Thank Women for Popularizing Beer

Females were our first brewers, before Christ
By Will McCahill,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 31, 2010 8:17 PM CDT
Thank Women for Popularizing Beer
Women have been brewing beer since before Christ, one historian says, and men have only elbowed in over the past 500 years.   (Wikimedia Commons)

Though both the brewing and consumption of beer might seem to have “manly” stamped all over them, it’s in fact women who drove suds’ popularity. Since thousands of years before Christ, a British historian tells the Daily Mail, brewing was done in the home, and females were in charge. Cleaner than water, Jane Peyton notes, beer “was part of the daily diet and therefore part of a woman’s domestic chores to produce.”

In the 14th century, she adds, women—known as brewsters—brewed most of Britain’s beer. “I can imagine it will come as a shock to many men, but they’ve got women to thank for their beer,” she says. “It is only in comparatively recent times that men became involved in the brewing process.”
(More beer stories.)

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