EPISODE S.4, E.6

Heather (00:09):
Welcome back to another episode of the Brewdeck Podcast, and Happy Women’s History Month. If you missed our podcast for International Women’s Day, it was released earlier this month. Go back and take a listen. We had some pretty amazing women within the craft brewing industry chatting about their beers and their pink boots brew days, so go back and take a listen to that. I am joined again today by Natasha Peiskar and Cheyenne Weishaar. Welcome.

Cheyenne (00:38):
Hello. Thank you.

Natasha (00:39):
Thanks for having me again.

Heather (00:41):
I am Heather Jerred for those of you that don’t know. We’re going to dive right in. I believe, Cheyenne, you’ve got some stats you’d like to share with everyone today.

Cheyenne (00:49):
Definitely. I mean, today’s episode, we are diving into the history of women in brewing, and the role that they have played. So, we wanted to dig up some statistics so we could talk about the state of the craft beer industry currently. The most recent benchmarking data for the brewery ownership that we could find was released by the Brewers Association in October of 2021. The percentages of breweries owned by women and non-binary individuals, 100% women-owned breweries only make up 2.9% of the breweries in total, and there was no data reported for non-binary owners.

(01:23)
When we look at production roles, the most recent data that we could find from the Brewers Association was released in 2018. Women account for 7.5% of all brewers in the United States. Again, there was no data reported for non-binary brewers. So, there’s definitely a lot of work to do in the industry.

Natasha (01:42):
I agree. Sometimes I think when we get to Women’s Month, and women are given a little bit more airtime, folks don’t see the big picture of how much work there is still to do. I think that’s why societies like Pink Boots Society are so important, and supporting the education of those folks so that they can advance their careers in the industry. We have some exciting news for some Pink Boots listeners out there. We’re actually bringing back our malting courses in person this year for a great western malting and Canada Malting Co.

(02:19)
We are excited to partner up with Pink Boots Society to offer two scholarship opportunities to the U.S., and two for Canadian members. It’s a four-day in-person course looking at all aspects of malting from barley selection to shipping finished malt, and includes some really fun field trips that I’ve actually been a part of.

Heather (02:41):
They’re a really good time.

Natasha (02:43):
So much fun. The deadline to apply is coming up really quick, March 31st. So, visit the Pink Boots Society Scholarship page for more information and how to apply.

Heather (02:55):
I’m really, really excited to have the malting course back again this year.

Natasha (02:59):
Yes.

Heather (02:59):
Finally, since COVID, this is the first time we get to do this in person again, so I’m very, very excited to have this back. Really, I think it’s just awesome that we get to invite members from the Pink Boots Society to come and join us.

Natasha (03:12):
I agree.

Heather (03:15):
While we’re talking Pink Boots Society, I guess we should introduce who our guests are going to be today. We are very, very lucky to have Teri Fahrendorf, who happens to be the founder of the Pink Boots Society. She was formally the manager of the Malt Innovation Center for Great Western Malting as well. We have definitely had her on the podcast multiple times. We’re also going to be talking to Tiah Edmunson-Morton. Tiah is an Oregon Hops and Beer archives historian at the Oregon State University. She is going to be telling us all about the history of women in brewing. Stay tuned.

(03:52)
Well, we are pleased now to welcome Tiah and Teri. Thank you so much for joining us. Let’s dive right in. Tiah, can you introduce yourself, and tell us a little about how you found yourself studying women in the brewing industry?

Tiah (04:07):
My name is Tiah. I work at Oregon State University in special collections and archives. I’ve been here a really long time, not doing this work for the entire time, but I started here in 2006. I started the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives in 2013. It was the first of its kind in the country. I didn’t really know how to start an archive, so I started talking to people, and Teri was one of the first people who I talked to. I interviewed her, I think, in 2014. I just got really hooked by interviewing women who were related to the brewing industry for the archive I run.

(04:56)
Then I got really hooked on researching women who lived in Oregon in the 19th century, and took over for their husbands when their husbands died, took over the business.

Heather (05:10):
Awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about your study now? I know you’re writing a book right now. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Tiah (05:16):
I am writing a book. I’m writing a book for the OSU Press. I’ve never written a book before. I have lots and lots of printouts of things and binders, and the focus of the study… Originally, I wanted to discover women who were brewers in Oregon, and who just hadn’t been recorded as such. It turns out that for the most part, women were not actually brewing, but they were running businesses, so, again, usually after their husbands died or if their husbands were absent. There was one woman whose husband went to Alaska to mine gold, and she took over the business for a couple of years.

(06:00)
It’s really turned into a book that is not… It’s not really about beer. It’s about families and family businesses and family systems and property and divorce, and just learning the stories of… I’m just shocked at how many women were involved one way or another. That book is supposed to come out in fall of 2024, knock on wood, somewhere.

Heather (06:32):
That’s awesome. Teri, you’re not a stranger to the Brew Deck Podcast as you have been on before, but could you just reintroduce yourself to everyone, and just give us a brief overview of your role in the brewing industry?

Teri (06:46):
Sure, you bet. By the way, it’s quite a pleasure to have a female interviewer or multiple female interviewers, because last time it was Jerred, a fellow. So, congratulations, ladies. That’s pretty cool.

Heather (07:00):
Thank you.

Teri (07:01):
My name is Teri Fahrendorf. I have been involved as a professional in the beer industry since 1989. I went to brewing school in 1988. During that time, I’ve been a brewing intern, a brewmaster, a head brewer, a brewmaster again, a regional corporate type brewmaster, a beer store clerk, a malt and hop sales rep, and then a innovation center malting manager. Then now, I have had a little career change, and I am a full-time ceramic artist, but still involved in Pink Boot Society, which we’ll talk about later.

