More women in male world of whiskey
In 2018, the three founders of Milam & Greene, a distillery in Blanco, Texas, made their first trip to the San Antonio Cocktail Conference, one of the state’s largest gatherings of bartenders, distillers and their legions of fans. They were excited to introduce their new whiskey, until they found their assigned table — stuck in a corner, far from the action.
The cold shoulder might have come because they were new to the scene, or because a portion of their whiskey was made outside Texas.
But it didn’t help that all three of them — Marsha Milam, entrepreneur; Heather Greene, CEO and master blender; and Marlene Holmes, master distiller — were women, trying to make it in an industry well known for its assertive, sometimes aggressive masculinity.
“There were literally complaints, like, ‘Why are they in here?’ ” Greene said.
Undaunted, the Milam & Greene team persevered, winning competitions and critical acclaim, including an award at the Texas Whiskey Festival in April. And three years after that first, frosty reception, they find themselves celebrated by other Texas distillers.
“It was a total turnaround,” Greene said. “We just had to dig in and say, ‘We’re here and we’re one of you guys.’ ”
Similar stories abound in the American whiskey business, where women have long played a quiet role, often in places like the bottling line or the marketing department. In the past few years, though, women have started to take on leadership roles in production — distilling and blending — at corporate operations like the Cascade Hollow Distilling Co. in Tennessee and startups like Milam & Greene.
In the process, they’re not just getting longdeserved credit — they are reshaping what remains a male-dominated profession.
“There have always been women in the industry,” said Andrea Wilson, master of maturation at Michter’s, a distillery in Louisville, Kentucky. “What’s different today is that they’re getting recognition for the contributions they made through time.”
Distilling used to be considered women’s work, part of their duties around the hearth and home. In his
book “Whiskey Women,” Fred Minnick writes that women in medieval Europe used their distilling acumen to make medicine, but also were persecuted when those same skills were denounced as black magic.
That tradition continued on the early American frontier: Catherine Spears Frye Carpenter, a widowed mother and distiller in early 19th-century Kentucky, was the first to record a recipe for sourmash whiskey.
As modern, industrial distilling emerged after the Civil War, and as gender roles became more rigid, women played less of a role in whiskey production, though they left their stamp in other ways. In the 1950s, Margie Samuels designed the bottle and label for her husband’s new whiskey brand, Maker’s Mark.
A few women managed to get hired for production roles. Both Pam Heilmann, master distiller emerita at Michter’s, and Holmes, of Milam & Greene, spent decades working at Jim Beam.
Holmes, 65, says that when she started out in the early 1990s, she had to overcome not just the usual sexist stereotypes about women, but also the many myths about women and distilling — for example, that their hormones might interfere with fermentation.
Smarter heads at the company prevailed, and Holmes took on more and more production responsibilities. “When I left Beam 27 years later,” she said, “I was making that yeast.”
Women like Holmes and Heilmann have opened doors for younger female distillers, many of whom arrive with technical training in chemistry and engineering — important assets, they say, for breaking through what can still seem like an old boys’ network.
Among them is Nicole Austin. She studied chemical engineering in college and was working for a wastewater-treatment company in New York City when, in the early 2010s, she started volunteering at the Kings County Distillery in Brooklyn.
Her hobby soon turned into a new career. Austin, 37, helped found the
New York State Distillers Guild in 2013, and later worked with Dave Pickerell, a consultant who jump-started dozens of craft distilleries, and at the sprawling Tullamore Distillery in Ireland.
In 2018 she returned to the United States to become the manager at Cascade Hollow in Tullahoma, Tennessee, home of George Dickel whiskey. There, she has revitalized a once-sleepy brand and won recognition as one of the nation’s best young distillers.
Austin said she was lucky to start her career at a time when a new generation of whiskey makers, more comfortable with women playing an equal role, was ascendant, even though she still has to deal with people who resent the idea of a woman doing what they see as men’s work.
“In moving to the whiskey industry, I’ve experienced the best and the worst,” she said. “The most dramatic inequity in pay and the most dramatically misogynistic corporate cultures, but I have also experienced an industry that has elected to have me as a leader multiple times.”
That tension is a challenge for women like Austin and the Milam & Greene team, who say they want to be respected for their achievements, not their gender — but also recognize that their standing makes them role models, with a responsibility to support other women trying to break in.
It’s a paradox that weighs especially heavy on Victoria Eady Butler, master blender at Uncle Nearest, a Tennessee distillery founded by entrepreneur Fawn Weaver in 2017. This year, Whisky magazine named Butler its blender of the year, but she said she still sometimes worries about how people perceive her, especially as a Black woman.
“I think we have been an example in this industry by showing that women can carry these roles and not just be a figurehead,” she said. “I fully understand that eyes are on me as the first African American master blender in history, and I embrace that responsibility — but I don’t focus on it.”
Dealing with residual sexism in the industry is hard enough — for many female distillers, the problem is not their co-workers, but their customers, especially men who bristle at the possibility that a woman might know more about whiskey than they do.
Marianne Eaves studied chemical engineering in college before starting at Brown-Forman, the Louisville company that makes Jack Daniel’s, Old Forester and Woodford Reserve whiskeys. Eaves left Brown-Forman in 2015 for a startup distillery, Castle & Key, where she was a partner and the master distiller — the first woman in Kentucky to hold that title since Prohibition — and in 2019 struck out on her own as a consultant.
Eaves has won plaudits for her recent work, developing ultrapremium whiskeys for brands like Sweetens Cove, which is backed by a group of sports stars including Peyton Manning and Andy Roddick.
Nevertheless, she still finds herself under the occasional sexist attack, especially from trolls online.
“At first it really got under my skin, but after a while, I stopped reading the comments,” she said. “I don’t feel I have to fight every battle. People follow me, I don’t have to justify myself every time someone challenges my accomplishments.”