Pints and Prejudice: Unleashing the Beer Goddess Within

By Mary Elizabeth Fratini

I know it’s wrong to think less of people because of what kind of beer they drink, but I can’t help it.

I learned to love beer in Prague, at a pub whose name I don’t remember but could never pronounce in the first place, just off of St. Wenceslas Square. A rabbit’s warren of small low-ceilinged rooms, with aged wide-plank wooden benches and tables and dimly lit by the few alley-facing windows. The beer was a half-liter stein of Gambrenis Dark, hoisted with a firm fist and a boisterous “Nos Stravi!” And when I returned home, I could no longer bring myself to order, let alone imbibe, the $5 pitchers of Budwesier at our weekly sojourn to the East Village. So I ventured further East at the behest of my literature professor to Avenue B (before it was hip) where he held forth on W.B. Yeats’ search for virility through the insertion of a baboon testicle into his own scrotum over the prettiest pints of Guinness anywhere in Manhattan.

Such were my formative beer experiences – a dark Czech lager that nobody will import and fresh, professionally poured Guinness for less than the cost of a falafel sandwich. So to overhear someone say that girls don’t drink beer, and when that someone is, all too often, a flatlander, trust-fund baby boy desperately clutching a 24-pack of Natty Light under his arm and wondering why he can’t get laid, then I can’t keep the beer snob in check. I just hoist my locally-brewed award-winning draft to a satisfying clink with those of my girlfriends’ pints in an eye-catching rainbow from wheat to red, brown or black and know that real women drink real beer.

I didn’t come back to Vermont for the beer, but it has been a happy accident that my home state hosts more breweries per capita than anywhere in the United States. And while those in the know said the microbrew craze peaked by the late 1990s, our local brewers defied that pronouncement and continue to grow, even those that weren’t founded until after the purported end of the fad, like Trout River in Lydonville, Rock Art in Johnson, and the Alchemist Brewpub in Waterbury. Three of the larger Vermont players were recently ranked in the top 50 list of American breweries by sales – Magic Hat in South Burlington (36th), Long Trail in Bridgewater (37th) and Otter Creek in Middlebury (50th) – out of more than 1400 breweries in 32 states.

Men who brew beer are a relatively new trend in the beverage’s history. Beer was invented by women in the ancient world, probably before the baking of bread and definitely preceding wine, and remained the province of brewsters (female brewers) well into the 18th century. A survey of England in the 1700s found that 78 percent of licensed brewers were women. The Code of Hammurabi, the oldest book of law in existence includes the following punishment for unethical brewsters: “If a beer seller do not receive barley as the price of beer, but if she receive money…or make the beer measure smaller than the barley received, they shall throw her into the water.”

Whatever the history and my personal experiences, statistics suggest that women remain a minority market, buying as much as 60% of the beer, but representing only 30% of beer drinkers in the United States according to a report by DataMonitor, based in London. The ultimate problem with these statistics, however, is that they treat all beer as a single product – from the aforementioned Natty Light to the Vermont Pub and Brewery’s Maple Ale – and women are selective and media savvy consumers.

TrendSite Group, a website that helps companies tap into female consumer market, states that women like to know what they’ll actually get for their money, rather than the image that goes with the product. Most of us are unwilling to trust a bikini-clad mud wrestler over the eternally pointless debate of Tastes Great vs. Less Filling.

Smaller breweries, from the regional bottlers to the local brewpub, don’t have the mega-advertising budgets of the national brands, so their marketing efforts are much more grassroots-based and focused on the product, according to Gail Daha, president of the Vermont Brewers Association (VBA) and general manager for Otter Creek Brewing. “A lot of us believe in educating the consumer, where big guys don’t spend much time on education,” Daha explained. “Some of their ads are sexist, or use sex to make it appealing, but that isn’t a part of the craft brewing segment. We emphasize the quality of the product.”

While none of the Vermont breweries I spoke with tracked sales by gender, everyone agreed that their consumers are educated beer drinkers, even the men (okay, they didn’t say that last part). “Some of our shareholders are women who never liked beer, but said they’d never had anything that tasted as good as ours; that’s how we got them to invest,” said Laura Gates, co-president of Trout River and past president of the VBA. “I think that’s a common experience…beer is becoming a more upscale beverage and more and more people – men and women – are drinking it and enjoying it.”

In closing (as my beer is now in the dregs), a Federal Reserve study noted that women now own 51.3% of the private wealth in the United States, and we make or influence the purchase of more than 80% of all services and products. Here’s to helping our partners, brothers, fathers and friends to look beyond their pop-top tin can swill to the wondrous world of hoppy, malty, nitrogen-tapped goodness. I can recommend some fruity beers for the faint of heart. Nos Stravi!

For a great intro to microbrews from across the U.S., visit the VT Brewers Festival at the Burlington Waterfront on July 15th and 16th. Info www.vermontbrewers.com

Mary Fratini is a freelance photojournalist in Montpelier who, though known to raise a hefeweisen on a hot summer day, remains loyal to the dark side of fermentation.