Addition Without Subtraction: How Women Enrich Beer
The Sightglass project is a collaboration between Beervana and Reuben's Brews. Together, we select a topic of mutual interest and I write about it. In some cases, Adam Robbings and Matt Lutton will interview one of the central players for their podcast, also called Sightglass. Articles in this series include "How a Hop Earns its Name" and "The Future of Yeast."
In early May this year, illustrator Em Sauter posted what has become, possibly, the most viral tweet on beer Twitter. Titled “Craft Beer in 2021,” it riffed on KC Green’s famous “this is fine” comic from 2013. In her inimitable style, Em drew a version of herself sitting amid the carnage of an exploded can of fruit beer. For anyone familiar with the original comic and the issues of exploding cans—not to mention the background stress of a pandemic and everything else swirling around these days—it perfectly and wryly captured the mood of early 2021. Could anyone finding it in their morning feed have done anything but laugh out loud?
We curate our own Twitter feeds and organically add new voices as we discover them. As I scroll through mine over my morning coffee, I see a lot of newsworthy, insightful, and funny bits like Em’s tweet pass by. And a lot of them come from women like Em. It’s emblematic of a transformation that is happening before our eyes, as an ever more diverse group of people participate in making, marketing, writing about, and of course, drinking beer. For some, change can seem scary, hinting at a loss of something essential. Yet much like Twitter feeds, the beer world is in no way diminished by this change—there’s just more to appreciate. I still get my Deschutes Brewery tweets as I have since logging on the first time in 2008, but now I also get so much more.
A couple months back, Notch Brewing’s Brienne Allan started posting messages from women mistreated by the breweries they work for. In hundreds of sometimes harrowing accounts, we learned how badly women are treated in this male-dominated field. It was challenging for men who didn’t want to believe the industry was like this, or wanted to ignore it or argue it away, and it was painful for women to re-experience these traumas and the inevitable blowback that resulted.
That is one dimension of women entering such a male-dominated industry. Yet there is another, far happier dimension: the ways in which their new perspectives and ideas have made beer more interesting. For someone who has been interested in the subject for over three decades, it’s as if women have added new color to a sepia-toned photograph—or perhaps new flavors to a once-fizzy yellow beer. We need to pay close attention to the way women are mistreated, but we can also stop to appreciate what a wonderful world they’ve remade. For this edition of the Sightglass Series, I thought it would be wonderful to train my eye on that change, highlighting the work and observations of some of the women who have brightened our world.
Peering in From the Outside
Seeing things differently is such an important capacity women bring to beer. To return to the sepia-world analogy, women come with an appreciation of a different set of colors, which makes them alive to the cultural specificity within craft beer. Most of the women I spoke to mentioned their encounters with that dense cultural filter, and half used the same word in describing how it made them feel: outsider.
Eight years ago, Oregon State University Librarian Tiah Edmunson-Morton created one of the most important resources in beer when she launched the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archive in Corvallis. When she was starting out, the work itself was familiar, but the world she entered was not. She described a moment when she became acutely aware of the different cultural expectations within beer.
“When I went to the Oregon Brewers Guild educational meeting for the first time, I think the archive was six or seven months old. I had been a professional for a decent amount of time. I was like ‘I’m giving a presentation; this is like teaching. I need to wear my clogs and my skirt.’ I remember looking out at the audience and thinking, ‘Ohhhh, this is not how I need to look. [Hop grower] Gayle Goschie was there, and I remember she had a fabulous leather blazer on. There was one other woman and no other women in the room. I had never felt like that before. I remember thinking ‘Ditch the skirt.’ I wasn’t going grow a beard and start wearing flannel. This was like 2013 and that was peaking, the lumbersexual kind of look, it was everywhere. I thought at the same time, ‘I’m never going to fit in here.’ Me trying to be this? I can’t be this. I kind of embraced it.”
Journalist Kate Bernot described entering the world of writing and experiencing something similar. “When I started at Draft [magazine], it’s not like anyone was mean to me or anything—but I didn’t know all the OG beer writers etc, etc. I felt removed and like an outsider anyway, so maybe that encouraged me to keep thinking outside the box. I didn’t have any insider status to lose. Even today, I think of myself this way.”
Fellow writer Ruvani de Silva identified a similar experience, and how that encouraged her to see the audience who, like her, felt like outsiders.
“I think we’re used to writing that has been predominantly written in a way that says, ‘This is our world; we’re going to speak in our language.’ When you come into that as an outsider, you automatically want to make it more open because you had to fight through language barriers, technical terms, in-jokes, and various things that have made you aware that you’re an outsider. You want to turn that on its head and make it more inclusive for others.”
