A Woman's Place Is in the Brewhouse

A Forgotten History of Alewives, Brewsters, Witches, and CEOs

Tara Nurin, Teri Fahrendorf

Dismiss the stereotype of the bearded brewer. It's women, not men, who've brewed beer throughout most of human history. Their role as family and village brewer lasted for hundreds of thousands of years—through the earliest days of Mesopotamian civilization, the reign of Cleopatra, the witch trials of Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and the settling of colonial America. A Woman's Place Is in the Brewhouse celebrates the contributions and influence of female brewers and explores the forces that have erased them from the brewing world.
 
It's a history that's simultaneously inspiring and demeaning. Wherever and whenever the cottage brewing industry has grown profitable, politics, religion, and capitalism have grown greedy. On a macro scale, men have repeatedly seized control and forced women out of the business. Other times, women have simply lost the minimal independence, respect, and economic power brewing brought them. But there are more breweries now than at any time in American history and today women serve as founder, CEO, or head brewer at more than one thousand of them. As women continue to work hard for equal treatment and recognition in the industry, author Tara Nurin shows readers that women have been—and are once again becoming—relevant in the brewing world.
 

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Teri Fahrendorf
• Time Line
• Preface
• 1 The Rebeginning
• 2 Planting the Seed
• 3 Rainbows End down That Highway
• 4 The Hymn to Ninkasi
• 5 The Birth of Beervana
• 6 Of Goddesses and High Priestesses
• 7 Decentralization
• 8 Brew Like an Egyptian
• 9 The Great Eastward Migration
• 10 What’s Past Is Prologue
• 11 Relax, Don’t Worry, Have a Homebrew
• 12 It’s a Sahti Paati
• 13 Slow Food, Slower Beer
• 14 B(eer) Is for Barbarians
• 15 The Last of the First Craft Brewery Women
• 16 The Fatherland
• 17 Boom and Bust
• 18 Wallflower at the Orgy
• 19 Alewives Unflattered
• 20 Beer’s Bridge over Troubled Water
• 21 Strange Brew: Did Renaissance Brewsters Practice Fermentation . . . Or Witchcraft?
• 22 These Boots Are Made for Brewing
• 23 Coming to America
• 24 From the Back Office to the Boardroom
• 25 Rivers of Lager Flow Toward Temperance
• 26 The Customer Is Sometimes Right
• 27 Prohibited from the Halls of Power No More
• 28 Big Boss Ladies and the Family Ties That Bind
• 29 Don’t Worry, Darling, You Didn’t Burn the Beer
• 30 Beyond Beards, Beyond Breasts
• 31 It’s a Woman’s World After All
• 32 Raging Bitches
• 33 That’s Right, the Women Are Smarter
• 34 Sisters Are Brewing It for Themselves
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors