Welcome to the first installment of Beer 101 Minisodes! In this first (not so mini) mini-sode, Hannah sits down with veteran freelance journalist Tara Nurin to learn about the history of beer and the major role women have played in beer throughout the centuries. Hannah sipped on a Solid Air from Threes Brewing, and Tara enjoyed a Societe Brewing Light Beer.
Keep your eyes out for the release of Tara's book, coming out on September 21st 2021- and for a Brews with Broads Book Club!
Stay tuned for updates on her website and follow her on Instagram and Twitter!
We shouted out:
Jeff Alworth's interview with Suzy Stern Denison
Tara's Forbes piece about Women in African Craft Beer
Ruvani Di Silva's Good Beer Hunting piece on South Asian Women in Craft Beer
Tara's client, Other Desi Beer Co.
Hannah (00:00:07):
Hi, Beer Friends. Welcome to Brews with Broads, the Beer 101 minisodes, I'm your host Hannah Kiem. What is a Beer 101 mini-sode you might ask- what a great question. I wanted to get us all on the same page. From the first few episodes, I realized that we're all coming to this beautiful thing called beer from different levels of education and different experience backgrounds. And frankly, there is a lot that I don't know. So I figured why not learn together. So with today's episode, I wanted to start at the very beginning, as they say, and I was so honored to get to talk to Tara Nurin. She is a journalist and a beer writer, and she's got a book coming out, Y'all. Tara has such a wealth of knowledge, not only about the history of beer, but as it relates to women. We truly spanned the globe with this discussion. And yet I'm sure there were things we left out and it feels like we only scratched the surface, but Tara was so generous with her time and her wealth of knowledge. My initial vision for these minisodes was that they would be like 20, 30 minutes, but we spoke for almost two hours and I don't want to cut anything out because she left us with some gems. So please take out a notebook y'all and enjoy my conversation about women in beer history with Tara Nurin,
Hannah (00:01:33):
Tara Nurin. Welcome to Brews with Broads the Beer 101 Minisode.
Tara (00:01:39):
Hi, how are you?
Hannah (00:01:40):
I'm good. Thank you so much for being here. Where, where are you? Quote, unquote, calling in from
Tara (00:01:46):
I'm in Camden, New Jersey, and to quote the great Sarah Palin. I can see Philadelphia from my house.
Hannah (00:01:53):
You know, that's the first time anyone has ever quoted Sarah Palin on my podcast. And, um,
Tara (00:02:00):
You're welcome.
Hannah (00:02:01):
Thank you. It should be happening more often. Um, what are you drinking?
Tara (00:02:04):
Yeah. So this is Light Beer, as you see, um, it's from Societe brewing in San Diego. You know, I just, um, took my first sip a couple minutes ago and they're a fantastic brewery and I love the idea of light craft beers. And so often when I taste them, it makes me laugh because I feel like we've come so far to come back to where we started sometimes.
Hannah (00:02:30):
Right? It's like a throwback what's old is new and what's was uncool is now excesi
Tara (00:02:37):
Cool excessively. Cool. I feel very hipster and awesome. What are you drinking?
Hannah (00:02:41):
I have, um, solid air, which is a smoked lager from Threes. I'm going through a major smoked beer phase right now. And you know, not... It's becoming more popular, but like you can't find it a lot of places. So they posted it on their Instagram. I was like, yes, thank you so much. I will go get it. So I'm going to crack this -Ok. Cheers. Cheers. Thank you so much for being here. We are here to talk about the history of beer as it relates particularly to women. But before we get into that, I want to know a little bit about you
Tara (00:03:13):
To indulge me and allow me to make the stupid joke that I just can't ever help myself.
Hannah (00:03:21):
I love a stupid joke,
Tara (00:03:22):
Whenever anyone says something like that, and I'm totally dating myself, but I always need to say like, "well, first there were the dinosaurs and then Prince Charles started wearing lady DI's clothes"... and you're staring at me. So you may or may not know this is from Airplane. One of the Airplane movies. I don't remember if it's the first one. Yeah.
Hannah (00:03:40):
Oh my God. When my husband listens to this, he will kill me because he loves that movie. It's like a main part of our relationship is that like he's seen every movie, I've seen no movies. So I apologize to him and to you for not being quote literate in that film.
Tara (00:03:56):
Thank you for letting me get that out. The real answer is I'm from Maryland. I've lived all over the country, all over the world. To some extent, I was a TV reporter for 10 years after grad school. And that's how I ended up in the Philly area. And when I left TV in 2005, I ended up gigging for the Philly tourism Bureau. I was writing a lot at the time about like new gastro pubs as we used to call them and new microbreweries as we used to call them. And in 2005, in my opinion, Philly was the Capitol of East coast craft beer. We were hot at the time. And uh, so the more I got into it, the more I thought that that would be like a really good thing to specialize in for a lot of reasons. And um, so I did, and it's been a lot of fun and it's taken me all over the world. I'm really lucky. I get a lot of alcohol sent to me every day like this.
Hannah (00:04:56):
And how did you make your way into beer?
Tara (00:04:59):
So in my journalism, I love to cover economic growth and development. And so when I was in my last TV job in Philly, I would cover like tourism and economic development stories as much as they would let me. And some of that did involve some of this new fangled craft stuff. Right. Um, and so I was already kind of hip to it and plus I always have like loved restaurants and like the drinking and dining scene. So I was paying attention. Um, and then, so when I stopped being on TV and I started working for the tourism Bureau, I really found myself gravitating toward that topic. Like, they'd make me do like a shopping story once in a while or something and okay, fine. I don't know the lingo or anything, but mostly I was, I was telling the tourism Bureau basically, um, like between the city and then the counties that surround Philly, my job would be to like go out into the suburbs and tell the people in Philly, like what was going on out there. And so there wasn't a lot of action for beer in the suburbs at the time. But once they saw that this is what I was turning up in the suburbs, I got kind of put on the, on the beer beat if you will. Um, and then I just started pitching stories about beer and Philly and it grew from there.
Hannah (00:06:24):
I always like to ask people like what their gateway beer was.