Heather (07:53):
Absolutely. I know Tiah, you said, so when you were doing research, Teri was one of the first persons you reached out to. How did you track her down?

Tiah (08:02):
Oh my gosh, I don’t know. I feel like if you open a book about brewing, Teri would be there.

Heather (08:12):
That’s true.

Teri (08:15):
I think if you go to woman professional brewer, my name would be on that list.

Heather (08:20):
Mostly. Yes.

Teri (08:20):
Yes.

Tiah (08:23):
That’s a funny… I don’t know. I don’t know. How did I learn to breathe? It was the funniest. Teri, again was one of my first oral history interviews, and I’ve done a lot since then. Teri was the one who taught me that I needed to chunk up my questions, because I asked her a 97-part question. She very graciously broke it down for me, but that was a really important moment for me in thinking about how to interview people.

Cheyenne (08:59):
That’s very cool to hear the connections that you guys have go pretty far back. That’s awesome. Well, very cool. Tiah, we wanted to start with you a little bit, and pick your brain. You’re a historian at Oregon State University. We wanted to ask you… This is a very broad question, and obviously there’s a lot to it, but could you describe for us the role that women have played in the history of beer and brewing, and how women have contributed to the evolution of beer?

Tiah (09:26):
My full disclosure is that I am a trained archivist, not a trained historian, which means that I often have imposter syndrome when it comes to talking about history. Also, the other full disclosure is that the archive I run is of no help to me in my own research or in answering this question ,because it’s very focused on the northwest. I’m very focused on Oregon, and very focused on the 20th century. But women have… They’ve always been involved in brewing, and that is certainly the case today, but it goes back to us hearing about…

(10:07)
Ninkasi is probably the most prominent figure who is featured in the history of ancient brewing, but women have brewed all over the world and all throughout time. There certainly were other goddesses at the time who were linked to brewing in the Middle East, so Egyptian goddesses, other characters from ancient Mesopotamia, in ancient Babylon, and again, throughout the world. There were Zulu fertility goddesses in Africa. There were women who were part of Finnish legends, and also women who were brewing beer in real life in villages, brewing sahti in villages, Latin America. There certainly were indigenous women in North America, women in Nepal.

(11:01)
So, women throughout time have made beer, whether that’s in real life or in stories or in myths and legends. I think as we shift, what we often think about is, again, either Ninkasi, or we shift to thinking about England and Europe. Again, so throughout literature, throughout real-life history, there was St. Brigid of Kildare who lived in the fifth century. She was one of Ireland’s patron saints. Hildegard of Bingen’s another one that many people know. She was an 11th century German Benedictine abbess. She also was a scientific writer, and she wrote this really famous set of books called Physica, which contains what is regarded as the first reference to hops being used in beer as a preservative.

(12:01)
There’s another woman from the East Anglian town of Lynn. Her name was Margery Kempe. She lived in the early 15th century. She was a brewer, but she also owned a horse mill. Later, she became a visionary and a mystic. Mother Louse was an alewife in Oxford, and she’s a really popular depiction. She’s one of those women who is wearing what looks like a witch’s hat, but she was an Oxford Alewife who sold beer commercially in the mid-17th century. Really, it’s at that point that brewing in Europe started to change from being a female-dominated profession to one that was dominated by men.

(12:45)
I don’t know if we want to get into that right now, if we want to start talking about that transition, and then, of course, the link to accusations of witchcraft too. I don’t know if we’re ready for that.

Cheyenne (12:59):
Definitely. I mean, you segued perfectly. I think it’s pretty safe to say that women have had a fairly large role in the evolution of beer and brewing throughout history, but could you talk to us a little bit about how and when women were getting phased out of brewing, and what factors contributed to the push to a more male-centric brewing industry?

Tiah (13:22):
It’s, in many ways, a slow eclipse of female brewers in England and other parts of Europe, but it’s a pretty complicated and complex matter. It certainly impacted all women. It impacted single women and widows earlier than married women. It really sprung from this shift in commercialization, in technology, in regulatory matters, in other ideological factors that were discouraging female brewing. To make something that is really complicated simple, it was as soon as brewing became profitable and prestigious, it really was passed into male hands. For women in England, rather than forcing them out as a regulatory matter where it was banning of women, for instance, as brewers, it was not an active force out, but the profession had regulatory guilds and emerging technologies related to hops and machinery.

(14:30)
The black deaths certainly had a huge impact on the population at writ large. There were changing political circumstances. Judith Bennett has written this wonderful book called Ale Wives and Brewsters in England, and talks a lot about this idea that women were just left behind. They were excluded and left behind as technology changed. Women throughout history, not just in the brewing industry, have done the skills or the jobs that were perceived as lower skilled. That meant that they were lower paid jobs. As those brewing technologies changed, different skills were needed. That was something that women were brewing in their homes.

(15:21)
It changes once you leave your home to go brew somewhere else. The ability to work outside of the home was not something that was available to most women for all the obvious reasons, but they also didn’t have access to capital. So, I think this is not something that we left in the past, that access to capital and the ability to work outside of the home, and focus on the commercialization of something that was maybe just occasional. Women would make beer when their families needed it, or when they needed a little extra income, but they only… This wasn’t something that they defined themselves necessarily as brewers.

(16:06)
They may have made cheese as well, or darned socks or other things that could be done in the home. It was by the 17th century when industrialization happened that this brewing had become large scale, and it had become centralized, and brewing had assumed a leading role among other industries. At that point, it was largely controlled by men. That was the point, again, that 16th and 17th century where we get these myths emerging that women couldn’t brew, that they would destroy the beer, or that they were witches. So, there are lots of popular depictions of alewives, so women who were married who made beer. Women were described as vicious and nasty and untrustworthy and corrupt, and they would use charms to induce the men to drink.

