@womenshistory
The place to share about women who made history & who are making history.
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 3:46
Women Dominated Beer Brewing Until They Were Accused of Being Witches
/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/e4/9b/e49b683d-7f6c-4122-9059-e48a383e4bfc/file-20210304-15-bf0kqb.jpg)
Which is really interesting. It especially talks about how some women then went on to take this household skill to the marketplace and actually began selling their beer. So, quote, widows or unmarried women use their fermentation prowess to earn some extra money while married women partnered with their husbands to run their beer business. So where it gets pretty upsetting and frustrating is talking about how women were exiled from the beer brewing industry
So the pointy hats really stem from a period in time where Jews were really forced to wear pointy hats as a symbol of their Judaism to Mark that they were Jewish in the same way that Hitler made Jews wear yellow stars of David on their clothes to present to everybody that they were Jewish at all times. Furthermore, terms like witches Sabbath stems directly from the Jewish Sabbath or Shabbat. The Church specifically took Jewish symbols Jewish practices and demonized them
In this case, we have brewing becoming an almost entirely male dominated industry, as the article in the Smithsonian describes. But it's just amazing how over this short period of time, they were able to not only pretty much completely remove any trace of female brewers, but also makes brewing a almost entirely male dominated space for what seems to me like hundreds of years, really some food for thought here
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 2:58
And that is a very important takeaway for me overall. Now I want to go and do some more reading because both of your comments have just brought up even more questions for me around the history of women in brewing all over the world
Charles Guerrero
@CharlesG · 1:58
This has been a really fascinating conversation for me to listen to, and I really appreciate Bowie posting the article initially, both the commentary from Leora and Taylor and not really having known a ton about this. It's really not surprising. And bought your last comment about sort of the roots of this once again coming down to white supremacy and patriarchy is really I think spot on when you look at sort of how marginalization has happened throughout our history, it's really just fascinating to learn about it in this area
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 2:13
And how can the folks I know who are small business owners be helpful in making the community have leaders that are more representative of everyone in our communities? So thank you for sharing that comment. It really got my wheels turning mentally and thinking about what we all can be doing doing locally. And I just love that ideas around what we can do now in 2021 were spurned by looking back at history. That is just so cool to me
Charles Guerrero
@CharlesG · 1:13
Thanks for that Podi. This is my actual first day on Swell, and I was so glad to stumble across such an interesting post. The hopculture at hopculture. Com has a pretty good article about 40 craft beer breweries to support that are women owned, so that could give you some resources even if they aren't where you are locally. Maybe other are some that are stocked by you that you could still support a brewery that is woman owned, even without it being local
Charles Guerrero
@CharlesG · 0:36
Okay, I found something. So Porch Drinking dot com has an article from June of 2020 that has a list of about 60 Black own breweries that also has links to a piece that was from Thrillist and Black Beer Travelers that have links to breweries by P people of Color. So that's something worth checking out
Ryan Cartier
@Cartier · 0:25
I'm up in Canada. You might want to look for Wendy Papadopoulos. So she's the brewmaster and part owner of Big Tide Brewing, which is a microbrewery in St. John's, New Brunswick. I believe that she may still be there
Ryan Cartier
@Cartier · 0:47
You may also find this interesting and I'll figure out a way to put the link in so you can look at this. Women have a genetic advantage, this article says when it comes to crafting brews, particularly, they have superior your smelling skills. They have 16.2 million cells in the old factory bulb, which would be twice as many as men. I don't know if that actually is a major factor, but I would assume it sounds sounds like that gives them a tremendous advantage