Interesting!
(Are you hip? Or are you, ahem, hipster?)
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Along with the particulars of getting hop alpha acids dissolved in water (must boil, and must boil for longer) @anon33932455 is digging into.
I think the missing piece of the pie is fuel.
The more I read about pre-modern production of a whole host of things, the more fuel pops up as the major cost and logistic hold up.
If you have to heat the liquid more, and for longer it consumes a lot more fuel. Those fuel needs go up exponentially with volume.
So if you’re talking about women being pressed out of commercial brewing, then commercial brewing displacing home and cottage industry style production. Further pressing women out. The need to throw more heat at it, even from a baseline of access to enough fuel to do it, is probably a big factor.
Has fuckall to do with brewing but I recently read through this series of essays about pre-modern iron production.
It is like 90% about charcoal.
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I do mention deforestation and coal in one of my replies. It’s absolutely critical, both as cause and effect: the fewer trees, the more coal gets used, the more coal gets used, the cheaper the beer gets, the more that happens, the harder it is for small brewers to compete. Kristen Burton’s article is a good short read, and discusses this. And . . .
. . . ah, is available online for free!
ETA: Ugh. She doesn’t cover the coal thing. I’ll have to poke around. Sorry! It’s still a good read. She’s a great historian and writer.
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On a more positive note Brouwerij Huyghe, makers of Delirium Tremins, are the only major European Brewery owned by a woman. And apparently have more female brewers and brew staff than all of the United States.
They do special beer every year for International Women’s Day, created and brewed only by their female staff. Usually partnered with a charity.
Should be coming to the US in April this year. It’s a Belgian strong blonde called Deliria, I believe it’s breast cancer research this year.
Probably already out in Europe.
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That’s awesome! I’d put in a pitch for Sara Barton at Brewster’s Brewery in Grantham England. She was the first woman to win the British Beer Writers’ Brewer of the Year Award, in 2012. She’s a fantastic brewer, and also puts a lot of energy into helping women in brewing around the world. She brews series’ of women-themed beers–“Wicked Women” in the early 2010s and now “Women of Wonder”.
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I just finished reading an interesting and relevant piece of fiction, The Lady Brewer of London by Karen Brooks. It covers a number of the problems women brewers faced trying to use their traditional brewing skills to make a living for their households, including competition from the Church and male brewers, brewing guilds which were traditionally male, and passing the standards of the government representatives so they could sell their product. Even if a woman made a superior product, often they could be and were undercut by others trying to push them out of the business.
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Good point on this. During the English Reformation, Henry VIII seized the monasteries, which closed down the breweries. What happened to the brewing equipment? Well, what did Cromwell’s family do? They were brewers.
Here’s a good short piece on hops and the Reformation:
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The part about people drinking beer because of unsafe water is not true.
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I bet this is where the whole cauldron / witches brew trope came from.
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Good excuse to drink beer tho.
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EDIT: the information in this post has been refuted, see Les_Pane’s response. thanks, Les!
I recall a college lecture I attended about the colonial American witch trials of Salem et al. the teacher explained that when the “MTV generation” began requesting more visual aides, the academics finally began mapping the locations of the witches and their accusers. they found all the “witches” lived in one area of town and the accusers another. sure enough, the accusers’ had an interest in the “witches” land for… I don’t remember, but which other historical records about the accusers explained (their professions, maybe.)
so the accusation of witchcraft was never seriously believed by the accusers, it was just used to sell the populace on murdering the women for the accusers’ land-grab. pretty fucked up.
obviously I don’t remember the lecture very well but maybe @anon33932455 or someone else knows the specifics better?
excuse me sir, my beer consumption is a health issue, thank you very much.
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That is an older interpretation, from Boyer and Nussbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (1967, not the MTV crowd), and it’s been pretty much overturned.
There’s an article about this, here: The Geography of Witchcraft Accusations in 1692 Salem Village on JSTOR [Requires login access, and I can’t find a free link. Here’s a draft, though.]
The key paragraph is this:
Contrary to Boyer and Nissenbaum’s conclusions in Salem Possessed , geographic analysis of the accusations in the Village shows that there was no significant Village-wide, east-west division between accusers and accused in 1692. Nor was there an east-west division between households of different economic status. Equally important, eastern Village leaders were not opposed to the Village’s attempts to gain independence from Salem Town. To be sure, Salem Village suffered from years of internal conflict over its ministers and replaced them at an unusually frequent rate. But these conflicts did not have an east-west geographic or economic character. The Village was in fact remarkably homogeneous in its geographic distribution of wealth at almost all economic levels during this period. The same distribution holds true of the Village’s religious and social demography.
Mary Beth Norton’s book. In The Devil’s Snare is a much better in-depth examination. In short, the geographical explanation isn’t very persuasive. There were a lot of accusations that don’t conform to that pattern.
ETA: clarity
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Per Germaine Greer’s “Shakespeare’s Wife”, Anne Hathaway Shakespeare was a commercial brewer who sold to Stratford-on-Avon’s taverns.
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