The One About the Ale (Wife)
A Super Brief History of Women & Beer
“She brews good ale, and thereof comes the proverb, Blessing of your heart, you brew good ale.”
— WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Ok, it’s time for a bit of history re: beer that also feels like I’m on my soapbox. I’m going to fill you in on something that you may find interesting, or not, but that’s the beauty of this substack, right? Right. Okay, now that we’ve re-established the rules, let’s get on with it.
The correct term for a woman brewing beer is not “lady brewer” or “chick who brews,” or even “exhausted woman wearing the overalls, wellies, and holding a shovel over by the mash tun” it’s “Brewster.”
However, women who brewed beer in England from about the 5th century through the fifteenth were known as ale wives.
Alewives became the inspiration for the warty, mean-spirited, tall hat-wearing, broom-riding mythological creatures we call “witches.”
No, I’m serious.
Let’s back up a second and reconsider all of this. It is believed that what we know as “beer” has been brewed since the dawn of man. Egyptians demanded kegs of it (one would hope NOT a hazy IPA) in their fancy tombs. Sumerians had a goddess of it. Beer was considered a health drink—and compared to what passed for fresh water back in the day, it wasn’t untrue. It was a currency for some cultures—including aforementioned Egyptians. The guys who built the pyramids were given beer as pay. Cleopatra was the first known ruler to impose a tax on it—maybe part of her downfall, maybe not.
For the ancient Celts and Gauls, beer was practically sacred. Archeologists have found evidence that they soaked barley in specially dug ditches until it sprouted, then dried them out by lighting fires at the ends of the ditches to roast the grains, giving them a dark and smoky taste. If you know anything about beer brewing you’re already going “um, yeah, that’s what we call ‘malting,’ duh.” They likely added spices like mugwort or henbane, which is supposed to make beer more intoxicating, being the party animals that they were. And life back then was kind of rough so why not drink a lot of scorched grains that have been turned into alcohol by magic?
Meanwhile, back in Egypt, brewing beer became commercialized. A license was required to make it on any scale, which means that the women who’d been doing it pretty much every day of their lives along with keeping home fires burning, making bread, tending children, cleaning, and what not were not allowed to be a part of making any money at it. This was the first step toward shutting women out of a product they’d more or less invented and definitely perfected.
Even still more archeological evidence exists to support the importance of the female in the history of this fermented drink. The Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi, a comprehensive code of law dating to around 1754 BCE, is full of rules about beer which directly affected the women who ran most of the taverns since every tavern owner is listed as “she.” It is believed that women brewed and baked together, sending their grains on different journeys, destined to end up on a plate and in a glass. In ancient Babylonia, brewing equipment was often given as part of a girls’ dowry.
So, you’d think that women would naturally own this process as naturally as they seem to own making weekly menus for the family and making sure the soccer uniforms get cleaned. And you wouldn’t be wrong in that assumption.
In beer loving locales like Ireland, Scotland and what is now Germany, women still brewed beer daily for both family (yes, even the kids got some) consumption as well as a side hustle. Early Finish women made a beer called sahti with hops, juniper twigs, barley, and rye all smoked in a sauna—as you’d expect. The Vikings wouldn’t let anyone BUT women brew beer, which is as it should be. The Slavic peoples had their own version of Ninkasi, Sumerian goddess of beer, named Raugutiene. By the 1300’s most women in England made money for their households selling their home brew.
So yeah. Women = beer. What’s the problem with that?
The problem became that they made money for themselves and for that reason, many men considered it a little… shady. One assumes even the husbands of these hard-working women did too but the bottom line was, the revered beer-maker “ale wife” began to take on a tinge of the negative. Some of these women even turned their homes into pubs and/or boarding houses which only made things worse.
