Women and the Craft Beer Movement
Before industrialisation, brewing was predominantly women's work. The alewife of medieval England, the braufrau of German towns, the women who maintained household fermentation in cultures across Northern Europe — these were not exceptions to a male brewing tradition; they were the tradition. The industrialisation of the nineteenth century pushed brewing into factories with male-dominated labour structures, and by the twentieth century the gendered image of beer — male drinker, male brewer — was so naturalised that it appeared to be a historical fact rather than a recent accident. The craft brewing movement of the last thirty years has been, among other things, a slow reclamation of the brewing trade by women who never lost the knowledge but were shut out of the industry's formal structures.
The historical female brewer
The evidence for women as the dominant brewers in pre-industrial Western Europe is extensive. In Anglo-Saxon England, ale was a household product and the alewife (alwif) was a recognised figure in the domestic economy. The brewing equipment found in Viking-age Scandinavian burial sites was typically interred with women, suggesting it was understood as female property. Medieval guild records in Belgium and the Netherlands show women as primary operators of urban commercial breweries; in some cities, brewing guilds had majority female membership through the fifteenth century. The shift to male industrial dominance is recorded in the sources as a shift — a change that needed to be made rather than a continuation of prior practice — driven by the capital requirements of steam-powered production and the legal structures of the industrial era that excluded women from factory ownership and employment in many contexts.
Pink Boots Society
The Pink Boots Society was founded in 2007 by Teri Fahrendorf, a brewer with over twenty years of professional experience in the US industry, after a cross-country brewery tour revealed both the isolation many female brewers experienced and the scale of their professional presence in the craft sector. The organisation provides scholarships, educational resources, and networking for women and non-binary people working in the fermented beverage industries. The annual Pink Boots hop blend — a proprietary blend of hop varieties developed with Yakima Chief Hops — is released each year for members and participating breweries to use on International Women's Collaboration Brew Day, generating funds for the scholarship programme. By 2024, Pink Boots had chapters in over forty countries and had provided scholarships to hundreds of brewing students. The scale of the organisation reflects both the unmet demand for professional support among women brewers and the growth of the sector itself.
International Women's Collaboration Brew Day
Established in 2014 in the UK and now global, International Women's Collaboration Brew Day (IWCBrD) takes place annually, typically in early March. Breweries worldwide commit to brewing a beer on the same day, often using a shared recipe framework or, for Pink Boots member breweries, the annual PBS hop blend. The event functions as both a networking mechanism and a public visibility exercise: hundreds of breweries participating simultaneously makes the scale of women's presence in the craft industry legible in a way that individual brewery appointments do not. The collaboration model also connects breweries across size tiers — a major production facility and a nanobrewery with one employee participate under the same framework.
Notable figures in modern craft brewing
Annie Johnson won the Samuel Adams Longshot homebrew competition in 2013, becoming the first woman to win the event in its history. The win came with commercial production of her Black and Brew coffee stout in the Longshot variety pack — a significant promotional platform for a homebrewer.
Kim Jordan co-founded New Belgium Brewing Company in Fort Collins, Colorado, in 1991 with her then-partner Jeff Lebesch. New Belgium — producer of Fat Tire Amber Ale and one of the first major employee-owned craft breweries in the US — grew under Jordan's leadership into one of the largest independent craft breweries in the country before its sale to Lion Little World Beverages in 2019. Jordan stepped down as CEO in 2015 and became chair of the board; she was named to the Brewers Association's recognition list multiple times and remains one of the most significant figures in American craft brewing history.
Laura Bell joined Bell's Brewery in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the early 2010s and became CEO in 2019 when her father Larry Bell transitioned to executive chairman. Bell's Brewery — founded by Larry Bell in 1985 and a foundational brewery of American craft — produces Oberon Ale, Two Hearted Ale, and Kalamazoo Stout among others. Laura Bell's leadership of one of the largest independent craft breweries in the US has made her one of the most prominent women in the industry. The brewery was sold to Lion in 2021, but the circumstances of the transition and Laura Bell's continued role distinguished it from the typical acquisition narrative.
The 2021 reckonings
In mid-2021, a series of public testimonies about workplace harassment, misogyny, and institutional failures emerged across the craft beer industry in multiple countries. The most visible was the BrewDog "open letter" signed by over 400 former employees in the UK, which described a culture of fear, harassment, and disregard for staff welfare. Independent accounts from the US, Canada, and Australia in the same period described comparable patterns: sexually hostile work environments, women in brewing roles treated as anomalies or objects of unwanted attention, and industry events structured in ways that made exclusion the default.
The responses varied. Some breweries replaced leadership; others commissioned external workplace reviews; some issued statements without substantive change. The long-term structural changes most consistently cited since 2021 include: formal HR structures at breweries that previously had none, mandatory codes of conduct at beer festivals (including explicit harassment policies for events run by SIBA in the UK and the Brewers Association in the US), and a measurable increase in breweries publicly promoting or hiring women into head brewer roles. Whether these changes represent durable cultural shifts or institutional surface responses is debated within the industry and the answer is likely different at different organisations.
Where the numbers are now
The Brewers Association estimated in 2023 that women held approximately 10–14% of head brewer positions at US craft breweries. This figure is contested as underrepresenting women in co-founder and co-brewing roles; the methodology for counting ownership and multiple-role positions varies. The UK and Australian data suggests comparable figures. In Belgium and Germany — countries with longer industrial brewing traditions and more formalised educational pathways — the numbers are lower in head brewer roles but improving through the VLB Berlin and KU Leuven brewing programmes, which have steadily increased female enrolment. In Japan, the craft brewery sector's relatively recent emergence has meant less calcified gender hierarchy in production roles; several of the country's most respected small breweries are operated or co-operated by women.
The longer view
The historical record is clear: the gendered association of brewing with men is a nineteenth-century industrial artefact, not an ancient tradition. The recovery of brewing as a profession available to women without systemic exclusion is, from a historical perspective, a return to the norm rather than a departure from it. The Pink Boots Society, the International Women's Collaboration Brew Day, and the structural changes since 2021 are part of the same historical arc — one that the map is also, quietly, part of: the thousands of breweries now marked include many founded, owned, and operated by women, in a distribution that would have been invisible in any equivalent map from forty years ago.