Tara Nurin Celebrates the History of Female Brewers in Latest Book

Editor’s note: We briefly mentioned A Woman’s Place Is in the Brewhouse is a round up of books on Smashing the Legacy of Carrie Nation. Today we take an even closer look.

Tara Nurin

Newspapers and other media love to publish articles discovering that not only women appear to like beer but also make it. That’s what Tara Nurin, beer journalist and beer and spirits contributor for Forbes, has noted over the years. But as she aptly demonstrates in A Woman's Place Is in the Brewhouse: A Forgotten History of Alewives, Brewsters, Witches and CEOs (September 2021) that women have long been brewing beer throughout human history, starting with ancient cultures through the craft brew movement today around the world. She interweaves the modern history of the craft movement with that of the history from past cultures and civilizations to show how pervasive women’s role in the beer making industry - whether in brewing or selling it.

A Woman's Place Is in the Brewhouse

Broadly speaking, Nurin’s book shows how in many cultures women brewed in their homes for the sake of their families. Extra beer may have been sold and some households may have turned it into a business.

In her research for the book and her work as a beer journalist, Nurin found that women have been written out of the historical narrative even with the most recent craft brew movement.

The men of the craft beer have been lauded while the women, often but not always as the partners of their male counterparts, have been forgotten.

Misogyny is Nothing New

She also noted the endemic misogyny that still persists even to the present day. Through her research, she had learned that men in the Iron Age in Northern Europe did not want women to go near the brew for fears of spoiling the brew. But when she talked with Gerri Kustelski who has worked in the industry since the 1960s, the same misogyny continues centuries later. When Kustelski first left college, she worked at a lab at Theodore Hamm Brewing Company in the 1960s, her male colleagues would not let her or other female lab workers collect their own samples for fear that their “hormones would affect the yeast.”

Hidden History of Women

But those archival silences, Nurin discovered, were one of the challenges for the book. In an interview, Nurin said, “history has tended to be written by the dominant population...women's work generally has not been considered interesting or important.”  Compounding the problem is that in many societies, women were not permitted to own property, sign contracts, etc. and were often illiterate so they disappeared from business and legal records because “regardless of who was actually doing the brewing or the ale sales would be the man who might be the business face.”

Unfortunately, this disappearance of women from the beer historical record is not an uncommon story. The story repeats itself in cheese. In Paul Kindstedt’s Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and its Place in Western Civilization (2012), he notes that cheesemaking was also part of maintaining the household; however, when it became clear that the enormous amounts of money could be made, men took over cheese making and women’s contributions were forgotten. 

However, despite the archival silences, Nurin was able to update the history of beer about women’s contributions with special consideration with the craft industry.  She has shown that women played an important role in craft beer from the beginning, whether supporting it financially, managing operations, and/or brewing.

Nurin explained that her favorite part of the book is bringing recognition to women of the craft beer industry (as well as modern beer industry in general) who had disappeared from the record. She loves that the women are “finally... celebrated for these monumental contributions that they made, and then celebrate with one another. And to celebrate one another.” She noted that as a consequence of the book, some of them have taken it upon themselves to meet each other.

Nurin’s Background

Nurin found herself in the beer journalism industry after 10 years working in television and began a career in freelancing. Her biggest client was the Philadelphia Tourism Bureau and found herself writing a lot about the beer and brewing scene in Philly since it was the heart of the craft beer movement in the East Coast. She ended up deciding to focus on the beer industry niche and while beer writing came first, she paid attention to the women in the industry. “The more I covered it, the more I wanted to cover it,” Nurin noted.

Teri Fahrendorf, the Pink Boots Society founder and author of the book’s foreward, told Nurin, that nobody's written a book about the history of women in beer, and you need to write it. Once she got the idea, it seemed like the natural extension of the work she was already doing. And the rest is history. Of course, there’s an entire chapter dedicated to Pink Boots Society, an organization that supports women in the beer and fermented industries.

Not only does Nurin bring back women into the narrative, she also does a good job adding in other cultural aspects in her work. For instance, in her chapter on temperance and Prohibition, she explores the many ways that women contributed on both sides of the equation - temperance and pro-alcohol.

I particularly appreciated how she made a case for the long maligned Carrie Nation, who has been long seen as an ax-wielding lunatic, instead of a thoughtful activist for temperance. There is some space dedicated to non-European/ North American beer history but it seemed a little sparse and perhaps worthy of its own work.

Overall, the book is an excellent addition to the history of beer as well as the history of women’s work.