Ex-CIA analyst is now a beer historian

WASHINGTON — She started her career in the shadows working for the CIA, but a historian at a prestigious Washington museum has been thrust into the limelight after the US media dubbed her job researching beer the “coolest in the world.”

Theresa McCulla, 34, emerged from anonymity in January to be hired by the National Museum of American History as its brewing historian.

As a woman catapulted into an ultramasculine, multibillion-dollar industry, McCulla has had to work hard to prove her credibility.

“It is absolutely a cool job,” she said, but “there’s been a sense that you really have to convince people that it’s serious. People say it’s a fun job. It is a fun job, but it’s also a lot of work.”

McCulla — who proudly identifies as feminist — is from a middle-class family in the eastern state of Virginia, and inherited her passion for beer from her father, an enthusiastic home brewer.

Growing up in her rural home in the 1980s, as the US began to discover microbreweries and craft beer, she said it was impossible to take a shower as the cubicle was always filled with “fermenting beer.”

She and her siblings had the job of capping the beer bottles. “It was a lot of overwhelming aromas for a 7- or 8-year-old,” she added.

The family is originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the unofficial capital of American beer since the 19th century, when a wave of German immigrants arrived in the city on the shores of Lake Michigan.

But it was as a university student in the same state that beer really began to interest her. Before long though, she was off to Harvard for a master’s degree in languages, including French, and in 2004 she bagged a job with the CIA as a European media analyst.

“While I was there I became interested in working in food. I wanted to do something more creative. I wanted to get out of a boxed-in environment,” she explained.

After three years, McCulla left US intelligence to devote herself to her passion, and in May she received a doctorate from Harvard, having specialized in the culinary traditions of New Orleans.

Then last July she — along with the nation’s media — spotted the unusual job offer at the museum.

The PR team there jokes that the position could have been tailor-made for her.

Three months after taking up the job, she has begun to crisscross the country, helping to build an archive for the museum on the history of beer.

I wanted to do something more creative. I wanted to get out of a boxed-in environment.” Theresa McCulla, a historian at a Washington museum