Tara (00:06:26):
Like I mentioned, I liked beer as a kid. My dad would indulge me a sip of his brand,Bud. And I would take as many steps as I could before my mom would notice that I had taken more than one sip and like scream at me and my dad to stop. So I don't know. I just had a taste for it really young.
Hannah (00:06:44):
Would that be Bud Heavy as they say?
Tara (00:06:47):
As like a four year old, yes!
Hannah (00:06:48):
Incredible. I love it. When did you write your book and what is it called?
Tara (00:06:52):
I am writing my book.
Hannah (00:06:55):
Okay. You heard it here first.
Tara (00:06:56):
It's at the copy editor Just went to the copy editor this week. So the manuscript is done. We'll just have to tweak a couple, you know, like if I've love art or something, that's the stage it's in. We just sent out a couple of review copies, like two days ago to some people to write endorsements. So I'm excited about that.
Hannah (00:07:17):
What's it called? Are you allowed to tell me?
Tara (00:07:19):
So I won't tell you the real title, but my working title: Don't Worry Darling, You Didn't Burn the Beer. And it comes from this Schlitz ad from the fifties. It's just such a prototypical beer ad for the time because the housewife is sobbing in the kitchen and she's got a pan that's on fire and the husbands, all "there there dear." And, uh, I felt like it just summed everything up.
Hannah (00:07:45):
I love that it's such a brilliant working title, so I can't wait to hear and then share the real title. Do you have a projected date that it's being released?
Tara (00:07:54):
Yes, September 21st,
Hannah (00:07:55):
September 21st. Okay, great. That's very exciting. And that kind of brings us to why we're here is to talk about the history of beer, but particularly as it relates to women, because I don't know if any of you out there, you should Google Tara, she's written so much about this topic and it is truly fascinating. So I guess begin at the beginning. Can you talk to us about the earliest earliest roots of beer?
Tara (00:08:18):
Yes. And this is so much fun to think about. There is a lot of disagreement about when the first I'm going to air quote beer was made. Um, and you can hear anything from about 5,000 BCE to what I say, because my ancient beer mentor, Dr. Patrick McGovern at the university of Pennsylvania, he believes it dates back to a hundred or 200,000 years ago. So here's the story. As I believe it, humanity developed in South Africa. And once we became bi -pedal, which means we could walk on both of our legs, we started walking North and that's when we were like very primitive Hunter gatherers and people who study this thing that it's likely that what happened was somebody was out walking around gathering. And we actually, we weren't even hunting at that point really because we didn't have tools. So it was more like we were foraging, right? So somebody goes out and, um, see some honey and maybe put the honey in his mouth. Maybe the honey was like pooling in a puddle or something, but he tasted it and it was sweet. And it had potentially already fermented by the wild yeast that is around us in the air. So I tend to find that people who aren't in the sciences don't realize that yeast is everywhere.
Hannah (00:09:49):
Newsflash yeast is everywhere. That's the headline
Tara (00:09:53):
Dude. I think I want to make a bumper sticker that says that that would be fun. So anyway, dude, or dudette is out there like foraging, tastes this sweet liquid. And when, you know, before we had plates and knives and such in nature, something that is sweet is generally something that, um, animals, humans, whatever gravitate toward. So this person would have tasted, it caught a buzz, been like "yo, what the Fuck, This is kind of fun." And, um, so to speak, brought it back to the village, right? And from there they would've maybe cultivated it more. So I'm going into too much detail, but Mead aka honey wine is believed to be the first alcohol. Um, and you know, there are a lot of reasons, a lot of arguments to be made that, um, people who drank alcohol would have potentially lived longer, their, their people, their villages, not that they were in villages, but their clans. I think they were called at the time, their clans might've lived longer for a lot of reasons. There's elements that are preservatives in there. There are chemicals in what they would have been drinking that would have helped them live longer. They would've gotten kind of horny and procreated and, and it's a social things. So They would have sort of gravitated towards their people more that's all stuff. I believe it might sound silly, but
Hannah (00:11:19):
It actually makes so much sense because obviously those are effects we experience now, but it makes a lot of sense how, like the earliest humans need to procreate. Otherwise there are no humans.
Tara (00:11:31):
And I mean, we are genetically and chemically predisposed to wanting to drink alcohol. And if you study all kinds of like bees and fruit flies and monkeys and birds, you give them alcohol, they'll drink it until they follow up. It's hilarious. So anyway, that's a little bit far away from beer, but that's how we think beer started. So, you know, over thousands of years, we're walking around Africa, we're generally migrating North along the Eastern coast of Africa. And eventually we end up having like gender segregation of labor. So once we did develop tools to go hunt big animals, somewhere along the way, and it didn't start out like this necessarily. I mean, the hunting and the gathering was pretty equal between the sexist for awhile. And I won't get into the whole like evolution of the patriarchy and stuff that's for like stronger alcohol. But at some point the men started going out hunting and the women were the ones who would stay in the village, tend to the children and take care of the food and the fire. Well, anything that they were eating or drinking would have fallen into the category of preparation of their sustenance. So whatever alcohol they were drinking, you know, would have become a domestic chore. And that is what has happened in every civilization that I can think of throughout all of human history, which is that you have women brewing the beer at first because it's a domestic tour, right.
Hannah (00:13:07):
Specifically, which are the earliest civilizations or areas that are known to have been the original brewers.