(17:06)
I think it’s important… Something I always talk about when I am talking about witches or this link between witches and brewers is that this was a construction, and it was really tied to this fear of change and a fear of a loss of power. The women who were accused of being witches tended to be poor. They tended to be the most vulnerable that were in these economic systems, and these were laboring women, and so they were widowed. They were possibly older. They were poor. After these accusations, it really left them in this vulnerable position, whether that was socially vulnerable, but they didn’t have the economic resources to combat these accusations. So, the loss of that income is not insignificant.

(18:02)
That’s, I think, something that I always put the wrapper around. It’s certainly one of the more popular things to hear and to see these depictions of women with pointy hats or with broomsticks hanging outside of their businesses, which certainly thought those were both true things. Hats were used because they were good maltsters, and there was green around. Those certainly have roots in reality, but it is a much more complicated story, and a real indication of the real challenge of being a woman who needed an income, and lived in a patriarchal society.

Natasha (18:50):
Tiah, I love that you covered this, because I believe there was an article that came out a few years ago that everybody just seized on and kept re-sharing across social media that there was this modern day depiction of witches based on historical women brewers. As you said, there’s so much more to the history behind that, and putting out the grimoire or the hat was a sign that you had wears for sale, whether it be beer or, like you said, some of the other household items that they were making. So, it’s great to hear more about the history of that.

Tiah (19:32):
Yeah, complicated.

Natasha (19:35):
Complicated, of course. Coming into more modern day, do you think we’re seeing an increase in women in brewing in North America over the past few decades?

Tiah (19:48):
I don’t know. I was pondering that question maybe in the brewhouse itself, but I think women have always been there. I think that’s something that has been interesting to me to learn in my book research is that earlier on in Oregon, certainly and in the rest of America too, that these early businesses usually run by German immigrants were small businesses, family businesses. The brew houses and the saloons were adjacent to the homes, or sometimes even attached to the homes. So, it’s pretty easy to imagine that women were doing work related to the family business. Whether they were brewing isn’t necessarily clear. There aren’t great records about that.

(20:41)
Certainly for Oregon, not great records, but I think that that carries forward in how we think about the past couple of decades too. I think there were lots of women who were co-owners. Teri certainly can speak much more to what it was like to walk in the door of the industry at the time that she did, but she was unique, but the idea that women were co-owners wasn’t necessarily unique, or were managing a restaurant that was maybe adjacent to a brewery, or had another job because the brewing business wasn’t making that much money. I think, again, the answer is it’s complicated.

(21:33)
To actually answer the question, though, yes, it does seem like there are more women who are in the brewhouse itself now. I think there are certainly parts of the country where there are more women than other parts of the country, but it’s an exciting time, I think, for me to be documenting an industry that is not necessarily returning to days of old, or not necessarily completely new, but it’s the long-term evolution of an industry and a business. So, yeah, I think so. I think so.

Natasha (22:22):
Like you said, it’s such a complicated question. Sorry, Teri, did you want to jump in there?

Teri (22:27):
Oh, I’d love to answer that question myself too. I mean, women have always been in the beer industry. Certainly, if you remember Laverne and Shirley, they work the bottling line, those fictional characters in Happy Days or whatever, but I believe that there are a lot more women than there were. For example, I was the first craft beer brewmaster west of the Rocky Mountains, and as far as I know, the first craft beer brewer west of the Rocky Mountains as well. Actually, no, there was one in Seattle who was an owner, and did a little bit of brewing.

(23:12)
Then there were a few out east, one in the Rocky Mountains and one in Pennsylvania that were brewmasters ahead of me, but they were owners. I was the first craft beer brewmaster who had to go get a job, but there are tons of them now. By the way, when you’re going to get a job, it was a man who was going to be doing the hiring. There’s lots of them now, and both on the brew deck. I mean, I consider anybody who’s involved in production pretty much a brewer. If you’re kegging or fermenting, to me, it’s part of the brewing team, but there’s always been female accountants, owners, and on the supply side as well and on the distribution side.

(23:58)
There definitely feels like there’s more now. I do feel that Pink Boots Society helped pave the way for that, but when I first started Pink Boots Society, I found 60 women brewers in the world. That was the original list. Now, Pink Boot Society encompasses anyone who earns income from beer and wine and all fermented beverages, which we can talk about later, but that membership does not include everyone. The membership is up to 3,000 women in the world. You ladies can also be members, because you earn income from beer as well, or from beer or fermented beverages. But yes, I do feel like it’s a much safer space, and that the women are very well-supported by other women.

(24:55)
I think that nobody really noticed that there was turnover in the beer industry with women coming and then going. Everybody just assumed, “Well, maybe she wanted to become a dental hygienist, or work at Walmart or whatever.” No, maybe she just wasn’t supported, and now people are much more open to trying to support diversity at including women.

Heather (25:20):
Well, I think that’s a really good way to segue into one of our first questions for you, Teri, is what were some of the barriers you faced when you did get into the brewing industry?

Teri (25:32):
Well, I was a home brewer in San Francisco, a member of the San Andreas Malts. About 10 of us members went pro at the same time. I believe I was the only woman member in the club at the time, the home brew club. The other nine were men, and they just went and got jobs. Pretty much in those days, there were a few breweries opening, but there was really nobody who knew how to brew. So if you were a home brewer, you could get a job as a head brewer, because they were all basically one person shows. I mean, you had a business owner or an investor who started the business, and they’d hire a brewer, but I also knew that the people were hiring brewers based on their ability to lift weights.

(26:17)
So, if you didn’t look like a bodybuilder, or you weren’t a man, you weren’t really getting hired. So, I went to brewing school. In my class, there was another woman. She worked for Straus, but she was basically tasked with making what we called malternatives, which were non-beer alcoholic beverages of about 5% alcohol by volume that were not hop and not actually beer. Then when I got out, I started looking for a job, and I did get a job based on the fact that I was the only one that they met that had education. They didn’t realize that brewing was a physical job, so I got to have a chance then prior to those folks hiring me. The people who were in the beer industry, well, they’re all my friends now.

