“Women and Beer: Scary Beer Feminists or a Healthy Growing Demographic?”
Tasting Nitch has come up with a great topic for healthy debate in this month’s session:
In a nutshell, “As the saintly Mr. M. Jackson created ‘beer culture’ by focusing on the people behind brewing, let us too take one blog post to contemplate the cultural shift that gender is taking in the beer world.”
The first two words that I thought of when I read the topic, “carrots and sticks.” It is a quaint way to start an economic or political conversation on how to change the behavior of a group of people. But I think it is valid here as well.
Because it is obvious that women and minorities are under represented in craft brewing in both the brewing and drinking parts of the equation. So, how do we go about shifting the balance?
Bear in mind, this is coming from a male perspective, so you may want to weigh more heavily the female voices who respond to this session. But I think change begins with more women in the brewing community. The world of craft beer is predicated on choice but in the case of what women want, that choice may be constrained because some styles are not brewed in enough quantity by people who can truly empathize with that under served market.
I don’t believe that men and women are drastically different in taste perceptions but I think we do pick up different aromas and flavors. Then how do you deliver to that market? And no knock on male brewers, but they simply may not be able to bridge that particular divide with their recipes. Whereas, someone of the other gender may be able to.
With that thesis in mind, how do we get more women brewing? I don’t think a still fairly young industry needs the “Stick”, but some “carrots” would make sense. I think brewers guilds on the state and national level should be allied with the Pink Boots Society to create a superfund that pays a portion of the salary of female brewers hired by breweries. To induce breweries into hiring more women, as not only brewers but as cellarpeople, QC and in scientific positions too.
Then once that happens, it us up to all of us in the craft beer fan community to at the very least sample what comes out of those taps. If we continue to drink a duo-culture of IPA’s and Imperial Stouts, then we will narrow our options by sheer force of economics.
Then bloggers like us need to write about the beer and the brewers behind them to create some momentum going forward so that more women will see brewing as a viable career path.
I hope that the ratios of men to women in this industry get closer so that more and different beer can hit the market. Without that first step of getting more women mashing in, the last two (easier and more fun) steps will just be so much spinning of wheels because if the female brewed beer can’t be found, then people will become frustrated and stop looking for it.
Or you could just follow this depressing link.
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