Tara (00:13:15):
So if you're looking at civilization as being an agriculturally based sedentary group of people that wasn't happening back in the early days in Southern Africa, that was too primitive. Um, but you start seeing it in what we now call Ethiopia, and then you start seeing it in Egypt. And so if you can picture Africa, right? Like they're walking up the Eastern coast, they get to the area that's Ethiopia now. And then they get to this area that's Egypt now. And again, like anything I'm saying might not even be true because there's just so much lack of knowledge when it comes to pre civilization and such, but this is sort of like what the belief is currently, right? And then they would have walked from Egypt to Asia, which would have been connected at the time. And so in my early days of beer history, I was taught that ancient Sumer, the Sumerians around Iran, Iraq, that that was the first real civilization. And that civilization was huge on beer. And then, so after the Sumerians kind of fell apart, the Babylonians followed them and both the Sumerians and the Babylonians were considered Mesopotamians and the Mesopotamian empire was happening around the same time as ancient Egypt, ish. So there's like a lot of cross culture, like trade. And in my early narrative, I was going with like, okay, so the Sumerians were the first state and the first brewers and then the Babylonians, and then the Babylonians taught the Egyptians to brew. But the more that we learn as a society and the more I learn personally, I see that there was probably much more back and forth happening as far as brewing goes. And there was some news that came out just the other day that archeologists working in Egypt found what appears to be the largest commercial brewery ever discovered. So what may have actually been happening is that these people who settled in Ethiopia and these people who settled in Egypt, like before all the pharaohs it's called pre dynastic, Egypt were actually brewing on a large scale, like legit, like, okay. Not quite like Budweiser to be like, yeah, like, like, like Anheuser, Busch,
Hannah (00:15:38):
Pre -InBev buyout, right.
Tara (00:15:39):
Maybe that's a good way to put it. So it is possible that the whole idea of like the Mesopotamians being the first brewers is incorrect. And it may have actually been like the Egyptians and the Ethiopians.
Hannah (00:15:54):
My bachelor of fine arts in a drama doesn't necessarily prepare me for this though. I did get a five on the AP,world history exam. How many people in their thirties are still bragging about that? Just me. But it seems like it's, like you said, generally accepted that, you know, the Sumerians and like the Cuneiform tablets that are, you know, praising their goddess of revelry. And so it's fascinating to learn that what historians have believed for hundreds of years maybe is actually not what really happened.
Tara (00:16:21):
I know! And just the evolutions that have happened, even like a sad, like since I started writing this book and started writing the proposal, things are changing, but it is cool. You mentioned the cuneiform tablets. And, um, it is not really contested that like the first writing, the first math.... Oh. And here's something that we need to talk about. That's super important to understanding all of this. We think of beer, you know, we read the stupid articles about the super bowl and, and, you know, we get snooty and, and do flights of craft beer and stuff, and that's all wonderful, but it's a leisure drink in our society. In most societies before the 19th, 20th century relied on beer as their staple drink. So people might be like, Oh wow. They must've really liked to have a good time if their earliest writing and math was for beer. Well, yes. And also, no, because there's a lot of sort of argument about this, but the conventional wisdom is that in a lot of these places in times, the water wasn't necessarily safe to drink. It was very polluted. And so there wasn't, there weren't a lot of options for, for drinking, like wine, wine tended to be expensive. They didn't have soda, they didn't have Gatorade or OJ. Right. And they didn't drink milk. And so beer. So, you know, wives, husbands, kids, babies, all drank small beer for all of their meals. And so not even to mention the higher strength alcohol that was for like festivals and religious rights and burials and things like that. Beer was probably the most staple beverage, and or food. And it has nutrients in it too. So like you're living in some old civilization, you relied on beer for everything. It's wild. It's so freaking wild.
Hannah (00:18:20):
Yeah. I mean, I had heard it referred to as like liquid bread, obviously because of like the ingredients, but to think of it as sustenance, not just a recreational drink is a big light bulb.
Tara (00:18:32):
And even like, if you go to the Nordic countries and Finland specifically, there's a beverage, that's an historic drink from the irony age called Sahti. And, uh, even within Sahti, it's S a H T I, and generally the women would brew it, although that like, everything else is in dispute, but a lot of women did brew it there, like different Sahti for different occasions. You know, there's like your daily Sahti, there's, women's Sahti. There's like, you're packing a punch, knock you on your Sahti for these, like all these like pagan festivals that they would have all the time.
Hannah (00:19:12):
Wow. So talking about Finland, it builds a nice bridge to jumping from Mesopotamia and Egypt to Europe, because I know when I think about beer and like the origins of beer, my mind might jump to like medieval England or whatever. So as far as those traditions in Europe, where, how did those start?
Tara (00:19:33):
So Eventually the people who had settled in what we now call the middle East would have made their way to Europe, Southern Europe first, and then, um, eventually working their way from the East to the West in populating central Europe, and then continuing to move North and West. So here we have beer in central Europe, the Celtic and Germanic tribes that inhabited central Europe around the same time as the ancient Greeks and Romans were big beer drinkers. They didn't have writing and they hadn't developed their own writing. So what we know about them tends to come from the Greeks and the Romans who were like these horribly sexist effete snobs who drank wine and looked down on everyone who drank beers. So anytime anyone thinks that wine is more civilized than beer, we have the Greeks and Romans to thank for that. So here we are in Europe, we're running around in the woods, we're very quarrelsome, we're warlike. And the women were like also big and burly and beer drinking and fighters. And, you know, a lot of those people ended up staying in Germany, you know, the Celts kept going. Um, and, uh, eventually some people got up to the Nordic countries and, uh, the beer traditions followed. And it's so interesting too, because beer developments tend to start, um, like in the middle of the old country, like around Germany. And then they don't get to the Northern, to Northern Europe for like 200 years. And they don't get to England for a hundred, 200 years because, you know, they're, they're farther away. You know, they're more isolated, they're more remote, but the same traditions were playing out. You know, it was the women who were brewing all throughout the, uh, middle ages that was before hops had really become an integral part of beer and people were throwing whatever they could into their beer. I mean, stuff that is not edible.
Hannah (00:21:52):
I mean, that brings up a great point that we'll touch on a little later, just the idea of regulation of what makes beer, obviously at that time, it was just sort of like you said, this small drink, how do we differentiate ancient beer from other distilled or brewed items?
Tara (00:22:08):
That's a really good question. It's, it's hard. Um, because A- anything that we think could be sort of approximating beer is so different from what we consider beer today. And then also like the words that people used in the various time periods and countries don't necessarily, you don't know if they're talking about, like alcohol in general or wine specifically. So I define beer whenever possible as having a grain base. So what, what tended to happen throughout civilization, but you really, really see it in Europe, in the medieval and even Renaissance times brewing is this women's job. It's part of their chores, but women sometimes would be able to make extra and then they would sell it. And there started to be rules and rules and rules and rules on how and where you could sell your beer and for how much and where in the market you could sell it and who you were determined, whether you were even allowed to sell beer or not.
