Theresa Braine
New York Daily News
As we settle into our sports broadcast of choice this month with our favorite brewski, let’s pause for a moment, and thank a woman.
Official “history months” have a way of teaching us things we thought we already knew, and Women’s History Month is no different. In this case it’s beer.
Women, as it turns out, were the first brewers of beer, a natural outgrowth of their culinary duties, as Ancient Origins explains. Women not only were in charge of beer making, but they also sold it to make ends meet when widowed or unmarried. It turns out that this only died down after men saw they could make money, got the women branded as witches and forced them out so beer could be turned into an industry.
Beer was a household staple, especially when clean water was hard to come by, as the fermentation process rendered unclean water sterile.
Indeed, beer making — and women’s involvement — dates back to ancient Mesopotamia, at least 4,000 years ago, and may even go beyond, to 7,000 years ago. Ancient Sumerians named their beer goddess Ninkasi, according to the Women’s History website. She came complete with her own hymn, which doubles as a beer recipe.
“Ancient Egyptians worshiped a beer goddess named Tenenet, and hieroglyphics have been found depicting women brewing and drinking beer,” Atlas Obscura has recounted. “Baltic and Slavic mythology both include a goddess, named Raugutiene, who provided protection over beer. And the Finnish told of a legendary woman named Kalevatar who invented beer by mixing honey with bear saliva.”
At some point during the Middle Ages, in came the disapproving church, which equated alewives, as these early brewers were called, with damnation, according to Atlas Obscura.
And from this, witches sprang, as The Conversation laid out in a post for International Women’s Day this year. While no direct link has been drawn or proven between the original brewmasters’ garb and what morphed into the stereotypical witch look, the resemblance is undeniably uncanny.
“They wore the tall, pointy hats so that their customers could see them in the crowded marketplace,” The Conversation said of the original female brewmasters. “They transported their brew in cauldrons. And those who sold their beer out of stores had cats not as demon familiars, but to keep mice away from the grain. Some argue that iconography we associate with witches, from the pointy hat to the cauldron, originated from women working as master brewers.”
They also hung brooms outside their doors to signal that ale was available.
During the 1500s began the “smear campaign,” as The Conversation called it, to reduce their competition. Beer making eventually became dangerous for women. Women continued to make beer for their households into the 1950s and 1960s, according to Atlas Obscura, before being edged out by modern-day marketing campaigns.
Today, the world’s top 10 beer companies are headed by male CEOs, with mostly male board members, The Conversation reports. Ad campaigns pitch beer as a masculine drink. And it holds throughout the industry, with a Stanford University study showing that 17% of craft beer breweries have a female CEO but just 4% have a female brewmaster.
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