pages and found winemaking. I went and bought some winemaking supplies. I made it from Australian ‘Traminer’ grape juice concentrate. And I made peach wine from canned peaches, I think. We made some crazy stuff.”
Choosing Beer over Computers
Like so many brewers, Teri didn’t start out pursuing beer. She was a part of that early wave of techie folks who headed to the Bay Area in the 1970s and ‘80s to do computer programing. She was swimming in a sea of good wine and that was when she turned her attention to making beer, visiting her first homebrew shop.
“It was a long way away. It was this dark, dusty place and the hops were in these little bags and they were just brown. So I started making homebrew, and I homebrewed for three years.” During this period, as her love for beer and brewing grew, she began to realize that computer programing didn’t make her heart sing. (“Cubicle life is not for me!”) She started visiting breweries and got more and more excited about beer. A watershed event—one that foreshadowed a similar one that would come two decades later—came in 1986. “A girlfriend and I went on, as far as I know, the first road trip by women to visit all the breweries on the West Coast.”
“My friend flew out and we drove from San Francisco to Portland and back and we visited every brewery we could find along the way—there weren’t that many. I remember visiting the original BridgePort. It had just been built two years before. We went to Widmer and it was Kurt and Rob and their dad—and Kurt was giving us dirty looks, like ‘you’re interrupting our work day.’ His dad Ray was like, ‘I’ll give you the nickel tour!’”
“That was a huge turning point. All my spare money back in the 1980s went for student loans and to buy suits. You had to wear suits to work back in those days. So I’d finally bought my fifth suit—a suit jacket with a skirt, that’s what women wore—and so I finally had one for each day of the week. Now I had a little extra money and I thought it would be nice to go on vacation. My sister lived in Denver so I thought I’d attend the American Homebrewers Association conference. At the time the GABF was held at the same time.” In the mid-80s, the events were a lot more intimate, so she was able to meet heavy hitters like Charlie Papazian, Michael Jackson, and future Rogue brewer John Maier.
Then, at the awards ceremony, Teri made a startling discovery. “I went to the GABF on the Saturday after Homebrew Con and all the judges got up on stage. Here’s all the winners: every single winner gets up on stage at one time. There were maybe 15 or 20 of them—and one of them was a woman! I was like omigosh, she won a medal! It was Mellie Pullman from Schirf Brewing/Wasatch ales. I thought, ‘If she can do the job, so can I. I’m about her size.’ John Maier said that he had been a senior aircraft technician at Hughes Aircraft in Los Angeles. I thought if he can make the jump from high tech to brewing and survive financially, so can I. So by the end of that weekend I had decided to check out Siebel and go to brewing school.”
First Female President of the Siebel Institute
Following the AHA/GABF, Teri had to take a trip to Chicago for work. “So I called the Siebel Institute and said ‘Hey, I’m going to be in Chicago. Can I come and visit you and get a tour?’ One of the instructors’ name was Ted, and he gave me the tour.” Although she had no science background, he encouraged her to apply. “Remember this: in 1988, there were basically about 50 national brand breweries in the country and about 50 craft breweries. The possibility of getting a job at a craft brewery was pretty slim, but I thought it had potential. I didn’t want to screw up my career, because I was working for a Fortune 100 company, so I asked for a leave of absence. They said no. I said okay. Then I quit. I gave them a month’s notice, packed all my stuff in storage, gave my pet bird to my boyfriend for safekeeping, and off I flew.”
Having just left a promising corporate job to take on a bunch of debt to get a job in a dying industry, she went back to Wisconsin, picked up a loaner car from parents, and then rented a second room from a friend in Chicago. “I basically had a sleeping bag on the floor and a box turned upside down and a lamp on the box. That was my desk.”
“At Siebel, all of my classmates were from large breweries—every one. There was one other woman in the class from Stroh’s. They were starting to make malternative beverages and she was focused on that. There were two guys from Molson and there were five guys from Coors. And then there were guys from Oriental Brewing (Seoul, Korea) and a guy from India—and all over the world. It was the biggest check I’d ever written out in my entire life. It literally cost half of what my college education cost. Siebel was $5,500 at the time for the Diploma Course.”
“They have a little event the night before our classes started where it was like a social. You had a name tag on and everything. This is what people were saying: ‘Nice to meet you so-and-so, what brand do you brew?’ That’s all they said, ‘What brand do you brew?’ I said, ‘I don’t brew brands, I brew styles.’ They said, “Styles? What are styles?’ Literally. None of them, not a one, knew what styles were. They brewed yellow beer.”
“I took it on myself to educate people. I thought, ‘This is ridiculous.’ Some of them had already been through UC-Davis. Siebel was like finishing school, graduate school, or something. The packaging manager from Coors was there. Management wanted to move him into upper management, but the guy had come up through the bottom of the ranks and all he knew was putting liquid into packaging. He didn’t know anything about beer or brewing. So I arranged a beers-of-the-world night. I found some liquor store and bought one of every style of beer I could find. Blew the dust off them—they were all imports and half of them were skunked. But I did the best I could. I explained all the styles.”
Furthering her classmates’ education, Teri decided to start taking them on field trips to local breweries. “Then I asked the instructors if they had a way to brew beer there. ‘Yeah, we got a little five-gallon system.’ Okay, let’s make a class brew. ‘What do you want to make?’ I said I wanted to make a lager because I didn’t have refrigeration at home. Then I said I’d like to make a doppelbock. My classmates said sure, but oh my god, they didn’t even know what it tasted like. So then I went and got some doppelbock and gave it to them. Of course they hated the doppelbock so we made an Oktoberfest.”
“After all that, two Canadian guys who ended up being my best friends there said they were nominating me for president. I said, ‘Why?’ They said, ‘Because you organize everything already—you’re already doing everything a president should do.’ I got to be the first woman class president in Siebel’s history, which is pretty awesome. At the time the Diploma Course was the biggest, gnarliest course you could take at Siebel—and they’d had that course at Siebel since like 1880 or something. So for a hundred years they hadn’t had a woman president. They had this hallway with all the class photos. We had our class photo where they took a head shot of each person. They put them in little ovals like in the old days—these little oval head shots going around the page. And it said ‘President’ below my name. I could see all the previous years, and there was [New Glarus’] Dan Carey—he was one of the first—and Jamie Emmerson [Full Sail], John Maier [Rogue], and Don Outterson. And those four guys were the only homebrewers who had attended Siebel prior to myself. I had met all of them but Jamie at the time.”
As Teri alludes, very few American craft brewers had gone to brewing school. She figured it would give her an edge as she entered the job market. In the next installment, we’ll hear how that worked out.