These Seattle area brewers want to change beer's bro image

Beer brewing has a reputation of being for bros with beards. But long ago, beer making was women’s work. Now, a growing number of Seattle area women are reclaiming that heritage.

In a male-dominated industry, there are a lot of assumptions about women and their brewing abilities. Leslie Shore experienced this when she began brewing professionally 15 years ago.

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“You had to be very on the ball with your knowledge, and you had to be firm about it, and you couldn’t back down,” Shore said.

Shore is head brewer at Pike Brewing in Seattle, where she hosted a recent event celebrating women in beer. Among those in attendance was Mari Kemper, co-owner of Chuckanut Brewery in Burlington, Washington. Before that, she and her husband were behind Thomas Kemper Beer in 1985.

“I don’t think people realize the difficulty in making beer,” Kemper said. “That’s a challenge for brewers. They love the difficulty in trying to figure out how to do a really good product.”

Her head brewer, Cathi Aldrich, nodded in agreement.

Aldrich started at Chuckanut seven months ago, but has been a brewer for nearly 10 years. She said part of the appeal was learning about the history of the craft.

“The vastness of what beer really is,” Aldrich said. “It’s really hard to stop once you get into that story.”

The story of beer wouldn’t be complete without women. They’ve been integral to brewing since ancient times. Cooking, which included brewing, was part of "women’s work."

“Women have always had to be industrious,” said Tara Nurin, a beer educator and author. Nurin traces the history of female brewers in her book, “A Woman’s Place is in the Brewhouse.” She said, in the early days, women were the public faces of beer.

“Women would be making beer for the household, and then if they were skilled or lucky enough to brew surplus, they might be able to sell some of it to their neighbors out of their house or in later days, in the marketplace,” she said.

Nurin said religion, politics, and economic forces changed that over time. As beer became commercialized and industrialization took hold, it displaced women and their role in brewing.

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“It wasn’t until the advent of craft brewing in the 1960s, 1970s, that women started to reenter the beer workforce for the first time in modern history,” she said.

Many would start their own breweries and contribute to the growth of craft beers. Still, as Nurin noted, women represent just 2% of about 9,000 existing breweries in the U.S.

Which brings us back to the Pike Brewing event where guests enjoyed a limited release honoring Rose Ann Finkel, the brewery’s late cofounder. Finkel and her husband helped create Seattle’s vibrant beer scene. After years of importing wine and craft beer from Europe, the Finkels launched Pike Brewing in 1989.

Shore, the head brewer, said proceeds from the event would fund a scholarship named for Rose Ann, who was known to welcome new local breweries to the community. The scholarship will be for people who are underrepresented in the industry, through a brewer certification program at Washington State University that is launching this spring.

“Anything we can do to remove barriers,” Shore said. “Talent is not dependent on, you know, a guy with a beard.”