Beer: Why Not Women?

Suppose
your store has two doors There isn’t really any difference
between them, just that one is on the wine side of your
store, and the other is on the beer side (we’ll assume you
have your spirits in the middle).

When someone comes in the
beer door, you show them spirits – hey, how about this nice
new vodka? – and you tour them through the wine, and of
course, you hand-sell them some nice seasonal craft beers
and point out the latest specials on mainstream
cases.

But whenever someone comes
in the wine door, you show them wine – this one’s good with
that chicken dish you mentioned making – and maybe cordials
and gin. That’s it. If they wander over into the beer
section, you just ignore them, because they obviously didn’t
mean to be there, and would soon be headed back to the wine
side – just because that’s the door they came in.

It sounds kind of strange,
but you shouldn’t feel odd about it. After all, if the beer
industry doesn’t seem to be interested in selling beer to
women, why should you be?

WHY
NOT
WOMEN?

“All the mainstream beer
ads are aimed at men,” agrees Crystal Burlingame, who works
at Blanchards in Marshfield. Crystal was heartily
recommended to me by the readers at beeradvocate as a woman
who really knows beer. “And they mostly run during sporting
events when the general audience is male. What little craft
beer advertising is done is usually in beer publications,
which are mostly read by . . . men!”

I have to agree. We get
cooking light at my home. Despite the name, it’s a woman’s
magazine that happens to talk a lot about food. There are
never any beer ads in there except an occasional one for
Michelob Ultra. Yet there are frequent wine ads. The
magazine has a wine columnist; there’s been one serious page
about beer in the magazine’s history that I’ve
seen.

Brewing is a man’s game:
industry estimates are that less than 1% of brewery workers
are women. I’m familiar with all levels of the industry –
production, wholesale, retail – and the place where women
show up the most is in marketing and publicity. It’s mostly
men who make beer, mostly men who deliver beer, mostly men
who sell beer, and yeah, mostly men who buy and drink beer.
Which begs the question: How come?

“It’s not that much of a
mystery,” answers Lauren Clark, a Boston writer who has
worked in the beer business and has a crusade for good
drinks going called DrinkBoston.com. “Women haven’t flocked
to beer for reasons of history, sociology and
taste.”

“Beer has been a
male-dominated area for centuries,” she explains, “ever
since brewing went from a home-based activity performed
mostly by women to a large-scale industry run by men. Also,
drinking as a pleasurable pursuit has traditionally been
more socially acceptable for men than for women. Look at
magazines. Men’s magazines have articles recommending and
celebrating beer, wine and spirits. In women’s magazines,
alcohol is seldom written about except in certain contexts,
like health studies.

“You have to consider
advertising, too,” she adds. “In the mass media, beer is
undeniably marketed to men, therefore – duh – beer in
general is seen as a man’s product. The biggest breweries
are afraid to advertise in ways that might appeal to women
out of fear that they might alienate their core, male
customer. The whole ‘Women are from Venus, men are from
Mars’ thing is stupidly alive and well when it comes to beer
advertising.”

It’s not like women feel
welcome in most beer drinking situations, either. The whole
craft beer scene, for instance, is “like a Star Trek
convention,” Clark says. “Most women who encounter a group
of guys talking about original gravity, the Lovibond scale
and IBUs are going to tune out, if not run away altogether.
To put all this in perspective, let’s admit that most men
aren’t into craft beer either.”

Dawn Tully, who runs
Tully’s Beer and Wine in Wells, Maine, has her own radically
honest thoughts on that. “I’ve been secretly harboring this
opinion for a long time,” she says. “I don’t really think
men like beer that much either. They drink it because they
don’t like wine, for various reasons, one of them being that
wine’s a ‘girly drink’. Women don’t have the “girly drink”
problem, so they drink wine. I’m not sure that men like beer
any more than women do.”

SWEETS
FOR THE SWEET?

Beer doesn’t necessarily
hit women in their sweet spot tastewise, at least, not for
some women. “Women do seem to have different tastes when it
comes to food and drink in general,” Clark muses, “though I
think this is far from hard-wired into our physiology, as is
often assumed. Yes, women are the ones who go ga-ga over
desserts and therefore do seem to have a preference for
fruity, chocolatey beers. But I don’t think the preference
is overwhelming, and I think it diminishes as women get
older and their palates become more sophisticated. Who is
drinking all the fruit- and vanilla-flavored martinis?
Mostly people in their 2Os, who haven’t developed a taste
yet for spirits.”

“Women love chocolate and
sweet beers, fruity beers,” counters Suzanne Woods, a
beer-loving, beer-selling friend of mine who reps for Sly
Fox Brewing, near Philadelphia. Suzanne has organized a
woman’s beer group in Philly called In Pursuit of Ale. “At a
beer club meeting last October, the majority of the ladies
were drinking the Dogfish Head Punkin’ ale. But men love
chocolate, too. I think people who aren’t beer drinkers will
gravitate toward chocolate beers.”