In each case, the women quoted above observed something invisible to many men in the industry. That gave them an opportunity shine a light on a vast terrain of unexplored experiences and stories. In doing so, they introduce new ideas and ways of thinking—and as Ruvani mentioned, they were also able to speak to a new, more diverse audience.
Increasingly, the stories we read about beer are written by women.
Conceptual Transformation
We often think of “perspectives” and “new ideas” as a kind of soft power—in the group processes that drive a brewery, perhaps they can inflect and guide decisions. Yet when the women are actually making the decisions, it can be a lot more direct and obvious. One example is Tiah’s work assembling the OSU brewing archive. She is literally writing history. What she chooses to include and not include will create the body of information people will draw on for decades to come. One of her central interests is the way women have affected brewing, and she has interviewed dozens of them for the archive. Would a man have done the same? Maybe. Yet we have lots of examples of museums and archives from earlier eras, and they tended to be assembled by White men who trained their eyes on the activities of other White men. Again, what women see is different, and that guides what they emphasize.
More subtly, had a man interviewed exactly the same people Tiah has, the conversations themselves would have been different. She surfaced this truth when she talked about working with another academic, a man. “When we were talking about how to talk to the students about how to talk to women about gender, I said something one time like ‘It’s really hard when people cry in interviews because I start crying and so I’m trying to be distant and trying to be professional and then all of a sudden I’m crying, too.’ And he said, ‘Nobody’s ever cried in an interview with me.’ Oooh, that’s interesting—the idea that it’s because of me and my identity I’m shaping the questions I ask. I think it would be a very, very different archive if it was run by a man, honestly.”
Kate Bernot, continuing to discuss how being an outsider shapes her work, offered this example. “Take the recent glassware piece that I wrote, which explores the issues of IP theft in small-batch glassware. I have absolutely no connection to that world. I had no preconceived notion going into that reporting about what the mores of that world are or who’s involved or what the scene should look like. It was just like walking into another world that I’m not a part of. Sometimes I think that lets me be a little clear-eyed and not feel like I owe anyone anything or that I have a duty to tell a story a certain way. I just go with what feels most compelling to me.”
Beth Demmon started writing about beer in San Diego in 2015. When she looked around at who was covering that beat, she saw men—all the writers were men—covering beer from different angles. “I took that as an opportunity to ask, ‘What is going to make me different? Why should people listen to me? What do I have to say that’s interesting and new and different than the people who are already writing about beer?’ There really wasn’t a voice talking about the culture of craft beer, and I felt like that was something I could give some insight to. I wasn’t part of the stereotypical craft beer consumer, especially at that time.”
Demmon now writes the Prohibitchin’ Substack, where she trains her attention where others often don’t bother to look. “It starts with the people, and not just the faces of breweries. Not just the owners, the brewers—it’s the packaging people, it’s the keg-washers, it’s the office people. It’s everybody. I like to uncover the stories of those people who aren’t highlighted or recognized or appreciated for their invaluable role.”
Looking beyond an owner or brewer was something a few women mentioned, and it contrasted with a way we’ve often reported about not just beer, but music, food, and the arts in general. Call it the “rock god” approach to reportage, where stories breathlessly describe the exploits of a single, highly influential person (typically a man). In Demmon’s experience, it fails to celebrate the many people who contribute to success. “Readers only know what media tells them. It’s often through a very narrow or sensationalist lens. I think there’s real beauty in the everyday. Of course, the owners and brewers should be celebrated, but I don’t think they should be the only people celebrated. They’re just one part of a huge machine.”
Finally, Emily Hutto transitioned from writing about beer after graduating with a degree in journalism to operating her own communications company, RadCraft. She is part of the growing crop of women who brand and market beer, and much like women writers, Emily is aware of a larger audience reachable with the right message. “I learned how to talk about beer in a very formal capacity—through BJCP style guidelines, through formal judge experiences, through the Cicerone program. And my experience, of course, comes from that of a journalist who is always trying to distill the brewing process for the general public. My intention in learning the language that is beer was to learn to teach it to others. With diversity comes lived experience. That gets us so much closer to a common language and being able to understand each other better.”
The way beer is presented has changed enormously over the past decade. If you read about beer or consume it, you’re often absorbing a story or message crafted by a woman—and that’s a big reason for the change in the way we talk about it.