Tara (00:23:21):
And you see that as capitalism began to form, and we politically became a more modern society, like as we moved from like feudalism to, you know, more of like a city state, these rules develop to further and further restrict brewing , and every time that happens and in general, like any time, something sort of gets more scientific or professionalizes in life, it tends to hurt the women who were doing it as like a craft, you know, the craftswomen. So for instance, so, so women would be brewing this beer and making extra when they could to sell it. You know, we think we have to be these perfect working moms now. Right? Like they had to do everything all the time. And so they would brew their beer in the middle of doing 700 other things. Right. It wasn't like, they were like, Nope, sorry, five o'clock I'm done my shift. So when a town for instance would say, okay, well, you can't brew on Sundays now. Well, that would kick out some women who could have only brewed on Sundays and when a Brewers Guild would form, and the only women who could join would be the widows of male brewers.
Hannah (00:24:46):
What, you've basically just explained, is that going, even from like the earliest roots of beer in Mesopotamia and Egypt, beer is women's work, it's just the same thing as like cooking dinner and cleaning the house, you're brewing your beer in your house. And it only became a sort of professionalized, obviously isn't the right word. But like these women were sometimes selling their beer. The extra is what you're saying. Right?
Tara (00:25:09):
Correct.
Hannah (00:25:09):
Basically relegated to like household, we don't care. You do it. Is that sort of the sentiment or...
Tara (00:25:14):
Yes. And I skipped over an important part that was happening in ancient civilizations because I wanted to get us to, we wanted to get us to Europe, but I will mention it because it is important. The very, very big exception to that is religious brewing. So in these ancient civilizations, you know, there would be a lot of brewing to the gods and goddesses. And then as like statehood to cold, as we became more civilized, so to speak, then it would be like priestesses would brew and they would have female servants and they would be brewing for the offerings and for the temples. And then as it became bigger business then, and the basically church and state merged, it would generally be men who would rise to the heads of state and through a lot of different forces, the society would become more patriarchal. The goddesses would get, um, demoted basically, and the gods would rise to more stature.
Tara (00:26:21):
And I'm still talking ancient times here. Um, because church and state were the same. They were brewing for religious purposes still, but now they were also like, Oh, Hey, this is a great industry. We can make some money to fund our roads and bridges. Um, let's brew a lot. And so they built these enormous production breweries. And the more that happened, the more men were put in charge and women would get relegated back to the home. And so the priestess stature of brewer disappeared. So it started in summer. It started with the first civilization. So if we skip back to Europe and what we see is once again, like we said, the women are brewing in the middle of all their other household chores or selling the extra. And yet any time. And I say, the forces of politics, economics, or religion would have some sort of motivation, whether it was conscious or not, um, men would replace women in brewing.
Tara (00:27:29):
Um, so just an example, you know, there were a lot of nuns who brewed alongside men in Europe, in medieval times. Well, when Protestant denomination came along, they liked to destroy the churches and kick out all the nuns because they thought that being a nun meant you were having like wild sex orgies all the time. You know, you lost a lot of brewing nuns who then had nowhere to go, and now I'm getting into a tangent, but as single women, they were like stripped of any right. They may have ever had. And sometimes even banished from their towns, just for being single women. And depending on the time and place like single women could like become servants and maybe they would brew to like make a tiny bit of money, but in a lot of places, single women were the most vulnerable people in the society.
Tara (00:28:26):
And so they weren't allowed to own their own equipment, even if they could have afforded it themselves. And they just get banished and often became prostitutes because there was literally nothing else for them to do. And so we mentioned the guilds before. Um, so, you know, there were times in the middle ages when living conditions were just unimaginable and the economic conditions, like nobody could make a living. And so competition for resources got insane. And so if you had brewing guilds, which would have formed as early as like the 13th century- ish and over the next few hundred years, some for instance would have let women in at the beginning as full partners, because they acknowledged that they were brewing and selling beer, or some would say no women allowed because you're just doing it as a bi-industry, which is like, you're making a little, a couple cents here and there from it while doing other things. And, and we're the professional brewers. So you don't count.
Hannah (00:29:33):
If brewing had always been considered a job for women and the women were taking that on, how did these men become "professional brewers," then ?
Tara (00:29:41):
A bunch of different ways. So consider that married women pretty much at no time could get away from those other chores. Like maybe they had servants or whatever, So that helped, but they were still in charge of the household. So they might've been like helping to run a Tavern or selling a lot of beer, but they couldn't necessarily take so much time away to get any sort of training, become an apprentice, which would require like two years away from home, go to school, become a, like a licensed doctor, all of this kind of stuff happening in the medieval and early modern European period. So when beers started to become bigger scale and technology allowed you to ship it farther and, and trade became more robust, the women were always left behind at home while the men could go take advantage of whatever opportunities there were. And the more this happens, the more calcified the misogyny became and, you know, the more the gap grew. And so when you started having like actual production breweries in Europe, there were never any women in them, always men. So like, you're, again, I say like professionalizing equals women falling from whatever rank they might've been able to eek out.
Hannah (00:31:03):
That makes sense. Thank you for going back and explaining that. And it also brings up something that I had read in a couple of articles you've written about and just been preparation, The idea that before the professionalization of beer and brewing, it was all basically just like oral history. Right?
Tara (00:31:20):
So when it was women in charge of the brew, I mean, most women throughout history have been illiterate. I mean, most people throughout history have been illiterate, but particularly women because they couldn't go to school. So brewing has been a very matrilineal craft. So yes, like you would grow up as a little girl helping your mom brew. So you would just learn it from her, but she wasn't like using a measuring cup and reading from a book. She just felt it, she knew it was in her bones, you know, for thousands of years. So, yeah, it was oral. And one of the big, interesting pivots that happened around the 19th century, both in Europe and here in the States. So there was this like big science push. And I mean, you can probably picture like steam punk, right. It really kind of glorifies that like with these weird, like scientific things.