(27:08)
They would be mortified to be reminded of this if they even remembered, because I’m sure they blocked it up, but they would say silly things like, “Can you carry a full half barrel of beer up a flight of steps?” No, I can’t, but I can think of three ways to get the beer from the bottom of the steps to the top. “Oh, I’m sorry. We require all of our brewers to be able to carry a full half barrel beer up a flight of steps.” Now, that’s something nobody should be doing. Another one was, “Can you lift a 55-pound sack of grain over your head?” “No, but I can think of two ways to get the grain from floor level up to that mill that’s six feet off the ground.”

(27:45)
“Sorry. We require all of our brewers to be able to lift a 55-pound sack of grain over their head.” What I tell people now is that when you’re interviewing, you really need to consider the questions you’re asking. Just because it’s been done this way before, or you’ve been doing it this particular way doesn’t mean that’s the only way. So when… At this point, you really need to ask anyone who’s going to come work for you, “We have a keg. It’s full. It’s sitting at the bottom of the steps. How would you get it to the top of the steps, or how would you get this 55-pound bag of grain put into the hopper on that mill?”

(28:23)
If you ask those kinds of questions, you will not only get a lot of creative responses. The responses you get will probably be a lot safer than the method you’re doing now, especially if you’re asking a woman, because a woman does not necessarily have the physical strength of a man, but she makes up for it in cleverness and intelligence. Not to say that men aren’t clever and intelligent, but they don’t always think the way that a woman would. I’ve even mentioned this to women. They’re like, “Wow, I’m going to change the way I ask questions when I interview people.” Say, women owners have told me that.

(29:00)
I said, “I think that’s great.” I also tell people, “If you want a safe brewery, ask a woman brewer to come and do a safety audit, and basically either brew with you for a day, or walk through your brewery, and you explain all of the procedures you do. At the end of the day, you will have a whole list of recommendations on how to make that brewery safer, because a brewery that a woman can brew in, one is a safer brewery. Two, it’s a brewery that all those young bodybuilder, musclely-strong guys who started brewing in their 20s, now they have really bad backs, and really bad knees, and possibly other bad joints. So, they can’t brew the way that they used to.

(29:45)
But if you have a brewery that any woman could brew in, you also have a brewery that any older male brewer could work in. Then people will not be aging out of the brew house, because there are safe breweries all over the place. There would hopefully be a lot less injuries, because brewing is a dangerous job. It is injury prone. So, the obstacles I saw were these people who were asking. I don’t like to say they were mean or anything. I just think they were asking the wrong questions, because they didn’t realize that there were other ways to do things. Some of those people that asked those questions asked me those questions over the phone, would not even meet me in person.

(30:27)
As I said, now they’re my friends, and they would be mortified to know. I’d hear little snippets like, “Oh, remember when you came through our brewery?” “Yes, so-and-so said to me, or so-and-so said to so-and-so, do you really think that a woman could make good beer?” Well, guess what? You give me the chance. I prove you wrong. Having someone like myself and a few other women out there proving those assumptions about whether women can make good beer or not, holy cow, how many great American beer festival medals have my recipes won, and I brewed those beers.

(31:02)
So, yes, I think we’ve proven many times now that women can make great beer. I think that those obstacles need to stop. There’s other weirdnesses that I have not had to experience that have taken place with men sexually harassing or worse, women in the business, not just brewers, but other women in the business, women who sell beer, distribute beer. I mean, this intimidation thing, and this sexual predation thing has got to stop, and the perpetrators need to be absolutely positively punished. That’s not the role of Pink Boots Society. It’s the role of society.

(31:50)
So, that forb momentum needs to be made. As far as, say, the benefits that I’ve received trying to get into the beer industry, these are not based upon being a female necessarily, but they’re based on when people believe in you, it helps you believe in yourself. I think it’s really important when you have a dream to see other people you can identify with to say, “Yes, she did it. I can too.” So, for example, in 1988, the weekend that I decided to become a professional brewer, I had attended the Home Brewers Conference in Denver, Colorado. As a part of that back in 1988, the Great American Beer Festival was connected.

(32:40)
I went to the Great American Beer Festival, and I watched the award ceremony. A woman got up on stage, and she won a medal. She’s exactly my size. She actually lives in Portland, Oregon. She is now the supply chain management instructor at Portland State University. But at that time, she was an owner and a partner in Schirf Brewing Company in Park City, Utah. She won medals with her Wasatch ales. She was their brewmaster. So, I thought, “If she can do it, I can too. Physically, I can too,” and I met other people who were in high-tech like I was. I thought, “If he can do it, and switch from high-tech to brewing, and survive financially, I can too.”

(33:24)
It’s really important to have role models, and I feel like Pink Boots Society is really giving the world role models with women as professionals in all aspects of all fermented beverages industries. Also, there were people that I would call and try to find out if they had any openings, or if they were willing to interview me, or had me come for an informational interview or whatever. There were some of the… There were some of the… They happened to be men, where some of the men would ask those silly questions about if I could carry a full half barreled beer up a flight of steps.

(34:00)
There was also a guy named Paul Shipman who started Redhook Brewing Company. He was an owner, and this brewery was fairly new back when I was graduating from brewing school. So, I called him up, and at the end of our conversation, he says, “I fully believe that you are either going to be a brewer, a brewmaster, or a brewery owner someday.” He said, “Keep going.” That was absolutely huge for me, because I didn’t get a lot of positive feedback verbally from anyone. I mean, face it, my parents thought I was nuts at the time, because I was leaving computer programming to go do this thing when…

(34:42)
There were seriously only 100 breweries in the entire country, and 50 of those were craft, or what we called in those days, microbreweries. The other 50 were the regional and larger breweries. So, 100 breweries in the country, and I think I’m going to go get a job at one of those 50 microbreweries. Well, I sure had my fingers crossed, and I did it, but I had a fallback on that programming. Now, my parents are super proud of me. They would never even remember that at the time, they kept telling me I was making a huge mistake.

