Teri Fahrendorf: Becoming a Brewer

 
 
This week I'll be celebrating the remarkable life of Teri Fahrendorf, a pioneer in craft brewing. In this oral history, Teri tells her life in three parts: 1) early influences and brewing school, 2) brewing professionally, and 3) founding the Pink Boots Society. It's the second in the women pioneers series on the site, so be sure to read New Albion co-founder Suzi Denison's story if you missed it last fall.

This week I am celebrating the life and work of Teri Fahrendorf, one of the earliest women brewers to stir a mash tun in the craft beer era. In yesterday’s post, we learned how she got interested in fermentation at a young age, abandoned her career as a computer programmer in Silicon Valley for beer, and went off to learn brewing at the Siebel Institute, becoming the first woman class president in the school’s long history.

Today we pick up the story in the weeks after she graduated from Siebel and hit the job market. It was a tough time in the industry. National brands were doing great, but smaller regional breweries were steadily dying off, their jobs lost as volume was absorbed by the giant plants by the national companies. Meanwhile, craft beer was still finding its footing. As Teri started looking for work, only a hundred craft breweries were open, and most of them weren’t hiring. Fortunately, new breweries were opening all the time, and the supply of trained brewers wasn’t keeping up.

 
 

Many of the pioneering women brewers in craft beer founded their own breweries, a dynamic that created its own set of challenges. Teri Fahrendorf entered the world as a working brewer, however—she may be the first woman in the US to do so—and that created a different set. As you’ll see in her descriptions she encountered the pervasive sexism of men who didn’t believe women could brew. In a moment when we’re considering the ways men treat women in the beer industry (still!), it stands as a remarkable document of how that dynamic has shifted. Men at the time were as often clueless as aggressively sexist. Yet Teri instinctively understood that she couldn’t rock the boat too much. It was a delicate dance, at once requiring Teri to be firm and confident, but also not too confident, lest she puncture a man’s sense of masculinity. Of course, male brewers in the business didn’t have to consider these matters—it fell entirely on Teri to find that sweet spot where confidence and competence advanced her career without becoming an obstacle. As with yesterday’s post, Teri tells her own story, with only small and infrequent additions by me to connect her narrative.


 

Reimagining the Brewhouse

“I went to brewing school because I knew that brewing was a physical job and that people would take one look at me, a hundred and twenty pounds and go, ‘Yeah right. She’s not going to be able to do the heavy lifting.’ So I figured I’d have to use my brain over my brawn. I knew that no one would give me a job without something extra. At the time if you were a guy and you were homebrewing, especially if you won a homebrewing ribbon or medal, you could have gotten a job. There weren’t that many openings, though.”

“I knew I wanted to live in Oregon, so I went back to the Bay Area (where I had lived for nearly five years) and I got my car and my bird and my suitcase and I started driving in my little Honda to Portland. I stopped at every single brewery and every single homebrew shop and dropped off a resume. I knew if a brewery was opening and somebody needed a brewer, they’d probably go to the local homebrew shop and ask them. That’s how I [later] found brewers, too, when I worked for Steelhead. Of course everybody says, ‘We’re not hiring.’ It was January. I said, ‘Oh, that’s fine. Just hang onto this in case you hear of a brewery opening.’ I went to Mendocino Brewing and talked to Don Barkley. I was stupid. I didn’t know any better—I wore a suit! I’m wearing my flat pumps and my best navy blue suit and Don Barkley’s like, ‘Wow! You dress better than our bankers.’ I didn’t know.” 

“I knew no one had jobs, so I started asking for informational interviews. ‘What’s that?’ ‘That’s where I just come and talk and you might give me some advice about my resume or what I need to do to become a better candidate and you can tell me about your brewery.’ So I call Karl Ockert at BridgePort. ‘No, we’re not hiring.’ I go to Portland Brewing, I’m talking to Fred Bowman. Teddy Peets told me much later that Fred turned to him and asked, ‘Do you think girls could actually make good beer?’ That was totally typical back then—nobody knew women could brew because they'd never seen them do it. I did get an interview over at Pyramid brewing in Kalama. I went there and brewed for a day with Tom Baune—basically like an all-day brewing interview. That’s something I always do with my brewers. It’s super telling. I was following him around and he just doesn’t talk. He’s one of those quiet types. At the end of the day he goes, ‘Okay, you got it? Do you think you can do that?’ I’m like, ‘You never explained what you were doing.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but I showed you.’ I’m thinking it would be horrible to work with this guy.” 