Physical Transformation
The transformation isn’t just conceptual, either. Women are bringing their experiences to the physical spaces we go to enjoy beer, and that is changing our real-world experiences of drinking. Traveling through Italy some years back, I took a wrong turn in a restaurant and walked into a private party in a dining room filled with elderly men all dressed to the nines. A wash of Italian words and the blue haze of cigarette smoke enveloped me, and within less than a second’s time, I knew I didn’t belong there. By the time I was receiving dirty looks for intruding, I was already backpedaling and closing the door behind me. We welcome or exclude in a million ways, from our clothes choices or the way we speak to the pictures we hang on the wall. Pubs broadcast a personality we all grasp the second we walk in.
One of the women I spoke to for this piece was Betsy Lay, one of three owners of Denver’s Lady Justice Brewing. Lady Justice is unusual in a number of ways, starting with its mission, which directs revenues to fundraising projects particularly focused on women and girls. “We live in Denver and we drink beer and we saw how much people were willing to spend on beer, and the idea was how do we funnel beer money into making our communities better?” she explained. Yet Lady Justice is a brewery first, and Betsy, Kate Power, and Jen Cuesta created a space with a slightly different vibe than the usual taproom.
“When you’re a part of a marginalized community, you notice everything about the space that you’re in,” she told me. Betsy, who is not just a woman but gay, picks up on the cues every taproom or pub sends out. “Is this a space where my wife and I can hold hands and not feel like we’re being judged, or going to get harassed? The way you show that is, when I walk in and I see other gay people or other women, I know that I belong in this space.”
When they were creating the Lady Justice space, the founders were careful about the way they presented themselves. One wall features a mural of Dolores Huerta, Marsha P. Johnson, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The names of the beers send a strong signal as well—Sandra Day IPA, Merkel’s Thursday, and Chosen Family to cite a few. “We want you to feel like this is your space and we’re happy you’re here. We built this space for you. In the world of beer, women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, we’ve largely been ignored on a public-facing level.”
Women standing behind the bar can also change the dynamic. Blanca Quintero the assistant general manager of LA’s Highland Park Brewery, has worked in customer-facing positions throughout her decade working in beer. Women being seen in positions of knowledge and expertise creates an important dynamic. “I think it starts on the staff side,” she told me. “If they have a welcoming, inclusive space they’re able to welcome the customer. If the staff is aware of microaggressions or is making sure that women have a safe place to drink a beer.”
Of course, anyone can create these welcoming environments. Men are capable of choosing art or beer names that welcome women. The trick is noticing that you should be intentional in these choices. So often the people making those choices don’t recognize they’re working in that same sepia-toned palette they’ve always used. It just looks “normal.” For women entering the beer world, it’s anything but. That’s why women empowered to create spaces are alive to the signals they send to reach out to people who might otherwise not see it as their place.
Who Said Beer Can’t Be Cute?
Many of the women I spoke to emphasized they were tired of being singled out merely for their gender. At RadCraft, Emily fields calls by journalists who aren’t necessarily interested in what women are doing, just what their gender is. “A lot of times the women we work with point-blank don’t want to take on the interview because they don’t feel as if the interview is about their contribution; it’s about their gender or their body parts,” she said. Ruvani warned of a similar, more subtle form of objectification that can happen. “It’s difficult to specify that women bring exactly this or women bring exactly that because that that risks pigeonholing women’s interests.”
I have both seen this approach and am guilty of taking it. There may be no worse question for a journalist to ask a BIPOC or woman brewer than, “How can we see the perspective of your identity in the beer you make?” Beer always reflects the brewer, and yet I’ve never thought to ask, “How does being a White man affect the way you approach beer?” Betsy has clearly encountered these questions, and gave me this amusing insight.
“Lady J’s a little bit of a unicorn. Gay owned, women-owned, brewer-owned, and so that also means that we’re gay brewed. I don’t walk in and look at my beer schedule and say, ‘What am I, the lesbian, going to brew today?’ But I think being excited about what we want to drink automatically transfers into the product we end up with. This beer is authentically Betsy.”
Yet observing how a woman’s creative expressions are unique also points to the value of having more women in the industry. Our various identities give us unique experiences, and it’s those experiences that broaden the beer world. Em Sauter teased apart this distinction in talking about her own art. I asked her how people describe it and she said “whimsical and adorable.” It’s her brand. “When they gave me the contract, Brewers Publications told me this book has to be whimsical AF,” she said, laughing.
What she said next could function as an axiom to the myriad ways women have enriched beer so far and the promise that future “outsiders” will bring to our experience of this beverage we love so much.
“[My style] is not feminine but is definitely cute. We were told for a long time that beer couldn’t be cute, but then—who said that? Who said beer can’t be cute? A lot of people like that. Beer’s for everybody. I guess we have to keep saying that. People forget.”
Let’s not forget. The more folks feel welcome to enter the beer world and bring their perspectives, the more color it will have. Indeed, the transformation is already underway, and we are so much the better for it.