So picture this with me: a traditional ale wife brewing outdoors, stirring a large, boiling cauldron and tossing in various herbs and whatnot to give the beer some flavor, making it stand out amongst all the other options so she could, you know, make some money for the household. She’d wear a tall, pointy hats so that when she took her product to the street market, it allowed people to recognize her in a crowd. When a batch of beer was ready, she hung some barley sticks over their door, kinda sorta broom-like. Oh and she kept a lot of cats around who did their job killing the mice that would eat all the grain she had on site otherwise.
Sound familiar?
Yes, so in case you didn’t know, being a witch at this time in history was, well, inadvisable. And I suppose since medieval dudes wished they could make some money making and selling beer, being an ale wife became synonymous with being someone who was looking to poison you and hence, she was a witch.
Our hard-working, Brewster forebears could not catch a break anywhere, even in England. They were accused of all manner of evils—prostitution, lying, cheating, poisoning what they were selling. You name it. It was a dangerous line of work.
Let’s leave this depressing bit of beer history behind for now and talk about Hildegard.
What you might not know about beer at this time was that it didn’t include a key ingredient in what we consider beer in the twenty-first century: hops. Gruit was the original base of beer. It was a mix of herbs and spices that varied depending on where you lived. Alewives used all sorts of things, both fresh and dried: marsh rosemary, yarrow, juniper, heather to get it started. Various ingredients were considered medicinal, and probably added some aroma and bitterness—and yeah, I can see that smelly stuff putting some people off, not to mention causing hallucinations or other negative effects depending on what was used.
In the 12th century in Germany, an abbess named Hildegard of Bingen is credited with discovering the medicinal property of a flower on a sticky vine that is a close cousin of marijuana. Humulus lupulus a.k.a. “hops” had preservative properties, but at the time, monks were prescribing them to pick up peoples’ spirits. But hey! The philosopher, composer, polymath abbess said, let’s toss some into this beer we’re brewing and see what happens.
“As a result of its own bitterness,” Hildegard wrote in the Physica, her classic text on health and healing, circa 1150, “[hops] stops putrification when put in [beer] and it may be added so that it lasts so much longer.”
Viola. Modern beer is born, thanks Hilde! And in a bit of karmic justice, only the female plant produces the valuable flowers used in brewing.
Once hops became a standard ingredient in the 16th century as a preservative, beer could travel longer distances, hence making it more industrialized and commercial. So the men took over, created guilds that specifically stated that women could not join, passed laws that prohibited it. There was Real Money to be made, ergo, the brewsters could stick with the bread baking to feed the brewers, thanks. No women need apply.
Now, of course, things are … “different”… and not in a “better” way, really. I mean we aren’t called witches, just…well, I’ll let the folks at Beer is For Everyone say it by dropping their quote it here because it says it best:
“According to the Brewers Association, 23.7% of breweries in the US have women co-founders but only 2.9% of breweries are founded solely by women. And for a position that’s more accessible than business ownership, women brewers represent only 4% of the industry. There can be several causes as to why this is the case. But as exemplified here, a lot of women and femme presenting people do not feel safe or welcome in brewery spaces. And why would we when we are constantly told through the media that we are the ones being consumed, not the ones consuming?”
Yours truly had her own not-so-positive experience as a woman* in this particular boy’s club. But that’s water under my bridge now because I credit the industry with giving me a revived sense of purpose. I’ve made friends and connections that I’ll always treasure thanks to my time spent learning the barley, water, hops, and yeast biz. Considering the rich history we women have in the invention, maturation, and production of this particular beverage, I believe there will come a time soon when we ladies take back our rightful place—whether it be at the mash tun, the sales force, or (even better) the executive suite in one of the fastest growing** industries in the world today.
(*Please ignore any interwebs searches you do that label me as “the beer wench” ‘cause I did that for the boy’s club. It was what one did to be accepted. It is no longer necessary, thank goodness.)
(**while also consolidating with the THC industry but whatever)
Hoist your glass and enjoy—and remember every time you dress up as a witch for Halloween, you’re actually celebrating some of our early, entrepreneurial Brewster ancestors. Cheers to the side hustle!
Have a lovely happy hour, whatever is in your glass!
Liz