“I remember calling Conrad Santos, who was the regional brewing manager for McMenamins. We became friends later, but at the time, he asked, ‘Can you carry a half-barrel up a flight of steps?’ I said, ‘No, but I’m pretty smart, so I’d figure out another way. What I’d do is get a slide and I’d put a winch at the top and I’d winch it up or I’d take a hand truck and I’d bump-bump-bump it up the steps.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s not going to work. We require all of our brewers to carry a half-barrel up a flight of steps.’ That’s over 160 pounds. He said, ‘It doesn’t matter, that’s the requirement. If you can’t do it, there’s no sense in me interviewing you.’ So I’d get questions like that.”

“Even Tom up at Pyramid said, ‘I want to see if you can load a bag of grain in the mill hopper.’ This mill hopper is like six feet off the ground, so it’s over my head. I said, ‘Well, what I would do is get some cinder blocks and some boards and I’d create steps and I’d dump half of this bag into a five-gallon pail and then I could make two trips.’ (And you can definitely make two trips before all the grain goes down.)

So what I realized is that if somebody wants to hire women as brewers, here’s what they need to do. Well, first of all, start asking better questions at the interview. Instead of asking, ‘Can you do this the way we’re used to doing it because we’re tall, strong guys,’ the question should be ‘I need to get this grain from ground level into that hopper. How would you do it?’ ‘I need to get this keg up from the basement up to the top of the steps. How would you do it?’ Women are clever like that. What you’ll find out is that whatever a woman recommends to you will make a much safer brewery for anyone. If you want to have a safe brewery, have a woman do a safety audit.”

 

First Jobs

Despite hustling around the Northwest, Teri couldn’t find anyone hiring. She did, however, field an inquiry from a start-up in the Bay Area about a brewer. “The General Manager said, ‘You’re the only one I’ve seen who has gone to brewing school. That sounds perfect for us.’ He interviewed me over the phone, and then I flew down and he interviewed me in person. That was Golden Gate Brewing Company. So I got my pet bird and my Honda and my suitcase and drove back. I started March 1, 1989.”

The Initiation
“So once my beer was on tap at Golden Gate Brewing, we’re having a party where all the professional brewers are tasting my beer. To a person, which happened to be to a man, they came up to me, shook my hand, and said, ‘Your beers are good.’ I realized there’s an old brewers’ network that I didn’t even know existed, but I just got initiated into it. I thought I was a professional brewer because I was earning money and working in a brewery, but no, they had to come and taste my beer, and then I got the handshake and got initiated.”
Teri Fahrendorf

Shortly after she started working at Golden Gate, Teri suffered a major injury. “This brewery was designed for looks,” she said, not function, and she ended up scalding her left foot and leg with boiling water. It was a traumatic and pivotal experience—and the whole incident, including her accident, the recovery, and the shady people who ran the brewery, could be an entire standalone post. The upshot was that after a few months at Golden Gate, Teri was nursing skin grafts and looking for another job. She found one at Triple Rock, also in the Berkeley, California, working there for about fifteen months.

That stop was where Teri learned how to be a professional brewer. “We had such a schedule, just like clockwork. We finished those brew days in seven and a half hours and you could get your shift beer and go home. Two people every day, and I thought it was excellent. I really, really learned how to brew at Triple Rock. When you’re doing six days a week and it’s the same thing every day, brewing to filter, you learn the dance. I love the flow of a brew day, I just love it.”                           