(35:17)
So, you just have to go out and prove to the world and the people and the naysayers that you can do it. Then you become a role model for others to self-identify that if you can do it, so can they. Then it just snowballs in all sorts of good ways.

Heather (35:34):
I totally agree with that. I think it’s really great that you touched on that, how much representation actually matters to women in the industry, to members of the LGBTQ community, to racial minorities in the industry. Representation does matter. Is this a big reason why the Pink Boots Society came about for you?

Teri (35:55):
Well, I had been a brewmaster for 19 years. In 2007, when the particular brewery I was working for, I just… You get to a point with a job where you just feel like it’s not a good fit anymore, so it’s time to go, but I wasn’t ready to fall in love with another brewery. So instead of hunting for a new job right away, I went on a road trip fully supported by my husband, where I had a minivan towing a short camper, the shortest one I could find that had a bathroom in it. I went across the country and back. It was a 139-day trip.

(36:33)
I think I visited 71, 81 breweries, and brewed at 38 of them. I don’t remember all the statistics, but they’re out. There’re on my blog at roadbrewer.com, because I was brewing on the road. I was on that trip, and unbeknownst to me, some of the people who invited me to visit their brewery were inviting me, because they had these young women or women brewers. The first one was at Stone Brewing, and I got there. They said, “You’re going to work with Laura today.” I said, “Laura, you have a brewer named Laura.” I mean, I didn’t know about her, and she did not… Even after 19 years of a brewmaster winning 24 Great American Beer Festival medals with my team for the brewery I worked for, she had never heard of me either.

(37:25)
So, she said… It was very clear that she needed some support. I didn’t start Pink Boots Society for myself, because I didn’t need it. I was never a tomboy, but I was very, very comfortable hanging out with men as friends, super comfortable. Honestly, if men said stupid things to me, obviously, I pretty much ignore it and go on with my life. So, you make friends with the ones that don’t say those silly friends things. Then when the other ones that did say the silly things, they want to be your friends. You know what? You have no grudge. You’re friends with them too.

(38:05)
It was really clear to me that she needed some support, and I really wanted to mentor her, and I wanted to mentor the other women that I met on that trip too, but I can’t mentor all of them myself. Then she basically said, “Well, Teri, you tell me there’s other women out there. How many of us are there?” I said, “I don’t know. I’m going on this long trip. I’ll start counting. I’ll figure it out. I’ll make a note of it.” I’m collecting all this information. At every brewery visit, I ask, “Do you have any women brewers here? Do you know of any? Where are they? What are their names?”

(38:44)
I’m making this list, and I get out to Troegs in Pennsylvania, and there I’m working with a gal named Whitney. Same questions, exact same questions in a real clear sense that she just really needed to connect. I was so proud that I had an answer. I said, “Well, Whitney, I have 60 names on my list.” She said, “Who are they? I want to talk to them. I want a network.” I thought, “Oh, is this where this is going?” I said, “Tell you what, I’ve got this website now that I built during my trip basically,” because I had written articles for New Brewer Magazine over the years that got published, and I needed to get those articles to the people I was meeting, because they really needed to get that information.

(39:30)
So, I built the website just to put my articles up. I said to Whitney, “I’ve got 60 on this list, and I’ll tell you what, since you want to know who they are, I’ll put them on my website. Give me a week or two.” So, I put them up on the website, and at this point, I’d been wearing pink boots on this trip. I never wore pink boots on my entire life. It was always black boots, but my mother-in-law gave me some pink boots because of my discussion with my husband about how I felt like, once again, I was representing women in the beer industry, all women.

(40:04)
I have always felt like I have represented the entire gender in the beer industry. I mean, just a sidetrack, during my probably 16 or something years as the only woman brewing, or judging the Great American Beer Festival, I wore a dress every day to judging, because I needed to balance a whole room full of testosterone with just me. So, I wore a dress. I don’t have to wear dresses to judging anymore, thank goodness, because there’s enough women judges. Anyway, I mentioned to my husband, “I wish I had a pair of pink boots to wear, because rubber boots are the very standardized piece of brewing equipment, safety equipment every brewer wears.”

(40:47)
Pink seems to be the color that our society has assigned to females. It hasn’t always been that way. Sidetrack again, that back in ancient Roman times, the god of war was Mars, and he had the color red. So if you were a family, a noble family that wanted your son to grow up to be a warrior, you dress your son in light pink togas or light red. They were called light red at the time. Pink is some weird modern word. I don’t know where it comes from. Anyway, so that’s where the pink was definitely warriors, and everybody in Pink Boots Society, all us women, we’re all warriors in the fermented beverages industry. At least that’s the way I like to look at it.

(41:31)
I was wearing these pink boots, and I’m on my website writing up for Whitney and whoever else, this names of all these 60 women that I had found. At the top of the list, I wrote list of women brewers. I thought, “Well, that’s a boring name. I want to give it a better name.” I mean, backtrack one more time, when I quit my brewmaster job after 19 years, I immediately had an identity crisis, because I’m, “Now, who am I? I’m going to go visit these brewers and say, “Who are you?” I’m going to say, “I’m nobody. I used to be a brewmaster.”

