22. A Very Special Halloween Episode: Brewsters as Witches, Maybe Debunked
Discussing a popular myth from the history of women in beer; plus a spicy stout to fire you up.
Gather Your Coven, It’s Time to Look Back on (More) Sexism in Beer!
In honor of Halloween, we’re going to do something I always wanted to do and planned on doing with this newsletter, but then got distracted by near-constant rage about everything happening in this industry (lolz!): We’re going to have a little history, as a (trick-or-)treat.
The history of beer, as with the history of anything, is full of fuzzy, loosely accepted origin stories that often come to be exposed as nothing more than lore or even totally mixed-up attributions. The IPA, for example. One of my favorites is a story that I have waffled back and forth on believing over the years, and that I had settled on accepting as truth until I read Tara Nurin’s absolutely excellent book, A Woman's Place Is in the Brewhouse: A Forgotten History of Alewives, Brewsters, Witches, and CEOs. It is, of course, the story of how our imagery and ideas around witches can be traced back to brewsters.
It’s something that comes up in articles, panels, lectures, classes, and even basic beer labels and taplist blurbs. The connection seems so strong, it’s just such a satisfying explanation as to how we ended up with “the witch”: an old crone in a pointed hat with a broom, cauldron, and black cat.
As we know, women were the primary brewers of beer for thousands of years, since the stuff originated. But as the sixteenth century began, things were changing. The Reformation started, instilling more confined gender roles and also condemning witchcraft. Men, meanwhile, were figuring out how they could make beer (or ale) commercial. Ale was something women brewed for their households, selling extra from their homes or at local markets, though even that was complicated depending on where you’re talking about. As men formed guilds of professional brewers and started the move toward a time when people would get beer from actual breweries rather than some lady on their street, they strategized how to squeeze women out of the craft they’d been honing for centuries.
Women, you see, couldn’t have any part in such a professional endeavor. Men saw the financial potential of beer, and the only way to harness it was to get women and their homespun sort of industry out of the picture. Smear campaigns began, accusing brewsters of cheating customers by charging too much for their product or not using good enough ingredients. Governments doubled down, fining and punishing women for such offenses. Men began to paint women as untrustworthy shills.
Men and the church worked together to rip beer-making from the hands of women, motivated by greed, sexism, and a sad little pathetic worldview crippled by the fear of women diversifying beyond their baby-making purpose. What if women got so busy brewing and making money off their beer that they forgot to get married and serve their husband’s every stupid whim? What if they did so well at brewster-ing that they got it into their dummy lady heads that they could be independent? This would not do!
To really drive home that you should not get your beer from these brewsters, or alewives, some men wanted to underline, bold, and italicize how evil these women were, with all their cheating, scamming, subpar-grain-using ways. They began to portray women in religious imagery as irrevocably damned, and to use Christianity’s built-in terror of witchcraft to cast women as the worst thing imaginable. This is where many historians and writers see the connection between brewsters and what we think of when we think of witches.
Brewsters made their beer in big, bubbling cauldrons after all. They often had cats at their side, who did their tiny cat job of catching the mice that the grain attracted. To sell the beer left over from what their families needed, some brewsters put brooms out in front of their homes to signal it was sellin’ time, and wore tall, pointy hats in the town squares or marketplaces so people would notice them. Cauldrons, cats, brooms, and hats: it’s tempting af to place the origin of witch imagery in the life of a brewster in Middle Ages Europe.
It’s kind of a bummer if you’re looking for a fun story now—also all of it is an actual bummer historically anyway—but this neat and tidy little correlation might not exist after all. Calling on different research and experts, Tara breaks down all of our supposed connections. The cat thing may come down to the fact that in the Middle Ages, people linked cats with heresy and the devil (I kinda still do, tbh?). As for the pointy hats, we don’t see depictions of witches sporting conical millinery until the eighteenth century. In fact, the hat and crooked nose motif may, more darkly, come from anti-Semitic sentiment expressed in medieval art. (A 1421 Hungarian decree punished anyone’s first witchcraft offense with the forced wearing of a tall, pointed “Jew’s hat,” Tara points out, from Peter Burke’s Eyewitnessing: The Use of Images as Historical Evidence.)
When it comes to brooms, it’s the opposite of the pointed hat, in that the witch-on-broom image actually long predates this period of demonizing alewives. And if you want to talk cauldrons, well, they don’t really ever actually come up in the witch talk of the day, including, importantly, the witch trials. Basically, we do have two things happening at once: men looking to demonize brewsters to force them out of the trade, and a religiously fueled witch panic that grew into deadly witch trials. But they were not necessarily fully connected. Alewives were depicted as damned and sinful, but we don’t see them with their pointed hats and cauldrons and brooms in the imagery from this time in particular.
There would have been overlap, sure, Tara writes. Women who brewed could also sometimes be the same women accused of witchcraft. But the link doesn’t seem to be hard, fast, direct, or all-encompassing. I am sorry to report this. As with…literally everything else? this all seems to trace back to good old fashioned misogyny.
Unfortunately, instead of there being a seasonally appropriate tie-in between alewives-as-witches and Halloween witches for today, there seems to be a more deeply entrenched tie-in of some men not wanting women in their beer space and using assorted nefarious means to push them out. Sexism is the spookiest horror of all, happy Halloween!
I won’t leave you there, though. If you haven’t yet, go get Tara’s book; that is the real treat and I promise I’ll cut it the heck out with the puns now, probably. And oh, drink Dyke Beer’s Witch Please! A pumpkin märzen, it combines the best of both fall-beer worlds and is truly delicious. That is an enjoyable way to embrace the whole witchy beer vibe.
Beer Tarot!
This week I pulled the Knight of Swords.
The suit of Swords speaks to intellect and decisions, and here, it’s about harnessing your own intellect to charge forth at your goals. I mean, look at our buddy the knight. Dude is fired up. This card comes up when you’re feeling unstoppable and ready for any challenge. You want to achieve something or get something done, and you know it’s not going to be a total picnic the whole journey, but you don’t care. It’s on. Now, this could mean getting a degree in something, starting a business, taking up aerial yoga, or finally facing that pile of dishes in the sink. Whatever looms largest on your life’s to-do list.
Our Knight here reminds us to be bold and fearless. Keep pushing and don’t let people intimidate you into backing down. But, this card also comes with a warning. Remember that when you launch into something full speed, you could miss—Twitter trend alert—red flags. So, yah, feel the power of determination, but don’t totally put on blinders.
Speaking of being fired up, I couldn’t knock the thought of one particular beer while I was writing this. I just tried Warwick Farm Brewing’s Molé Stout, and it had such good spicy heat holding its own against rich chocolatey-ness and warm cinnamon. It truly was a fired up beer. If you can get your hands on this one, do—it’s delicious and sure to stir up some get-up-and-go in ya.
This Week’s Boozy Reading Rec
By now, you’ve probably read Beth Demmon’s powerful piece for Civil Eats, “Craft Beer Faces a Gender and Race Reckoning.” But just in case you haven’t, and because it’s hard to think of a more important piece to make sure you get to, I’ll go ahead and bring it up again here. Not only is this piece shaped, as always, with Beth’s inimitable balance of razor-sharp, tuned-in reporting and real, authentic care, but I also think it’s always interesting and helpful to read pieces like this that dig into beer industry issues for an audience that extends far past just beer people.
Until next week, here is a special Halloween-edition two-fer: Darby as a taco for Halloween of 2018, first at Fifth Hammer for their joy of a pet costume contest, then at nearby Rockaway Brewing.