 

Founding Brewer at Steelhead

For years, Teri had been trying to land in Oregon. She finally found a job by chance when visiting Portland for the Oregon Brewers Festival in July 1990. “I saw a guy walking around in a t-shirt that said ‘Brewer Wanted, Eugene, Oregon.’ I thought, ‘Oh, I gotta talk to that guy.’ He called me the following Wednesday, and he didn’t have any questions to ask me. He didn’t know what to ask. I had been through a brewery that went bankrupt, so I had tons of questions. Golden Gate had hired me because they didn’t know that a woman quote shouldn’t be able to do the job, right? Steelhead was looking for an experienced brewer, and I had nearly a year and a half. About a week after the Oregon Brewers Festival, I had accepted the job at Steelhead.”  

Eugene’s Steelhead Brewery was one of those early brewpubs that helped define beer in Oregon. The tenth craft brewery in Oregon, it was still in the construction phase when the owners brought Teri on, and she quickly started guiding the process. Her first day was September 17, 1990.

“I was working with the construction people and was able to get some modifications made. The GM sent me the blueprints while I was interviewing and I said, ‘Where’s your mill room?’ I asked who spec’ed the brewery and they said JV Northwest. I called Phil Loen, whom I knew at JVNW. He says, ‘Well, they told me they wanted the cheapest system, and that uses pre-milled malt,’ and I said, ‘We can’t have that!’ I asked, ‘where’s the office?’ You gotta have an office. I need a little space for lab work. I was able to get a mill room and a silo and extra long legs on the serving tanks to fit kegs underneath. They were only going to do four serving tanks and I said do five. I designed things like the employee manual, looked up all the legal stuff for that. Whatever they needed I just showed up and did stuff. I set up the CO2 lines. Steelhead really felt like my baby.” 

“We opened January 22, 1991. I was at Steelhead for almost 17 years, and I grew it to five locations for them, as they asked. I was the regional brewmaster over all of them and I hired and trained dozens of brewers. Over the years my beers and the brewers who worked for me at the Steelhead locations have won 24 GABF medals. I was always very proud of that. Eight of them I brewed myself. I’ve done six installations of new breweries—five for Steelhead and one for Great Western Malting.”

Since 2009, Teri has used her brewing talents at Great Western Malting, where she’s the Malt Innovations Manager. Between the time she left Steelhead and joined Great Western, however, she went on a transformational road trip—her second, if you recall from part one—and what resulted from it is the subject of part three.

Bombay Bomber
One of the most influential early beers in Oregon, and Steelhead’s most famous, was Teri’s Bombay Bomber IPA. Here’s the story of how it came to be.

“We opened with a golden, an amber, a stout, and a seasonal. Back in those days you’d have five taps but you’d only have four beers going. You never kegged off, you just had the back-up beer in the 5th serving tank. You’d always have a golden and an amber and a dark beer and then a rotating seasonal on the fourth tap. So Bombay Bomber was my first seasonal at Steelhead. My first IPA was at Triple Rock, Nehru’s Nectar. Before I made it, I had never had an IPA; people were not making them. Fred Eckhardt had his little book, The Essentials of Beer Style, and I had a preview copy that he made on a mimeograph and sold from a card table at the 1988 AHA Homebrew Con I attended, and I bought a copy. I used that thing like a Bible.”

“In it, he had a few examples—they were all British examples—and he used Munich and Vienna malt and UK Goldings and Styrian Goldings, which gave it the orange marmalade flavor. So I’m like, well, I’ve got to use American malts. American malts are cheaper, and I don’t want to go through another brewery going belly up. So here I am at Triple Rock and this is my philosophy: I have to use American ingredients. At the time, the only place you could get caramel 60 was Schreier Malting (in Wisconsin) and you had to buy 10,000 pounds. So Triple Rock had a warehouse full of caramel 60, and I thought, I don’t want to use that in my IPA. By ‘89, Briess was selling specialty malt. So I got some Vienna and Munich malt from Briess. Then I’m trying to figure out which American hops will give you an orange marmalade flavor, and I came up with Chinook and Centennial and Mt Hood. I got that grapefruit/pineapple character. That was my Bombay Bomber IPA, and it was famous for that. People said it didn’t really taste like an IPA—because it wasn’t British—but said it was amazing anyway. That was Bombay Bomber.”
Teri Fahrendorf