With everyone coming down from their Halloween hangovers, the beverage of the weekend was not an autumnal cider. Whether as a memory or as a lingering headache, beer is hot on peoples’ minds.
Ohio University students accompany millennia of humans who have chorused that they will “Never drink beer again,” as beer has been a staple of people’s diets for at least 5,000 years.
Despite The Clancy Brothers’ Irish drinking song accrediting beer’s creation to Charlie Mops, the first beer was actually born in China around 7000 BCE. However, the brewing process now known is credited to Mesopotamia around 3500-3100 BCE, although some evidence points to beer brewing as old as 10,000 BCE when agriculture first planted itself as a staple of human growth.
No matter when it officially began, beer has been a staple from the get go. In Mesopotamia, paintings, poems and myths depict people and gods enjoying beer, and there was even a Sumerian goddess of beer: Ninkasi.
Despite popular association of beer as a male beverage, historically beer was for the girls. The original brewers were the priestesses of Ninkasi, women who regularly brewed beer. In “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” part of the hero’s character development comes through the guidance of a temple harlot who teaches him to drink beer. In ancient Egypt, women again brewed beer and also celebrated a goddess of beer, Tenenit.
As beer traveled west to Greece and Rome, both cultures accepted it with less reverence. Preferring strong wines, beer was seen as a low-class beverage. Wine was also a manly drink, so beer was prejudiced against as effeminate.
As time passed in the west, beer remained a feminine beverage. In 12th century Europe in what would now be Germany, Hildegard von Bingen, a nun, added hops to her beer recipe. In medieval Europe, women were the primary brewers, known as “brewsters.” According to Richard W. Unger’s book “Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” women were so important to brewing in Holland that 13th century governments limited how much beer a man could make.
During this time, beer was a dietary staple, as beer provided nutrients and much water was unclean, so beer brewing became a homemaking task. Some women began using this knowledge to expand into the business sphere and opened taverns. Even into early America, one few position women could hold was as a tavern owner. In Philadelphia, 20% of taverns were female-owned and in Boston, 30-40% of tavern keepers were women.
Many more women just sold beer at the marketplace, however. This looked familiar. If one visited an English marketplace, they’d see women donning tall, pointed hats, typically standing in front of cauldrons. These women were not witches; they wore the hats so customers could see them and they made and transported the beer in cauldrons. If they had a tavern they typically owned cats, too, to ward off mice.
When the reformations began, male brewers took the fundamentalist religious movement, which preferred strict gender norms and condemned witchcraft, as an opportunity. To reduce competition in the female-dominated industry, male brewers began accusing beer saleswomen of brewing potions, not beer, in their cauldrons. This made brewing a dangerous profession for women, lest they be deemed a witch and ostracized, imprisoned or killed.
The enforcement of gender norms in the 1500s also created a notion that even non-witching women should not brew beer. Some towns in England even made it illegal for most women to sell beer to keep young women from supposedly becoming spinsters.
As beer became more and more male-associated, the narrative around beer changed completely. Fast forwarding to the 1950s, sexist advertisements for beer were common. One Budweiser advertisement featured a man messing with tools as a woman poured him a beer with the tagline, “The King’s Credentials!” Another advertisement for Oland’s Export Ale featured an image of a woman with a beer in front of her face, atop the words “Suddenly, she never looked prettier!”
Beer transformed from a woman’s beverage to one associated with men. Today, this shift in patterns holds still, as a 2019 Gallup poll found men’s favorite beverage is beer while women’s is wine, the reverse of ancient Rome. Beer Today found the three biggest barriers preventing the historic pairing of women and beer in the modern era are male-oriented advertising, judgment and beer’s calorie content. Despite this reasoning, the calorie count of beer is actually quite similar to that of other beverages.
Despite its male-dominated new façade, overall beer is the preferred beverage of Americans, regardless of gender. As hipsters usher in a new era of beer drinking, one that is beginning to favor breweries, it is time to eliminate gendered associations once and for all. Beer has been the peoples’ beverage for centuries, and it’s certainly safer than drinking the jungle juice at a party. No matter someone’s gender, sipping an ale or a lager is hopping onto one of the biggest beverage trends in human history.
Katie Millard is a junior studying journalism at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. What are your thoughts? Tell Katie by tweeting her at @katie_millard11.
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