Women and the Brewer's Craft

On a high mountain mesa in southern Peru, eleven thousand feet above sea level, sit the ruins of Cerro Baúl.

Around the year 1050, the leaders of the Wari Empire decided to abandon the city. But before they walked away, they performed a carefully staged, ritualized destruction of their most valuable facility: a five-thousand-square-foot imperial brewery.

It was a massive complex with dedicated rooms for boiling grain, specialized fermentation vats, and underground storage pits capable of outputting nearly two thousand liters of fermented maize beer every single week. The operators torched the wooden roof timbers and buried the smoldering floor beneath a thick blanket of mountain sand.

When archaeologists excavated that floor, they found what the brewers had left behind in the ash. Scattered across the boiling rooms were small spindle whorls used to spin thread for filtering cloth—and at least ten elaborate metal shawl pins.

In Wari culture, these pins were worn exclusively by high-status, aristocratic women. This was not domestic labor or forced servitude. This was an industrial, state-sponsored brewing enterprise, managed and executed by elite noblewomen.

Which brings us to the question sitting at the heart of this story: How did a craft that began across the ancient world as the sacred, exclusive domain of women become, centuries later, an industrial trade that explicitly barred them from entering the room?

To understand how brewing shifted, we have to start where the written record begins.

In ancient Mesopotamia, brewing was legally and religiously defined as a woman's domain. The oldest surviving hymn to brewing, the Hymn to Ninkasi, written down around 1800 BCE, is addressed to the goddess of beer. Right at line 49, the text does something remarkable: it pivots from a sacred hymn into a secular drinking song set in a real tavern, celebrating a female tavern keeper who pours beer for her guests.

That literary record matches the legal code. In the Code of Hammurabi, written around 1754 BCE, commercial tavern operators are designated by the Akkadian word sabītu—a grammatically female noun. The state recognized women as the primary proprietors of the commercial beer trade.

When modern scholars re-examined Mesopotamian administrative ledgers, some media outlets rushed to claim that ancient beer was alcohol-free. But literary myths and legal codes from the era explicitly record heavy intoxication. Mesopotamian beer was both daily nourishment and a potent intoxicant, produced and sold by women.

Now let’s look across the globe to Japan, and you’ll see the exact same pattern.

Before commercial sake breweries existed, sake production belonged to women. In early Shinto traditions, sacred sake was prepared by shrine maidens. The Japanese word for a master brewer today is Toji. In eighth-century texts, that title was written with characters meaning a female clan leader who directed household management and brewing.

The exclusion in Japan came much later, during the Edo period in the seventeenth century. As commercial sake production scaled up, merchant guilds introduced winter brewing techniques that relied on seasonal male migrant labor.

To solidify male control over the commercial trade, guilds weaponized Shinto concepts of ritual purity and blood pollution. Women were barred from stepping foot inside the brewery under the claim that their presence would spoil the fermenting mash. Over time, the written characters for Toji were rewritten, reassigning a title created by women to male master brewers.

Across the globe in medieval England, the baseline was virtually identical: brewing was women’s work. Manorial court rolls from the late thirteenth century show that between 75% and over 90% of all people commercializing ale were women—known in Middle English as brewsters or alewives.

Ale was an essential part of the medieval diet. Unhopped ale provided clean calories and hydration, but because it spoiled within three to five days, brewing couldn’t be centralized. It was a small-scale, domestic task done in batches using household cauldrons. A woman brewed a batch, used what her family needed, and sold the surplus out her front door, hanging a long wooden pole—an alestake—over her doorway to signal that a fresh batch was ready.

The trade was regulated nationally under the Assize of Bread and Ale, established in 1266\. Official ale-tasters visited brewsters to inspect the quality before it could be sold. If a brewster broke fixed price caps, she was cited in court and assessed a fine.

Popular histories often frame these court entries as criminal prosecutions against dishonest women. In reality, these regular court fines operated as a routine, predictable licensing tax. Manorial courts recognized brewsters as independent economic actors and collected revenue from their business.

We even have the first-person account of a prominent medieval brewster. Around 1438, Margery Kempe of King’s Lynn recorded that she launched a commercial brewing enterprise to achieve financial independence. She built a successful business for several years before consecutive batches of ale inexplicably failed. The yeast refused to ferment, the liquid turned sour in the vats, her head brewer quit, and Margery suffered heavy financial losses that forced her to abandon the trade entirely.

Kempe’s failure was an individual disaster, but within a few generations, her entire trade was facing a systemic one. The shift that removed women from commercial brewing was not a sudden political coup. It was driven by a chemical transformation in the beverage itself: the arrival of hops.

Traditional English ale was unhopped, flavored instead with herbs or a botanical blend called gruit. Without hops, ale went sour within days, keeping brewing local and small-scale.

In the fifteenth century, Flemish immigrants brought hopped beer to England. Hops contained alpha acids that provided antimicrobial preservation. Hopped beer didn’t spoil in three days; it remained drinkable for weeks or even months.

That single chemical difference transformed the entire economics of the trade. Hopped beer could be shipped long distances and stored in large warehouses. Brewing shifted from household cauldrons to industrial copper vats, large cooling tuns, and extensive timber cask inventories.

This is where legal structures intersected with economic scale.

See, in early modern England, married women lived under the common-law doctrine of coverture. Under coverture, a married woman had no independent legal personality. She couldn’t own property in her own name, sign legally binding contracts, secure commercial credit, or take out business loans.

