As a beer lover, I find it absurd that over 50% of the world’s population might be excluded from the world of beer. So let me start with a shout out to some of heroines of brewing.
In 2013, Sarah Barton of Brewsters Brewery became the first female winner of the British Beer Guild’s “Brewer of the Year” award.
Veronique Maes was central to the revival of the phenomenal Straffe Hendrik beer, brewed by her family’s Halve Maan brewery in Bruges
Further afield, let us acknowledge two pioneering Mexican NGOs - “Female Beer Tasters of Mexico” and “Adelitas Cerveceras”
And not to forget Sister Doris Engelhard of Mallersdorf Abbey, Germany’s last master-brewing nun.
Perhaps to be more controversial, let us recognise Jill Vaughn and Rebecca Bennett, brew masters at Anheuser-Busch - because actually not everything that Anheuser-Busch does is bad.
But it has been a long hard road for women in brewing over the centuries. As ever, I will now draw on the work of professional historians - in this case mainly Professor Judith Bennett from the University of Southern California.
At the beginning of human civilisation, beer was firmly in the female domain. It was a food to be cultivated and prepared and therefore woman’s work. All ancient civilizations agreed that beer was a gift from the gods, and most had it as a gift to women from an earth goddess. As time moved on, brewing settled down as just something that women did within the household.
What changed? We first saw industrialised brewing by men - monks - around 1000. The Black Death seems to have had an impact - agriculture saw a big shift from subsistence to specialised production, and beer was not exempt. Then the famous Bavarian purity law - the Reinheitsgebot of 1516 - symbolised the growing sense of the leading men of German towns that beer was important and needed to be controlled by reliable chaps such as themselves who knew what they were doing. The Guilds took over brewing and traditional alewives were pushed to the side lines.
Some alewives continued to ply their trade. They were often widows of mature years. They wore large pointed hats so that they could easily be spotted by customers in the market. They kept cats to stop mice getting at the grain. They brewed strong concoctions in cauldrons that caused men to lose their reason. They hung a broomstick outside their door as a symbol of their trade… you have probably figured by now where this line of narrative is going.
This was particularly bad when you overlay onto it the witch-burning craze of some parts of continental Europe - especially Germany - in early modern times. These women were precisely the people who tended to get accused of witchcraft. Plus their trade put them in competition with the Guilds. One common scenario seems to be as follows. Sometimes a batch of Guild beer would go bad. Centuries later, scientists established why this happened and what to do about it (a story for another time). At the time, however, the fact that an alewife had been heard muttering uncharitable things in the vague direction of the Guild beer vats sounded like excellent evidence of a crime - means, motive and opportunity all present in abundance, death by fire an eminently reasonable response by the criminal justice system.
Before us British blokes get too smug about those nasty Germans, while we may not have burned alewives we were not exactly very good to them. The most famous literary hatchet-job on alewives was the ballad of Eleanor Runninge, composed by Henry VIII’s tutor John Skelton. (Skelton was not a nice man. Henry VIII got fed up with him and dispensed with his services when he became king. Skelton then wrote him a load of whingeing letters. Frankly, given what happened to other people whose services Henry dispensed with, he would have done better to count his blessings and retire quietly). Eleanor became the archetype of the bad alewife, loose of morals and purveyor of beer with dodgy ingredients that gave it aphrodisiac qualities. (Incidentally, her inn - the Running Horse at Leatherhead - is still there in case you want to try the beer. In my experience it is perfectly pleasant).
To be clear, it was not that these women looked like witches that put them under suspicion. It was the other way round - the modern imagery of witches dates from the 18th century, and it was clearly lifted from the negative imagery of alewives.
But of course all this is a long time ago.... Well, check out a US Supreme Court judgement of 1948, which upheld Michigan’s ban on female bartenders (unless supervised by their husband or father) on the basis that
“bartending by women may... give rise to moral and social problems... Michigan evidently believes that the oversight assured through ownership of a bar by a barmaid's husband or father minimizes hazards that may confront a barmaid without such protecting oversight. This Court is certainly not in a position to gainsay such belief by the Michigan legislature.”
So here is my call to action for all of us. If women hold up half the sky, let them make, serve and enjoy half the beer. It matters.
In case you think I have been too exercised writing this to drink any beer, fear not. The last few days have given me cause for a special celebration and therefore the consumption of my stash of Westvleteren Abbey beer. Shared with my girlfriend, of course.