On February 8, 2022, a group of women gathered in Green Bay, Wisconsin, to brew a batch of beer. These industry professionals from across the state represented the Wisconsin chapter of the Pink Boots Society, formed in 2007 to bring together women in the brewing industry. The beer, a weiss ale recipe featuring fragrant malted barley, white wheat, and a unique hop blend, was a tribute to a woman who, more than one hundred years earlier, had owned and operated a brewery on the opposite bank of the Fox River. Not only was Octavia Van Dycke the brewery’s president, the O. Van Dycke Company was the first brewing operation in Wisconsin to be named for a woman. The members of the Pink Boots who gathered to honor her—brewers, maltsters, managers, cellarwomen, and others employed in the brewing and distilling industry—represent a direct connection Wisconsin’s women brewers and the longer tradition of women brewing beer across human history.
A Ten-Thousand-Year History of Women Making Beer
As the last of Wisconsin’s glaciers receded ten thousand years ago, the first beer-like beverages were likely being fermented on the other side of the world. From ancient China to Mesopotamia, the origin story of beer has been dominated by women. Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer, is immortalized in a hymn that describes the beer-making process in detail. In Mesopotamia, where cuneiform tablets dating to 2000 BCE record recipes for beer, the only trade presided over by a goddess was brewing.1 Egyptians worshiped the beer goddess Tenenit, who was closely associated with the goddess of birth. Beer in ancient Egypt was brewed by women in the home, though there is some evidence men and women brewed together in commercial hybrid bakery-breweries.2
In her book A Woman’s Place Is in the Brewhouse, historian Tara Nurin collects the traditions of women not only in early history but in Europe, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, China, Japan, and Peru—all of whom were, and some of whom still are, responsible for the brewing or distributing of fermented beverages in their societies. In the grain-growing Celtic lands of Northern Europe, evidence of beer brewing dates back to at least 800 BCE, likely carried out by the women of nomadic tribes.3 Records of Finnish women brewing Sahtis, an often un-hopped, juniper-spiced, murky, and sometimes sour beer that is still made today, show women as central to farmhouse brewing in Northern Europe.4
German traditions of brewing, of course, would have a great influence in Wisconsin, and here, too, women were influential. During the Middle Ages, the nuns of Germany were scientific-minded brewers at least partially responsible for evolving lager yeast.5 Abbess Hildegard von Bingen has become a hero in beer history: she is recognized as the first person to provide a written description of hops as a bittering agent and preservative in beer.6 While German women were welcome to brew beer during Hildegard’s time, they experienced the erosion of their rights to legally distribute it between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. German monarchs, eager to raise funds from the sale of beer, passed laws regulating ingredients, culminating in the Reinheitsgebot. This legendary Bavarian law was passed in 1516 by Duke Wilhelm IV and mandated the use of only malt, water, and hops in the production of beer. Hailed by the nascent brewers guilds as a way to protect the purity of beer, its effect on women brewers was devastating. Not only were they no longer able to sell non-hop beers, they were unable to afford the taxes levied on hops.7
Prior to the ascendance of hop farming in England, Scotland, and Wales, many brewers had carved out a living running their own taverns, not unlike today’s brewpubs. Commercial hop farming led to an increase in production for breweries and the beginning of an industrial brewing revolution. This shift from cottage brewing, which With women feeling increased societal pressure not to make a living brewing, the era of women as the primary brewers in Europe was coming to an end. As Nurin elegantly and succinctly puts it, “Any time an industry mechanizes or significantly scales up, women get left in the dirt.”
