Women hop into craft beer scene
More varied brewers open door to wide array of fans
Women are becoming more than a pint-sized part of the beer brewing world, with a growing number of lady brew masters and the growth of women’s tasting groups.
The emergence of women as both beer lovers and brewers happened as the craft beer scene grew overall by leaps and bounds, and that’s no coincidence, said Lisa Morrison, an Oregon-based writer, blogger and author of Craft Beers of the Pacific Northwest.
“I think that women are finally discovering, thanks to craft beer, that beer has flavor,” she said.
“When we start getting into the artisan stuff you start realizing that there’s an entire rainbow of flavors that you can enjoy. And because of that you can pair that with all kinds of different food flavors,” Morrison said. “Women love food. We love cooking. We love tasting food. We love sampling different things. So when you put all that together, the cooking with beer, the pairing food with beer, the whole wide-ranging genre of beer styles and beer flavors — it’s something that women can get really excited about.”
The marketing message is also different, said Julia Herz, home brewer and craft beer program director at the Boulder, Colo.-based Brewers Association. “Historically, the massproduced lagers have been marketed as a beverage targeting males in their mid- to high 20s, and it seems to me in advertising that I see for craft beer that it’s really not marketed as a gender-specific beverage.”
It’s hard to put a number on the trend, but Morrison and others say they’ve personally seen more women take an interest in beer.
“It used to be at beer festivals, I was pretty much the only gal. Now it’s definitely venturing more toward 60-40,” with women being the 40 percent, said Morrison, who has been involved in the craft beer scene for nearly 15 years.
On the business side, beer management remains predominantly male, though there have been changes there, too, said Irene Firmat, founder and chief executive officer of Full Sail Brewing Co. in Hood River, Ore.
To support women brewers, a support network called the Pink Boots Society was formed. It includes a consumer tasting organization, Barley’s Angels, that has chapters in the U.S., Canada, Australia and South America.
Being a female beer producer means standing out, said Rosemarie Certo, co-founder and owner of Dock Street Brewing Co. in West Philadelphia.
Certo’s interest in beer started when she began making beer at home because she wasn’t happy with what was available domestically at the time. She started Dock Street in 1985 and remembers in the early days going to make a sales pitch to a distributor and being the only woman in a room of more than 50.
“I remember not being bothered by it,” she said.
She sees the craft segment as generally having a different approach to business. “I think it’s easier for women to enter the craft industry only because the craft industry is different to begin with,” she said, pointing out that most people don’t go into the labor-intensive craft beer business with dreams of piling up a fortune. “It’s an industry that is born from a lot of love.”
Firmat also started in beer about 25 years ago, a time when there were about 20 craft breweries nationwide compared with today’s 2,000. Back then, it was considered more outlandish to be challenging the big domestic producers than to be a woman in the beer business, she said.
As far as operating in a man’s world, she said, “the thing that I always focused on, and it’s what I always tell women in our company, is really focus on being competent. Focus on being good and doing your job and don’t go in expecting to get a reaction.”