(42:09)
So, I gave myself the title Road Brewer, the Road Brewer. I was the road brewer. I needed a title for this list of names, and I thought, “Well, I’m wearing these pink boots. It’s the Pink Boots tour.” One of these people, a customer that I met at one of the breweries, said they started following my blog randomly the night before. They said, “Oh, you’re the Pink Boots lady.” So apparently, I was that too. Then I thought, “Well, and there’s those little old ladies who like to party, the Red Hat Society.” So, at the top of the list, I put Pink Boots Society. I didn’t think too hard about it. Boop, posted that list up.

(42:50)
Then just like a lightning rod attracting media attention, all of a sudden, I started getting all these emails, “Hi, I’m a male blogger, and I’ve never… I didn’t know there were any women brewers. I want to post your list. May I repost it? I’m linking to you, or I have a daughter, and I’m so excited.” So, all of a sudden, it was like a thing. I know there are women and Pink Boots members out there who don’t like the colored pink. I mean, I was not a pink girl growing up. I was a blue girl. But apparently, people consider good marketing now, and pretty much nobody in the beer industry should… I mean, everybody in the beer industry knows…

(43:34)
Pretty much, everybody in the beer industry knows what a pair of pink boots stands for. Very few don’t. Now, we’re making this concept known to inspire, encourage, empower, and assist women in the fermented beverages industries, women and non-binary, and the whole LGBTQ Plus, TIA. I don’t know all of the initials in the acronym, but we want to support anybody who identifies as a woman or non-binary to participate and have access to all the benefits that Pink Boots membership delivers. Now, I have to ask you what the question was, because I may have got off track.

Cheyenne (44:23):
That was wonderful. I had a blast listening to all of that. We were just asking you… You answered the question in full. We wanted to hear from you about the founding of the Pink Boots Society, and that was a really great overview. Obviously, the Pink Boots Society was founded to connect women in the industry, and to foster mentorship among those women. How have those goals changed since the founding, and how have they evolved?

Teri (44:49):
Well, originally, at our very first meeting at The Craft Brewers Conference in 2008, 16 of the Women on that list, and six… I invited six beer writers. Well, I invited as many women beer writers as I could find to come because it was historic. I mean, all my life in the beer industry up till that time, which was, what, 20 years or so, we had never had a room full of estrogen in the beer industry. Not ever. There were some male beer writers who wanted to cover our meeting, because they knew it was historic too, but I said, “No, send a woman. We don’t know what this feels like to have just women in the room, but we need that.”

(45:32)
During that meeting, I had the ladies vote. I had just the 16 on the list to vote because that was what Pink Boots was at the time. I said, “Do you want to be an online list or an organization?” They voted to become an organization. I said, “I don’t know what that means, but I may need help.” I said, “Second question, who are we?” They said, “Well, Teri, look around. We’re women brewers.” I said, “Look again. There are six women beer writers in this room, and they have all asked to join.” I said, “And I’ve been receiving emails from women packaging managers, women lab managers and technicians.”

(46:12)
I said, “Who are we?” So, we had quite a bit of discussion about who we were. Two of the women brewers wanted to allow men to join as well. I reminded them of all that if we don’t stand for something, then we stand for nothing. I said, “You ladies might be voted on that today, but I want you to give this Pink Boots Society. I mean, we don’t know what she wants to be. She’s going to have a personality of her own, because organizations do.” I said, “So in two years, if you still feel that men need to be members, then let’s bring it back, and vote again.” One of them did come back to me less than two years later, and said, “I see what you’re doing now, and I fully approve, and you were right.”

(46:59)
That was neat, but we decided… We talked about, “Is it just women who brew? Is it women who work only at breweries? Is it women who work at small breweries versus big breweries? Is it just women in North America? Is it the whole world? What is it? Is it home brewers? Is it beer fans and consumers?” After quite a bit of discussion, at that time, we voted to represent three things, women, beer, professionals, and you have to define those terms, and those definitions have changed over time. So originally, it was women, and that was 2007. Now, it’s women and non-binary, and pretty much anybody who self identifies as non-male.

(47:48)
Then the second thing is beer. Now, that’s been expanded to include all fermented beverages. So, that includes beer, wine, spirits, kombucha, sake, cider. I don’t know if I missed any, but basically any fermented beverage. Spirits, I did say that, distilled as well as… Distilled is fermented first and then distilled. Then professional, it was originally defined as if you earned income repetitively over time, at least once a quarter, but preferably once a month on a consistent basis of any amount, you could be considered a professional. So, there was a woman who edited her husband’s beer articles, and she wasn’t getting paid, so I made him give me five bucks.

(48:43)
I handed it to her, and I said, “You need to charge him at least five bucks every month for your editing services, so you can join Pink Boots Society.” But now, that’s been redefined to women who earn at least 25% of their income from beer, because we feel that you really need to have skin in the game to really understand what women beer professionals are going through, and the lives that they lead. Pink Boots continues to evolve. As I may have mentioned, after running Pink Boots Society for nine years as its founder, first president, secretary, treasurer, blah, blah, blah, I mean, I did have some help.

(49:26)
I wanted to start a scholarship program, because I felt like as… I really had to think about it. What does it mean to be an organization? I have never founded an organization or started one before. Believe me, I am a creator, and I am not an administrator. So, some of this stuff was so hard for me, but I thought if we just have a party once a year, then the organization’s going to fall apart. It has to have meaning. In fact, it has to have a meaning that is greater than any one of us. So, I felt like, “What’s a purpose that we could all get behind and push?” I felt like, “Okay, we can’t tackle…

(50:08)
In my opinion, we can’t really tackle the gender-based glass ceiling, because it comes across as negative. How can we tackle whatever glass ceilings may be present in a positive way?” I thought, “We can tackle that by getting women the education they need to advance to the next level, and nobody can snare at that.” So, I thought, “How are we going to do that?” Well, we’re going to want to have a scholarship program, and we’re going to need to raise money.” Well, I want the money to be tax deductible, so people are happy to donate. That means we need a 501c3 designation, charity designation from the IRS because no other designation…

(50:53)
It can’t be trade group or industry trade group or anything like that. Besides, that would be replicating what the Master Brewers Association of the Americas and the American Society of Brewing Chemists and the European Brewing Congress, it would be replicating what those organizations do. As I mentioned, if we don’t stand for something, we stand for nothing. Therefore, I decided that we needed to become a 501c3, and it took me four years to write the 98-page application that the IRS accepted. Thank goodness, my mother-in-law, who gave me those pink boots, helped me out with that, because that was way more than my little creative self could really, really do well by myself.

