Women and the Craft Beer Movement
Before brewing became big business, much of it was women's work. The alewife of medieval England and the women who maintained household fermentation in cultures across Northern Europe were not exceptions to a male brewing tradition; for long stretches of history they were the tradition. Over the following centuries, commercialisation, guilds, regulation and finally the industrial factory pushed women to the margins, 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 historical outcome. The craft brewing movement of the last few decades has been, among other things, a slow reclamation of the brewing trade by women who were shut out of the industry's formal structures.
The historical female brewer
The best-documented case is England. As the historian Judith Bennett showed in Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England (1996), women brewed and sold most of the ale drunk in medieval England. Brewing was something women did alongside running a household, and the alewife, or brewster, was a familiar figure in village and town records. After about 1350, men slowly took over the trade. As brewing commercialised and hopped beer replaced unhopped ale, it demanded more capital, which men could raise more easily. Guilds and new regulations formalised the trade around male householders, and a hostile popular culture recast the brewster as a symbol of drunkenness and disorder (National Humanities Center). Bennett argues the shift was gradual rather than sudden. The nineteenth-century factory, with its large capital requirements and male labour force, completed a process that had begun centuries earlier.
Pink Boots Society
The Pink Boots Society was founded in 2007 by Teri Fahrendorf, a brewer with more than two decades of professional experience in the US industry, after a cross-country brewery road trip revealed both the isolation many female brewers experienced and how many of them there actually were. The organisation provides scholarships, educational resources, and networking for women and non-binary people working in the fermented beverage industries. Since 2017 it has worked with Yakima Chief Hops on an annual Pink Boots hop blend, chosen by members at a hop rub during the Great American Beer Festival. Breweries use the blend for the Pink Boots Collaboration Brew Day around International Women's Day on 8 March, and part of the proceeds goes to the scholarship fund (Brewbound). The organisation has grown from a US network into an international one with chapters abroad, a sign of both the unmet demand for professional support among women brewers and the growth of the sector itself.
International Women's Collaboration Brew Day
A separate initiative, International Women's Collaboration Brew Day (IWCBD), was founded in the UK in 2014 by brewer Sophie de Ronde, then at Brentwood Brewing Company, and also takes place each year around International Women's Day. Women at breweries around the world brew on the same day, often to a shared theme or recipe framework. The event works as both a networking mechanism and a public visibility exercise. When many breweries take part simultaneously, women's presence in the industry becomes visible in a way that individual brewery appointments do not. The collaboration model also connects breweries of very different sizes — a major production facility and a nanobrewery with one employee can take part on the same terms.
Notable figures in modern craft brewing
Annie Johnson won the American Homebrewers Association's Homebrewer of the Year award in 2013 with a light American lager called "Mow the Damn Lawn". She was the first woman to win the title in thirty years and the first African American ever to do so (Brewbound).
Kim Jordan co-founded New Belgium Brewing Company in Fort Collins, Colorado, in 1991 with her then-husband Jeff Lebesch. New Belgium, the producer of Fat Tire and later fully employee-owned, grew under Jordan's leadership into one of the largest craft breweries in the country. She stepped down as CEO in 2015, and the company was sold to Lion Little World Beverages, part of Japan's Kirin, in 2019. She remains one of the most significant figures in American craft brewing history.
Laura Bell, daughter of founder Larry Bell, served as CEO of Bell's Brewery in Kalamazoo, Michigan — the brewery behind Two Hearted Ale, Oberon and Kalamazoo Stout — and for a time was one of the very few women leading a major American craft brewery. She stepped down in May 2019, two years before Bell's itself was sold to Lion in 2021.
The 2021 reckonings
In 2021, a wave of public testimony about workplace harassment, misogyny, and institutional failure swept the craft beer industry. In the US it gathered pace in May, when brewer Brienne Allan invited others in the industry to share their experiences on social media and received hundreds of responses. In the UK the most visible moment came on 9 June, when a group of former BrewDog staff calling themselves Punks With Purpose published an open letter. Around sixty named former employees and dozens more anonymous ones described a "culture of fear" at the company (Brewbound). Accounts from Canada, Australia and elsewhere 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. (For more on how companies like BrewDog grew from craft upstarts into big businesses, see our guide to craft vs. macro breweries.)
The responses varied. Some breweries replaced leadership; others commissioned external workplace reviews; some issued statements without substantive change. The changes most often cited since 2021 include formal HR structures at breweries that previously had none, codes of conduct and harassment policies at many beer festivals and trade events, and more visible efforts to recruit and promote women into brewing and leadership roles. Whether these changes represent durable cultural shifts or surface-level institutional responses is debated within the industry, and the answer probably differs from one organisation to the next.
Where the numbers are now
Hard numbers remain sobering. In the Brewers Association's 2019 benchmarking survey, just 7.5 percent of US brewers identified as female (Good Beer Hunting), and its 2021 survey found that brewery owners were 75.6 percent male, meaning nearly a quarter were women. Ownership, in other words, is noticeably more diverse than the brewhouse floor, partly because many breweries are co-founded by couples or partners. Counting methods vary, especially for people who hold several roles at once, so these figures are best read as a rough picture rather than a precise census. Comparable industry surveys in the UK and elsewhere tell a broadly similar story of slow progress from a low base.
The longer view
The historical record is clear that the association of brewing with men is a historical outcome, not an eternal tradition. Seen this way, the recovery of brewing as a profession open to women without systemic exclusion is less a departure from the norm than a return to an older one. The Pink Boots Society, International Women's Collaboration Brew Day, and the changes since 2021 are part of the same long arc. Our map is part of that story too: among the thousands of breweries it marks are many founded, owned, and run by women, in numbers that would have been hard to imagine forty years ago. For a primer on the beers they make, start with our guide to understanding beer styles.