Tara (00:32:21):
So around that era, a lot more people were starting to like write books about science and scientific journals and taking the mystery out of things and these books and these periodicals, and these guidebooks really started denigrating like the foolish women who relied on, you know, spells or whatever they would call them to just idly brew this beer. Well, let me tell you how to make it scientific. We're going to use big scientific terms and yeah, we're going to take all the mystery out of it. And now we're going to start writing down recipes and taking it even more away from the women, putting it more in the, hands of men.
Hannah (00:33:06):
So basically it was the original form of mansplaining, as it pertains to beer. You can draw a direct line from that to someone like saying to you in a taproom, like, you know, that's bitter, right.
Tara (00:33:18):
Well, I would be remiss if we didn't touch on the role of hops. So speaking of better hops, really, I hate to use the cliche, but I can't think of anything better. Like at least when it comes to the UK really nailed the nail in the coffin or whatever for female brewers, because remember we were talking about women would just like put whatever they could find in their beer. And so once hops started to be used back on the mainland, you could preserve your beer longer, sell it farther. And so you started to have the development of bigger breweries, like in the Netherlands, for instance, and then slowly here come hop across the English channel. And people really liked the taste of hops eventually. Oh. And then they would also bring over Dutch men and German men to build and work at big production breweries in England. And, you know, they would be using hops. Well, the women couldn't compete because hops could be hard to get. Sometimes they were sort of jealously guarded by like the the nobility or the church or whoever. And the more hops were valued and the more restrictions were put on this, like old style of brewing. The less women could access the beer because they couldn't ever possibly afford like the equipment and the networking and the connections and all of that. And so that's really what took women out of brewing.
Hannah (00:34:49):
Interesting. But what about the Benedictine Abbess, what's her name? Hildegard?
Tara (00:34:54):
Yeah, Hildegard. She was bad-ass Hildegard is the one none throughout history, except for one who's alive now brewing Nun who anybody really knows about. And she was wicked scientist and she was really into horticulture and the healing powers of botanicals, and she wrote a lot of things down. And so she was the first person that we know of to put in writing the preservative properties of hops. So she's famous for that. And then, you know, you had mentioned the Reinheitsgebot, um, in our correspondence. So States in Germany started taking over what had been monastic brewers, right. And so each state would have like a state run brewery and the nobility for various reasons, some innocent and some, a little more, I think sinister would start to impose regulations on what couldn't, couldn't be used in beer. And a lot of this had to do with taxation.
Tara (00:36:06):
Like they really wanted to be able to tax the beer. So however they could like suck the most money out of it, they would. So, um, you know, a lot of people know about this beer purity law of 15, 16, the regulations said that you could, by law only brew with three ingredients, and those were grains, water and hops. They didn't know about yeast at the time. So they added yeast in later. Um, and so you couldn't put like cat claw clippings and like poisonous roots and all that other stuff. So, I mean, there was some positive to it because sure. Like you could die from drinking a beer that was unscrupulously made, but also that really, again like that sealed the fate of women because they very often couldn't access the hops. So there were a couple of laws like that. And then in 1516, um, it became the law of the whole state of Bavaria. It was mistakenly believed that it's, it was the law for all of Germany. That wasn't true. I mean, now it is, but it's really mostly Bavaria. And the farther North in Germany, you go, the more kind of, um, stylistic interpretation, you see,
Hannah (00:37:23):
Bring it back to the thesis. If you will, of women were edged out of beer by politics, economics, and religion. Like we can put a period on that. Thank you for going back and explaining that. You touched earlier. I want to circle back around to early colonial America and women have kind of had the same role in brewing here?
Tara (00:37:41):
I continue to be surprised by how parallel the colonial brewing experience was to the British brewing experience. Um, a couple hundred years earlier. Yeah. I mean, same thing. Um, there were community brew houses built, um, with which you didn't necessarily see in Europe as much, but community brew houses in the colonies. Also women brewing at home, and the men going out and doing their like political thing or their merchant thing or whatever the women would, they would run taverns and such. There was less, I mean, it was later on in history. So you didn't see as much like huckstering at the market necessarily as you would have in earlier European days, but pretty much everything was the same. And then, you know, technological developments, the scientific stuff we talked about basically separated women from the industry because they couldn't afford or access the things that they needed to.
Hannah (00:38:42):
I, wasn't going to ask you this, but the working title of your book inspired me, how did we get into the culture of how beer was, and still is marketed to women that like, Oh dear, you need your own light beer. That kind of thing.
Tara (00:38:57):
It has a lot to do. I think with world war two and the organization that is now called the Beer Institutes coming out of world war two, they, uh, kind of wanted to find new markets for the beer. And this is when the idea of shopping for your food was becoming more modernized. And so you could like go to a store and transport bottles for the first time of beer and bring them home. Um, and so a lot was changing just societaly at that time also. And so the brewers association different from the one that exists now had a lot of smart men, a lot of smart advertising men. And they were like, Oh, little ladies. Perfect. And, um, it wasn't necessarily that they were, that they created the idea of the little lady, but I think that they perpetuated it, they exploited it. And they've also had a really antagonistic history with women starting back in the, um, early days of the temperance movement.
Tara (00:40:17):
So that's a whole nother story, but, um, so it was, let's try to market to women so that they don't just go to the store and buy the beer, but that they'll also want to drink a little bit too. Another reason that the, uh, beer guilds wanted to appeal to women and their advertising at that time after world war two, is that they needed to present it as a wholesome beverage. There was a long period of time when taverns were viewed as like really Steed, dark underbelly of society, kind of places. And the Germans came over in the 19th century and they started these fabulous beer gardens where the women and children would go hang out with the families and the, the, the white Christian women of America were scandalized that a woman would drink in public and that they'd bring their children. So then you have like prohibition and world war two, and it was just a rough economic time. And so brewers needed to expand their markets and they needed to reposition beer as something that was healthy and wholesome. So what better way to do that, then present, you know, women in the ads, you know, doing healthy family things. And then it just devolved into these sexualized images because everything pretty much always does.