(51:43)
I just can’t do that stuff. So, we did do that. Then after nine years, this is the honest truth, I was so burnt out. I mean, I had my full-time career at Country Malt Group, and about the time… No, and even at Great Western as well, when I was the malt innovation center manager, so I was burnt out because my weekends were 100% occupied by Pink Boots Society, and my weeks were occupied by my job. So, what I had to do after nine years being so burnt out… I had been asking the leaders who were helping me to the best of their ability, building the scholarship program, growing the scholarship program, liaising with the scholarship partners, keeping track of the membership lists.

(52:39)
At this time also, membership was free. I wanted the organization to build value before we charged for any membership. So, I had to also do fundraising. Nobody really wanted to fundraise beside me. I was like… I’m like… I’d say, “You’re going to be my volunteer for fundraise. People volunteer for it, but they didn’t like asking for money, so I had to do it.” It’s not always easy. But after 10 years, we did start charging for dues, so that did change, but we had built a lot of value by then. I mean, we have these national meetings. There’s international chapters and national and state and regional chapters all over the world.

(53:24)
I mean, there’s a huge amount of value in it. We probably do about the equivalent of 10 scholarships a month at this point. I mean, this is humongous, everybody. That’s 120 scholarships a year. That’s pretty fantastic. So, there’s a lot of management for all this going on. I have been begging my team to, “Please, let’s have a board meeting, and I need to have real board members, not just friends who locally once a year would sit down with me, so I could have a legal board meeting for the tax employer identification number and all that for the requirements for the IRS and for corporate requirements.”

(54:10)
So, finally after nine years, I called the main one who was head of the scholarship committee. I said, “Listen, I just want you to know that tomorrow, I’m calling the IRS to find out what I need to do to dissolve Pink Boots Society, and what we need to do with the money that we’ve raised so far, because we haven’t had that board meeting.” She said, “What? Don’t do it. Stop. No.” She said, “Please don’t do that. We will have that meeting.” Within a month, we had that meeting, that scholarship meeting, sorry, that board meeting. They all volunteered for different posts, took it off my shoulders, and they said, “Don’t you want to be up the president?”

(54:52)
Nope. “Don’t you want to be in the board at large as a member at large?” Nope. I said, “Here’s why.” I said, “Because if I’m on that board, and I’m sitting at the table with all of you, and a decision needs to be made, you all will look down the table and say… Inside your head, it’ll be, “What does mom want?” This can’t happen because Pink Boots Society needs to stand at her own two feet, or she will not survive. I said, “You guys are going to make decisions based on what you feel is right, and I may not always agree with it, and I certainly will throw in my two cents.” I said, “But I’m not on the board so that my two cents do not count, and just remember that.”

(55:33)
So, I fired myself in 2016 from the board. That was the best thing I could have done, because I needed to get my life back, and my husband wanted to hang out with me. Since that time, they were discussing about whether or not to… The winemakers and the spirit makers and the cider makers had contacted them, and said, “We want to join Pink Boots Society, but they weren’t in the beer industry.” So, there was a lot of discussion about that behind the scenes, and I was against it. I’ll tell you why I was at first. I was against it because I said, “Listen, we have worked so hard. We have 300 volunteers in Pink Boots Society. We have raised all this money. We have developed scholarship programs and the money to go with them.”

(56:24)
I said, “If they want to join Pink Boots as a group, they need to bring their own volunteers, hopefully some of their own scholarships and their own money,” but that didn’t happen because what happened is that Pink Boots members were becoming fluid with their careers, and were moving out of brewing and into these other disciplines, and they wanted to maintain their membership. So, it made sense. Against my better judgment, the board of directors did this, and you know what? I’m really proud of them. They were right. Another discussion that happened, but I was not involved, the board doesn’t really tell me what’s going on anymore. That’s okay.

(57:05)
So, it turned out that there were members who realized they did not self-identify as female anymore. They were non-binary, and they wanted to maintain their membership. Well, we want to be inclusive, don’t we? So, they expanded the original definition that we called women, what that would be. Now, it’s much, much broader, so the beverage definition is broader. The definition… What was originally women is now more inclusive, and the professional side of it got tightened up a little bit so that people really had their skin in the game, and we’re not just barely members.

Heather (57:48):
Well, it does seem like the Pink Boots Society has really evolved over the years. So just looking briefly into the future, what do you wish for the Pink Boots Society moving forward?

Teri (58:01):
I think that it has a huge job to do. I mean, in my opinion, it needs to exist until there’s gender parody at the highest levels of all of these industries. I don’t see that happening in my lifetime, so it has a job to do. Maybe once that job is done, when there is gender parity at the brewmaster level, at the owner level, at the head winemaker level, et cetera, and I mean 50/50 or whatever the demographics, say, women constitute as a part of the general population, then maybe Pink Boots could go away. But my guess is it will continue to evolve in ways that we cannot foresee at this time, and I’m really happy about that that pink Boots Society has the DNA to do those kinds of morphings, and doesn’t just become stuck in the past and rigid and calcified.

