Brewing was once a female-dominated industry, but that hasn’t been the case in a very long time. These women are reclaiming the brewing business and promoting a more diverse sector.

We bet that a lady doesn’t instantly come to mind when you attempt to visualize a beer drinker. If you try it with a beer maker, you’re still probably picturing a large, hulking man, aren’t you?

None of this is your fault. Despite a long and varied history that places women at the heart of beer production, most of us are unaware of the female impact on what is now a ubiquitous beverage. Why? Because female brewers were the targets of a witch-hunting slander campaign in the 1500s. Since then, the beer business has mostly become a man’s world, with records of thousands of years of female brewing almost lost.

Let’s give credit where credit is due, then: The Sumerians are said to have created beer in what is now Iraq some 5,000 years ago (the dates vary significantly in works on the subject, and beer has even been traced to 13,000 years ago in Israel). Female brewers are shown on ancient tablets from that period that were discovered during excavations in Mesopotamia. The Sumerians believed that drinking alcohol caused one’s soul to become intoxicated because they were toasting Ninkasi, the goddess of beer.

Women were the main brewers for millennia after that; they were known as “brewsters,” and they did it as part of their regular household chores to conserve grains and maintain a caloric diet. They also ran the brewing industry as owners of pubs and larger breweries for their communities. Then, in the middle of the 1100s, a German woman named Hildegard of Bingen made the scientific discovery of the beer’s preserving properties, and her writing inspired the largest advancement in brewing technique since the beginning of the industry.

Read the full story HERE, written by Valentina Valentini

SOURCE: Shondaland
PHOTO CREDIT: Shondaland