Hannah (00:41:42):
Also my takeaway from that is just like... White women... we fuck it all up
Tara (00:41:49):
As we talk about temperance and such, and the minute I go into a lot of racial relations stuff and, um, there's this woman everyone should know about. And like, so few people do, um, her name was Frances Harper. She was a black suffragist and temperance activist and uh man, she called people out when she would go speak and she'd get invited to all these like feminist slash temperance meetings. And she got on stage. And I think about this for myself. Sometimes if I think I'm being like just a basic white girl, she got up there and said something like, there is no person who needs to get out of their airy nothing's more than the white women do. And she was this black lady saying that and she walked off stage. Right.
Hannah (00:42:42):
That's incredible. I can't imagine that played very well at the time.
Tara (00:42:46):
She was clear, Really very eloquent and persuasive because she did end up convincing large groups of white women repeatedly to start considering like fighting for the Black Man's vote when they didn't really want to. So yes, I would agree. It probably didn't play well, although she might've gotten her way.
Hannah (00:43:11):
Wow. I'm really thrilled to learn about her. I want you to basically talk about temperance as little or as much as you want, because obviously that could be a whole nother podcast, but it's kind of an integral part of beer history in the United States. So we would be remiss if we didn't talk about it a little bit.
Tara (00:43:30):
The Ttmperance movement, doesn't it, it's more about talking about alcohol in general. There are a few things that are specific to beer versus alcohol, and I can touch on those, but generally we're looking at alcohol as a whole category, right? So starting in the early 19th century, mostly Protestant women got behind the idea that alcohol was not so good for society. They tended to be like these God-fearing women. And so some of them thought it was sinful or whatever. Some things happen in society like the civil war. And it kind of went away for a little while. It wasn't a priority. And then right around the time of the civil war a little bit after the same I don't want to say type of woman, but like, your, your...
Hannah (00:44:18):
Bible belt.
Tara (00:44:19):
So it really started the early days of it were very concentrated in Ohio.
Tara (00:44:23):
And so that's where you start seeing like church going women praying outside taverns, calling for people to stop selling alcohol. And this movement took hold and it spread around a lot of the country. And that's when you see the beginning of the women's Christian temperance movement and the temperance movement merged with the women's movement. So they ended up basically becoming interchangeable. Women who wanted to fight for the vote were also typically the same women who wanted to fight to make the sale of alcohol illegal. So for a while, the beer people, the brewers, which by this point had pretty much become very dominated by Germans. So we're talking like fairly large scale German commercial operations. At this point at first, the brewers tried to separate themselves from the distillers by basically saying, well, beer is so wholesome. Liquor will get you drunk before this time people were drinking rum in quantities that you cannot imagine.
Tara (00:45:37):
So the brewers were like, okay, great. Don't drink rum, drink beer. You can drink beer all day. And you'll be healthy. Look at this rosy cheeked blonde child. Right. But that didn't really work. So the bigger the temperance and the suffrage movement became the more the brewers fought against it. And they would come up with all these like crazy fake ad campaigns. And they would be violent against the women who were down on their knees, praying in the street to save the souls of the drunk men inside. And they would beat them. They sick dogs...I mean, I am not pro religion at all, but you've got these like sicking dogs on them and kicking them in the face while they were down on their knees. Praying.
Hannah (00:46:28):
That is absolutely insane. It's just interesting to like, kind of think about those forces of temperance and prohibition versus protesting against that. And the misogyny that's like ingrained in, in that act by the, these brewers and their guilds.
Tara (00:46:45):
Big time. And because the two movements became one in the same, the brewers by default had to take a very, very, very big stands against the women's vote because it was believed. And then they said it, a vote for suffrage is a vote for temperance because the temperance movement, if it weren't for women, we would have never had prohibition. Now on the positive side of the temperance movement is that women got involved in political action for the first. It was really the first time women found their political voice in this country.
Hannah (00:47:34):
So Temperance and women's right to vote are intertwined at this point. And so then we have prohibition and obviously that kind of brings beer, any type of, you know, alcohol, but for our purposes, beer brewing to a halt completely?
Tara (00:47:52):
So breweries a lot of them that survived, produced other stuff. I don't know why, but I have a six pack of malt soda in my closet that I think somebody brought. And I tried one for the first time since I was a kid. And I was thinking like, well, this is the kind of thing that the breweries would have tried, would have produced to try to stay open or like malt ice cream. Most of them closed those that survived were able to do so that way, or they bootleg. I mean, they produced it illegally. So prohibition, I mean, that was a positive thing also for totally changing the mores under which women, young women in particular lived throughout the twenties. You know, women's started smoking cigarettes in public. I mean, yay. But skirt hems could get a little shorter. It was like women started to be able, young women started to be able to have sort of some sense of self identity and autonomy for the first time ish.
Tara (00:49:02):
And then as far as political women go with prohibition, I focus on this woman named Pauline Sabin who helped end prohibition. She was a fabulously wealthy L ong Island socialite. And, uh, she was so well connected that she had the ear of like the most famous man in Washington. And she got a lot of other rich women like clutch the pearls women, right. To mobilize against prohibition. And ultimately, I mean, she, wasn't the only reason that it ended, but she was a huge, huge, huge force of that. Oh, and the other thing is that there really wasn't all that much regarding beer going on at the time. It's a time when, I mean, I'm sure, you know, I'm sure a lot of your listeners know too, like it was cocktail culture at that time. And that's when these really complicated, overly sweet froofy gross cocktails came to be because you had to mask the disgusting flavor of the like bathtub gin, you were drinking. But yeah, it wasn't really a time for beer. It was more a more a cocktail time. But, um, those are some of the ways that women were involved in the lead up and take down, um, it's prohibition.
Hannah (00:50:25):
I absolutely never knew that. So thank you for teaching me. I want to shout out another podcast. I love called drink history they go into more the origins of the cocktails. We know. So everybody checked that out, but how did we go from masking the taste of this disgusting distillate to beer again?
Tara (00:50:48):
There are these famous stories of breweries, like Budweiser rolling out barrels of beer, the instant that prohibition ended, and everyone was sending their beer to the president at that time. So the breweries that had either stayed open through producing alternate products, or for whatever reason were able to reopen did so. We didn't really get back into beer in a way that I would consider positive for many, many, many decades. So what happened was so many breweries, you know, didn't reopen after prohibition and the ones that did were the big heavyweights, right? Because they would have been able to survive or reopen after prohibition. And it was an era of massive consolidation. So if you were a regional family brewery that had been open for seventy-five years, at that point a hundred years, you probably got bought whether you wanted to sell or not. So we ended up having the lowest point for breweries in modern America was 1978, I think, because everything was either bought or closed.
