Today we’re going to talk about beer.
Specifically, about GENDER and beer.
Wait, don’t go!
I swear this a fascinating story.
We’re GOING to talk about how beer used to be made, and how something as simple as
hops says something about gender.
So this is a story I’ve been harassing friends with in bars since I heard it myself a little
more than three years ago.
I think anyone who drinks with me has heard this story multiple times.
Beer holds a special place in our society.
As far as we can tell, our species’ likely first introduction to alcohol, save maybe
chowing down on some rotten fruit.
Estimates show beer may be more than 10,000 years old.
Heck, we just uncovered a very ancient middle-eastern brewery.
With a link in the description for you to check out.
And why does it enjoy so much popularity?
Well, first of all, it tastes good, and you can make it with some of the earliest ingredients
our species learned to farm.
It has much of the nutrition and calories of bread but is drinkable.
It’s like Gogurt but booze Second, alcohol is a drug which makes you
feel good… that is up until you have too much and it makes you feel very NOT good.
Drugging our brains has been shown to be a universally desired experience, and not just
from humans.
Animals get drunk all the time, just watch this video by artexplains in the cards or
description to learn about that.
Lastly, we don’t appreciate this much today with our modern sewage systems and such, but
water used to be a bit of a gamble.
Diseases such as cholera made drinking water kinda dangerous, and brewing it into beer
was an easy way to disinfect water before drinking.
So yeah, for a long time beer was a household staple, enjoyed by the whole family!
For the sake of honesty, beer back then had much less alcohol and as some food historians
have found by recreating recipes, not super flavourful, but it was beer nonetheless.
And so to begin our story about gender, the home where we need to start.
Beer wasn’t a luxury product.
It was as much part of the average household as salt and pepper are today.
And the people back then would probably kill for salt and pepper.
Funny how things change…
So, beer was very much associated with home and the domestic sphere, which given the delineation
of labour in much of the past, meant brewing beer became a job for women.
We even see many cases in European and Middle-Eastern mythology goddesses of beer.
The beer women made in this period was a simple unhopped ale which spoiled quickly, so it
wasn’t feasible to centralise production.
That meant beer was often brewed at home.
Some brewsters, which is the feminine word for a brewer, would sell their excess beer
and make a bit of profit.
Many women who didn’t have the burdens of a family in Europe became masters of their
craft.
We have lots of records of medieval nuns who became famous brewsters.
One of the most famous being St. Hildegard of Bingen.
Ironically for this story, one of her significant contributions was to suggest using a herb
called hops as a preservative and to improve the beer’s flavour.
And here’s where the real kicker came.
As beer gained a longer shelf life, the process became more centralised, and since it was
a staple of the house, profitable.
Also, in order to keep prices low, governments passed laws like the Reinheitsgebot, which
standardised beer recipes for centuries as requiring the use of only barley and hops,
outlawing other herbs and grains.
It was an effort to keep the grains used to make food, especially wheat, from use in brewing.
It was an effort to keep food prices low.
However, those who produced beer at home, who had a menagerie of different ingredients
used in their brew were disproportionately affected.
These laws muscled beer brewing out of the hands of women, in order to ensure commercial
success for large centralized, all male, brewing guilds.
Soon, it was relatively rare for women to brew at all and even today beer has attained
a sort of masculine identity.
And this didn’t happen without coercion.
Churches began to write sermons about how women had no place in commerce, and many of
the icons associated with prominent brewsters began to take on sinister connotations.
Brewsters used to make beer in frothing cauldrons, and hang a broom outside their doors to indicate
whether they had any available for sale.
Often times, the grain they used attracted mice, and so they owned cats as pest control.
Also, since women are shorter than men, and they wanted to stand out at the market, they’d
wear tall pointy hats t-, ok I think you get where I’m going with this.
[Wizard of Oz witch clip] Witches have so many gender dynamics to unpack,
I think they should be a video of their own for the future, but yeah it’s not super
surprising these icons became associated with witchcraft, and not too long after these purity
laws went into place, massive witch hunts happened across Europe.
During these witch hunts, influential hunters, and small communities accused over 200,000
women of witchcraft.
Given how hops act as a kind of symbol of the male takeover of brewing from women, I
can’t help but think modern-day craft beer and the arms race of hoppy beers have more
than a little of a gendered aspect to it.
But there’s some hope for change.
Women are getting more into the craft beer scene in the last few years, and we've even
started to see the slightest hints of beer made without hops, called gruit, entering
the market.
Now, this sort of gender story is not new.
We’ve seen stuff such as this happen with women’s domains as soon as they become profitable
throughout history.
One example often brought up is midwifery.
There used to be a whole industry of midwives who’d help women with their pregnancies
and giving birth.
As medicine became more professionalised, childbirth became medicalized, and doctors
went to pretty far lengths to push these women out of the delivery room.
However, midwives do seem to be making a little bit of a comeback.
A more recent example is computer coding.
Early on, before there were even computers, women often did secretarial work which involved
mass amounts of computations.
These women were literally called computers.
As computer the machines developed, the male engineers only really cared about developing
new hardware and considered the actual writing of code, the software, as a side priority
they could give to their mostly female secretaries.
As software started to show more promise, men entered the scene, pushed women out, and
coding even built a reputation it’s some sort of masculine activity women aren’t
good at doing.
Stereotypes which still block a lot of women going into the field today.
It makes you think about how gender runs deep in our culture.
Aspects of society your favourite Kermit-voiced professor might say is baked into human biology
turn out to be way younger than you think they are, and capable of change.
It’s almost as if it’s some form of… dare I say… social construct?
I want to thank U of T professor, and food historian Jeffrey Pilcher whose keynote address
I watched BEFORE I EVEN STARTED STEP BACK led to the creation of this video.
He also agreed to review this script which was really cool.
This video is one I’ve wanted to make for a long time.
Thank you to 12tone for the Step Back theme as well as the support of my patrons Don and
Kerry Johnson, Michael Kirschner, Martin King, Scott Smith, Luis Eneas Guarita, Mary D'Onofrio,
James McNeice, and Garrick Kwan.
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