(59:04)
It has added, I think, a student level for those that are studying fermentation. There are scholarships that have to do with running a business ownership, growing hops, malt and malting, barley and malting. So, there’s a lot more scholarships that are there, and more can be added. I would love to see scholarships focused on all those added fermented beverage industries. There needs to be a kombucha class or something, or a workshop or programs and enology for wine and spirits and distilling. All those programs need their own scholarships, so I would… Since there’s about five or six different disciplines now, I would like to see the number of scholarships multiplied by five or six.

(59:57)
I’d like to see 50 a month, 10 in each of the disciplines or something if possible. That would be great. I would love to see more women join. It seems to be that women who are at the beginning of their careers tend to join more, because they really need the help. We don’t use the word network, because as a part of our IRS 501c3 charity designation, network cannot be a part of your DNA, so we don’t mention that, but it happens. Honestly, networking is education. If a young person goes to a meeting, and meets a more experienced person, and they’re talking, giving advice, that’s education. I’d love to see that continue to happen.

(01:00:43)
Pink Boots Society now has a… It has a conference every other year. I would love to see that go to an annual event, especially since all of the speakers at the Pink Boots Society Conference are Pink Boots Society members. The conference is basically organized by whichever local chapter wants it to come to their town, and so I love to see the chapters getting stronger and bigger and more financially astute. Chapters can now raise money just for their chapter to get their own chapter-only scholarships as well as on the national level. I would love to see the international chapters gain the equivalent of 501c3 charity designation for tax deductibility in their own countries, and then they can at that point raise money locally for their own scholarships.

(01:01:52)
Because right now, most of the scholarships are US based, and sometimes money can be found to fly them over for in-person scholarship workshops or whatever, but sometimes… Luckily some, a lot of them are online at this point, and so those are great. Our very, very, very first scholarship recipient was a woman from Sweden who received the Siebel Concise course in brewing technology. It helped her go from being an assistant brewer to a brewmaster to a brewery owner. So, this kind of education is needed all over the world, but a lot of these countries don’t have their own scholarship programs, because they need to develop the financing first.

(01:02:38)
I’d love to see that happen. I mean, I’m sure there’s more. I know that new fermented beverage businesses that have a female owner are now allowed to join. In the past, the rules are a little more restricted that you couldn’t join until you sold your first pint of beer. That has evolved too. The Pink Boots Society has realized that… I mean, some of these businesses never open, which was why I said you should sell your first pint of beer. Some of them just sit in planning stages forever, but now, those future business owners, even if they never open the business, they can certainly join Pink Boots Society for the amount of time that they are actively pursuing, opening their business.

(01:03:30)
I think I mostly covered it. I’m sure there’s more if I have more time, but there’s a lot of-

Heather (01:03:35):
No, that’s great. That’s a good wishlist for the future.

Teri (01:03:38):
Yes. That’s wonderful.

Tiah (01:03:41):
Can I say one thing that-

Heather (01:03:43):
Absolutely you can.

Tiah (01:03:44):
… is interesting. We have the organizational records for the Pink Boots Society in the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives. One thing that stood out to me as I was processing through those is this transition from the files being on Teri’s computer essentially, and then what that transition to this board model looked like. That was really interesting for me to see that and learn about that, and that just from a very logistical, practical stance, it had to go from one person’s management of everything. There was, as Teri was saying, this board, but that it was also so much of it was her.

(01:04:30)
So, to see that transition to a broader group of people and what that looks like, that it was cool. It was cool to see that reflected in the records too.

Heather (01:04:42):
That’s awesome.

Teri (01:04:44):
Then after that, there is a business who manages organizations called Scientific Societies based in St. Paul, Minnesota. They’re quite expensive, but they do a great job. I kept telling the board, “Listen, this is too much for even the board. It’s way too much. Trust me, I know this. It’s not going to stop growing. It’s going to need professional management.” Scientific Societies is also known as SciSoc. They manage the Master Brewers Association of the Americas and the American Society of Brewing Chemists, and I believe whatever group the Bakers have and maybe a couple of other professional groups like that.

(01:05:29)
So, I said, “You guys need to contact Scientific Societies, and see if somehow they’d be willing to take you on, or what it would cost. Then the fundraising needs to be there to make that jump to professional management,” because I mean, I was really, really concerned that the board would burn out. Certainly, board members have either burned out or just not understood the responsibility level, or perhaps wanted to be board members thinking it’s just something to put on your resume, but it happens over and over that a volunteer will just drop a flaming ball of goo in your lap. Then you’re handling your own volunteer stuff as well as their volunteer stuff, which is now on fire.

(01:06:19)
So, I didn’t want to see the board burn out with all of that the way I had. That was also another jump in TF. You don’t have all that documentation for that transition to professional management. That might be very interesting to add to your collection.

Tiah (01:06:38):
I think we have the lead up to it, and the discussions leading up to it, but I think all of these points of transition are so important and fascinating. I know we’re just doing this so that people in the future can tell the story of this group of people, but also of women in brewing, so it’s good to have lots.

Heather (01:07:06):
For sure. Absolutely. Well, I’m probably going to end us there. I do want to say great big thank you to Teri and Tiah for giving us a great history on the female role in the brewing industry going way back when, and a good look into the future of what we can look forward to. Thank you everyone for joining us. Great big thank you to Teri and Tiah for being our guest today, and to Natasha and Cheyenne for joining me on hosting duties.

Tiah (01:07:37):
Thanks for having us.

Natasha (01:07:39):
Love being here. For those who are wondering, we still have a little bit of the Yakima Chief Pink Boots hot blood left. It’s super delicious, and you can use it in any brew year round, in fact. $3 per pound goes back to the Pink Boots Society to help fund those educational opportunities for their members. So if you are interested, get in touch with your CMG rep, and see if you can snag some of that.

Heather (01:08:06):
Awesome. Thanks so much, y’all. We’ll be back in a couple weeks with a new episode.

Natasha (01:08:12):
Bye-bye.

Cheyenne (01:08:12):
Bye-bye.