Tara (00:52:00):
And so that's like the vast wasteland that I grew up with, you know, like drinking my dad's Budweiser, right? If you wanted to drink beer, you're drinking like Schlitz or Milwaukee's or Miller, you know, those brands. And it was just as fast beer wasteland. And then 1965, Fritz Maytag bought anchor brewing in 1976, a guy named Jack who had learned how to home brew while in the Navy and Scotland opened with two women, the first ground up craft brewery in America, after prohibition and people followed by opening these real, like bootstrap little breweries. They tended to be people who had been to Europe and drunk that kind of beer, and then had taught themselves to Homebrew because they didn't want to drink the schwag that was available. And here we are today.
Hannah (00:52:54):
And here we are, that actually is a gorgeous segue because I was going to ask you, you know, myself and my listeners have varying degrees of knowledge on this, but I know names like Fritz Maytag, like Ken Grossman, Steve Hindy, these like people who we think of as like the progenitors of the American craft beer movement. And you kind of touched on it, but are there women's names that we should know and we don't?
Tara (00:53:16):
Yeah. Big time. I talk about this a lot in the book. So even starting with New Albion, which is when they opened in 1976, first ground up craft brewery, anyone who knows anything about it knows that it was this guy, Jack McAuliffe, right? Who opened it? No one. I mean, no one knows that two women funded his brewery, launched it with him, built the fucking thing. One of them quit after not too long because Jack was an asshole. Sorry, I'm just repeating what I'm told. I just report the news.
Hannah (00:53:56):
Listen, she's a journalist people.
Tara (00:53:59):
And the other one, Suzanne stern Denison was there from the first day to the last day she did everything. She helped him brew. She ran the place she helped sell. She would drive around and pick up supplies. No one knows she has. That is a major point in the book, which is that she'd got erased from the history erased.
Tara (00:54:24):
So she's my first and foremost, but then there are other women like Mellie Pullman was, are you familiar with the brewery out of Utah called Wasatch Polygamy Porter? You ever heard of that?
Hannah (00:54:40):
I haven't heard of that.
Tara (00:54:41):
See if you can get your hands on it. That opens in 1986, it's still around and a guy named Greg Schirf opened it. And he's the one who's all over the history on the website and, his business partner and his brewer were one and the same woman, Mellie Pullman in a very, very, very rare role reversal, which we still never see. He did the business side of the brewery and she was in charge of the brewing and she hired, they were in ski country in park city. And, um, she hired a lot of women to brew for her. So she's number two. I mean, if you want to look chronologically, and then a lot of those very early craft breweries were husband and wife operations.
Tara (00:55:25):
And, um, a lot of them are lost to history just in general anymore, but you don't really ever hear about the wives who are working every single bit as hard as the husband, all kinds of crazy manual labor and probably taking care of the kids more and maybe working a day job. You know, one that I was able to find was Beth Hart, actually people do still know this brewery because they only closed like last year, Pyramid out of, um, the Pacific Northwest that's. She started that with her husband. And that was around from the early eighties until basically now. So there are a lot of stories like that. I mean, I can babble on and on about that, but...
Hannah (00:56:11):
But people need to buy the damn book!
Tara (00:56:13):
We introduce a lot of those women. Oh, and can I highlight one more? There's a woman she's hysterical her name's Judy Ashworth.
Tara (00:56:20):
She ran a pub outside of San Francisco in the eighties. And it was one... she says She wasn't the very first, but she, she had to be like one of the first five craft beer bars in the country. And she started things that even now haven't completely caught on. And some that have, but things like Meet The Brewer nights, Christmas in July, she was fanatic about her lines and she built her own draft system that used like reverse osmosis. She doesn't have the bar anymore, but if it weren't for her, I think that like beer bar landscape might look different and no one outside of like a certain circle in California really knows about her either. And she's Oh my God. She's so funny.
Hannah (00:57:09):
Wow. I'm so grateful to know those names. And now go off and try to learn more about them in your book, obviously, because they need to be more widely known clearly.
Tara (00:57:19):
Well, and I, I will say Jeff, Allworth the, uh really renowned beer journalist just published a pretty straight up interview with Susie Stern Dennison from new Albion. You can find out a lot about Susie there and I don't get to really highlight her personality, but the interview does,
Hannah (00:57:38):
I'll definitely link that in the show notes. This is kind of a jump, but I do want to get global again for a second and touch on, uh, like traditional brewing techniques that women are keeping alive today.
Tara (00:57:50):
That's an awesome question. And I think in hope we're going to slowly start to hear more about that. I would say that's happening primarily in Africa and in South America, a lot of people have heard of chicha and that is where women for thousands of years have chewed up coordinates. And we won't go into how it works, but they make chicha, which is a type of beer with the chewed up corn maze that does still happen in traditional environments in South America. And every once in a while, a craft brewer, AKA Sam Calagione will make one of their own. So that's happening. I don't know, offhand of like craft recreations of that. Okay. So what is really interesting is in Africa, again, like everywhere women have traditionally been the brewers in Africa, big corporate breweries have come in and they make like the commercial lager that the young people drink throughout this whole time village. Women are still making the old traditional beers and selling them out of their houses to men who tend to drink them out of like out of a fruit, I think out of a Calabash hardened shell. So the men drink it around the homes of the women. It's like very, still an old school thing. There are some female craft brewery owners now scattered around Africa a very few, but there are some who are taking inspiration from those traditional beer recipes that their grandmothers might still make at Christmas time and making them on a craft brewery scale. They tend to be naming them after like whatever the women of their clan are called. And that is really amazing. And they're starting to be known about a tiny bit in the States. In fact, I will plug a Forbes article that introduces us to a couple of those young female African craft brewers. They are really, really bringing all the new together and they're fabulous.