When brewing required modest household equipment, a brewster could fund her work out of daily household income. But when brewing transformed into an industrial trade requiring large capital investments and commercial credit lines, coverture systematically disqualified married women from participating. Men, who possessed full legal rights to hold credit and sign contracts, captured the expanding wholesale beer market. Women remained largely trapped in the shrinking, low-margin, domestic ale sector.

Exclusion also operated through formal institutions. Male craft guilds formed to control the new trade, limiting apprenticeships primarily to young men and restricting master status to male heads of household. In some towns, municipal ordinances explicitly prohibited women between certain ages from selling ale at retail.

No single royal statute banned women from brewing across England. Instead, industrial capital, credit access, and guild structures combined to squeeze brewsters out of the market they had built.

As women were pushed out of commercial brewing, stories grew up around them.

The most widely circulated claim is that the modern icon of the witch—the pointed hat, the broomstick, the bubbling cauldron, and the black cat—was directly copied from medieval alewives. The story claims that when men wanted to steal the brewing trade, they accused alewives of witchcraft to turn their commercial tools into signs of devil worship.

It’s a compelling story, but the archival record tells a very different truth.

Tall, conical hats didn’t appear in witch iconography until the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, deriving from depictions of elderly rural poor rather than medieval market alewives. Alewives didn’t display vertical sweeping brooms over their doors; they hung horizontal, seven-foot wooden alestakes. Large iron cauldrons were universal cooking utensils found in virtually every medieval household, and domestic cats were kept in grain stores across Europe by farmers, millers, and bakers alike.

Legal and court records show no evidence that brewsters were systematically targeted as witches to steal their businesses. The actual documented hostility toward medieval alewives was grounded largely in economic satire. Alewives were caricatured in popular plays and poems as dishonest merchants who served short measures or diluted their drink—satirized as dishonest traders, while accused witches were persecuted as theological outcasts.

There is one other story that we should examine. Centuries of European harvest folklore told stories of female hop-pickers experiencing sudden changes in their cycles during the autumn harvest. That observation wasn't imagination. It was the clue that led researchers in 1953, and again in 1999, to isolate a compound inside the hop cone called 8-prenylnaringenin, one of the most potent naturally occurring phytoestrogens ever discovered.

Laboratory assays proved the compound’s remarkable strength in test tubes. No clinical study has ever empirically measured transdermal absorption in human harvesters, but the cycle changes remain a piece of agricultural folklore that sparked a major chemical breakthrough.

Which brings us to the present day.

In 2007, master brewer Teri Fahrendorf founded the Pink Boots Society to support and encourage women working in the professional beverage industry. Through their annual Collaboration Brew Days using a dedicated hop blend donated by Yakima Chief Hops, the organization raises scholarship funds for women in brewing.

Yet the modern industry numbers show how deep the historical shift ran. According to demographic benchmark surveys from the Brewers Association, women currently represent 23.7% of brewery co-owners. But when you look at primary operational roles, women make up only 7.5% of production brewers and just 2.9% of sole brewery owners. Centuries after commercialization separated women from the brew kettle, production brewing remains heavily male-dominated.

At the same time, health research has brought an essential boundary into focus. In 2025, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an Advisory on Alcohol and Cancer Risk, reinforcing long-standing classifications of ethanol as a Group 1 human carcinogen.

Epidemiological data cited in the advisory links alcohol consumption directly to 16.4% of all annual U.S. female breast cancer cases—roughly 44,000 cases each year—with measurable risk increases beginning at average consumption levels of just one drink per day. Public health researchers have called out commercial marketing campaigns that package alcoholic drinks in pink bottles during October under the banner of breast cancer awareness. Promoting a known carcinogen responsible for tens of thousands of breast cancer diagnoses as a tool for awareness is a stark paradox that an honest look at drinks history can’t ignore.

That paradox is not a modern anomaly; it’s the logical endpoint of a structural shift centuries in the making. Which brings us to the argument at the center of this story.

Brewing wasn’t stolen from women in a sudden, supernatural panic, nor was it stripped away by a single royal decree.

When a domestic craft becomes a lucrative, capital-intensive trade, those who hold legal authority, institutional access, and financial capital draw boundaries around it.

Women weren’t displaced because they lacked the skill to ferment grain. They were displaced because when brewing moved out of the kitchen and onto the market floor, the law denied them the right to sign the contract, borrow the capital, and own the room.

Whenever an ancient, sacred process is commercialized into an industry, pay attention to who’s granted the keys—and who’s left holding the empty vessel.

And yet, there’s a concrete survival from this history sitting on street corners, signboards, and tax registries today, preserved in the English language itself.

In Old English, the standard masculine suffix for a person performing an action was -er — a male who brews is a brewer. The Old English suffix -ster was the distinct feminine agent suffix. A woman who spins thread is a spinster. A woman who weaves is a webster. A woman who taps casks is a tapster. A woman who sews is a seamster. And a woman who brews is a brewster.

Over centuries, as men captured these commercial trades, the feminine suffix lost its gendered meaning in daily speech, turning into common family surnames. Every time the surname Brewster appears on a storefront, a law firm, or a birth certificate today, it’s a linguistic fossil. It’s the physical record of an era when the person standing over the fermenting vat, managing the yeast, and feeding the community was, by definition and by trade, a woman.

Pay attention to what's in the glass.

DISTILLATE is a production of The Alchemist's Bar — part of the Obscura Meridian family of projects. New episodes every Tuesday at 6:00 AM Central.