Hannah (01:00:10):
That's so exciting. And I will definitely link that. Obviously we're talking a lot about history, but looking into the future, what are you most excited about for the future of women in beer
Tara (01:00:23):
You know, coming off this conversation about Africa, I'm really excited for women in underrepresented beer countries to mine, their traditions and revive them. If they've gone away, keep them alive If they're still struggling along and make sure that those traditions don't disappear and use whatever resources they have to get people in other parts of the world, like here to know about them and to be able to try them and drink them. And then hopefully people in the diaspora of those continents can then also start incorporating those ingredients or brewing traditions from their Homeland. God, I think that everybody can benefit from that. Like I think that could be some really awesome cultural understanding.
Hannah (01:01:23):
I'm so glad that you said that it makes me think of another article that I'll link, but I think it was in Good Beer Hunting and it was all about South Asian women specifically. And, you know, the broader picture of it was culturally, how being involved in beer and alcohol, like how that's perceived, but they spoke a lot about traditional flavors and ingredients that like breweries in India are putting into their beer. And yeah, I'm, I'm excited now. I'm excited about that too!
Tara (01:01:51):
The, the potential is amazing. Um, there are two examples that involve men that are coming to mind, but I interviewed a guy for an article I've coming out soon, who is a Jamaican descent and he works at a brewery. And, you know, he's just talking about all of these flavors from Jamaica and how they would be so incredible in beer and how he wishes more people from the African diaspora were brewing in this country. Because I mean, how delicious and like how freaking food friendly I imagined, and I will actually give a little plug to a client of mine. He is first-generation American from India and he just opened a brewery called Other Desi Beer in Connecticut. And, um, his beers are inspired by themes and ingredients and such from India. And he should have put in the mail to me a chai stout.
Hannah (01:02:54):
Yes, please. Thank you so much.
Tara (01:02:57):
I mean, I'm sure it's not like it's not the first chai stout, but like it's probably the first one brewed by an Indian person. I can't say that for sure. With like real imported ingredients.
Hannah (01:03:06):
That was the other thing that this article mentioned sort of about the cultural appropriation of specifically Indian ingredients and like Indian cultural, like designs on cans and namings in Sanskrit of the whole white washing of that. And co-opting it and how we need exactly. Like you're saying with Other Desi Beer, like people whose cultural heritage, this is to represent it. And rather than someone who is just co-opting it and appropriating it,
Tara (01:03:32):
And it's so true. And he has a, one-off a limited release that he makes, I think it's called, um, Three Sisters and it is honoring his mom and his two aunts for raising him. And he references Indian goddesses on there and goes into like an explanation. In like in the marketing materials about goddesses in India. And so even though he's a dude who owns this brewery, he at least for one can teach us and is honoring women in his tradition. Wow. I just got chills.
Hannah (01:04:09):
You too. I'm getting the verklempt. Oh, thank you for sharing that. Speaking of plugs, is there anything else as we wrap up that, you know, you have like exploded my brain so...
Tara (01:04:21):
Good. I've done my job.
Hannah (01:04:23):
But is there anything else you want to share our plug? Where can people find you on the internet? That's like 45 questions in one. So...
Tara (01:04:30):
On Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, my handle is Tara Nurin for all of that. My website is the same TaraNurin.com . I will have once COVID is over a schedule on there of where I'm going to be doing appearances and things like that. So hopefully people will find me and drink some beers and talk women in history.
Hannah (01:04:53):
Yes, I will.
Tara (01:04:54):
Good. I... you don't have a choice, but as long as you're asking, if I do do marketing for breweries and distilleries and such, and I'm always up for hosting and speaking engagements or leading um fun, beer events, providing expert commentary.
Hannah (01:05:12):
Great. Yeah. Spoken like a true marketing professional. You listed all of your handles and your website very clearly, But I'll link it also for a quick click for people who want to find you. I've had so much fun on the zoom. I'm so grateful to you. You've been so generous with your time and your knowledge and like, I can't wait to read your book.
Tara (01:05:30):
Thank you.
Hannah (01:05:31):
We're all going to buy it. Oh my God. We'll have a Brews with Broads book club and we'll all read your book and what a time we'll have. Wow. Okay. That's perfect. Tara, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. Will you take us out with your favorite toast, a toast, anything you got? I'll take.
Tara (01:05:49):
Sure. So I was thinking about this and kind of coming up short because I'm not like funny toast girl necessarily. Um, I do really enjoy a good Salude or a good Slainte, but there's one that, um, I remember from childhood, my mom actually saying it in Puerto Rico, which is, um, "Salude, Amor, y pesetas", Which do you speak any Spanish?
Hannah (01:06:17):
No, I took French in high school, unfortunately.
Tara (01:06:21):
So "Salude, Amor, y pesetas" means, um, health love and money. Basically.
Hannah (01:06:29):
I love that salad, amor, y pesetas.
Tara (01:06:32):
Yeah.
Hannah (01:06:32):
Amen.
Tara (01:06:33):
Amen.
Hannah (01:06:34):
Cheers to that.
Hannah (01:06:43):
Okay. Is your brain exploding? As much as my brain is exploding? I hope so. Tara dropped so much brilliance on us and I for one am so excited to get my paws on her book. When it comes out on September 21st of this year, trust me. When I say I will keep you all updated with where you can get it. And I'm serious about that book club. I want to make it happen. I have linked Tara's article and all the articles we spoke about in the show notes. So you can continue to educate yourselves, As I know I will be doing. Thank you so much to Tara for taking the time to talk to me and to you all for listening. This has been the ultimate nerd out session, and I am so excited to have you along for the rest of these Beer 101 Minisodes we're going to dive into brewing ingredients and during process and so much more. So stay tuned. I will be back next week with your regularly scheduled programming. Don't forget to follow Tara on Instagram and Twitter at Tara Nurin and follow me. Y'all I don't even have a Twitter at Bruce with broads as always. Thank you so much to Megan Bagala for IME our to Sabrina at the hobbyist shop for our graphic and to you for listening. Keep sharing the pod, keep reviewing, keep subscribing. Oh wow. Could I sound more like a granny anyway, I will talk to you all next week. Bye.