Dawn Tully sees the same
kind of thing with a beer that most folks will tell you is a
“girly” beer. “One year my best-selling single bottle was
the Lindeman’s 25.4 ounce Framboise lambic,” she says. “It’s
popular with women, but it wouldn’t be the best seller if
men weren’t buying it. The Framboise will sell to
non-specialty beer drinkers. It’s like a category unto
itself, like champagne. Some people don’t even know
champagne’s wine; and people don’t know lambic’s beer.
People will say, ‘I don’t like beer, but I love this!’ It
happens all the time.”

All of which reminds me of
something Alan Newman once told me about Magic Hat’s #9,
their pale ale with a hint of apricot flavor. “Among the
beer geeks of the world, they say “#9, oh yeah, that’s a
girly beer.” There are not enough girls in New England to
account for the sales of #9! Don’t call it a girly beer. A
lot of people love it.”

Sweet beer for girls is
“just another stereotype,” says Bonnie Reed, a beer
enthusiast from Southwick. ” I don’t understand why male
beer drinkers suggest sweet fruit and chocolate beers first.
Find out what the woman likes in wine, or mixed drinks, and
find a beer that compares. She likes bourbon? Try a Scotch
ale. Maybe she likes coffee; try a stout. You have to cater
to the individual.”

BAITING
THE
HOOK.

How do you get the woman to
the beer? Clark makes it sound like seduction. “I think
setting is the most crucial,” she says. “Women care about
esthetics and atmosphere, and, like men, they often follow
the lead of members of their own sex. So, if a woman walks
into a nice-looking bar that is filled with men and women
drinking attractive beers of all different styles and
colors, served in distinctive glassware, they’re going to be
more apt to give craft beer a try rather than fall back on a
Cosmo. And the thing is, they’ll often begin to realize,
‘Hey, I like the taste of this stuff!'”

Burlingame talks to her
female customers, gets them to open up. She used to be a
wine geek herself, and took on beer as a challenge, so she
knows how to talk both sides of the aisle. “Just talk to
them, see what they like,” she says. “Tell them how well a
beer will pair with the food they’re planning. A lot of
talking will get people interested.”

Once you’ve got them
interested, show them the package. “Packaging drives
everything,” she says. “Some of the nicer cork-and-caged
bottles of beer look elegant on the table; appeal to the
sense of sight. A nicer looking bottle looks better on the
table than a can of beer; put it in a wine glass and it will
taste even better. I’ve got a lot of women who come in here
and buy good beer. It helps that there’s a woman here to
talk to. We all tend to feel more comfortable speaking to
the same sex.”

Tully thinks women may have
to get over a bad impression of beer from early experiences,
much like a kid who had liver and vows that they hated it
and will never try it again. “Many people get their first
exposure to alcohol when they can’t afford to buy halfway
decent beer,” she conjectures. “They buy the lightest,
cheapest beers they can get their hands on. A lot of women
don’t like those. Beers with more flavor, craft beers,
they’ll like them, but they usually stumble across them.
They won’t pick them up. They have a solid opinion from
early on that they don’t like beer, and they won’t even try
it.”

How does Tully fight that?
“We use segue beers,” she explains. “Michelob Ultra is one
way to get women back into drinking beer. ‘Ooo, this will
make you less fat!’ I don’t know about the truth in that,
but it worked. A lot of women went back to drinking domestic
beer because of Mich Ultra. That’s a segue beer, and when
they start to get bored with Ultra, we can move them into
other beers from there. People move from light to heavy,
sweet to dry, less expensive to more expensive. That’s how
our lives work, our bodies work, our pocketbooks
work.

“But the hard part is
getting them to try it,” she says. Tully sees women staying
in the car when men come in to buy beer. “If I could hand
women a beer when they’re sitting out in the car waiting for
their husbands to get beer, and just say, ‘Hey, try this,
just take it home and try it . . .’ I could double my beer
business in a year. Women are an almost entirely untapped
segment in America for selling beer.”

Woods brings up one point
that can kill a promising sale, even if the woman likes the
beer: the beer belly image. “Many of the women I know that
truly enjoy beer still don’t drink it sometimes,” she notes
ruefully, “because a ‘moment on the lips is a lifetime on
the hips.’ But there is a lot of positive research being
done on the health benefits of beer, and it’s a pretty well
known fact now that a pint of Guinness, for instance, has
125 calories. If these health facts continue to be featured
on the news and in print, we’ll have more success getting
women to order beer instead of Beaujolais.” Know your facts,
and you can fight the myths.

Harpoon brewer Katie Tame
(see sidebar) isn’t in sales, but she’s got the idea. “I
haven’t really gone out and made a point of talking to women
about beer,” she says. “I don’t like to force things on
people in general. But I always end up talking about beer. I
tell women what makes a specific beer different and unique
and wonderful. I’ve had women come up to me and say, “You’re
drinking something dark.” Yeah, and it has flavor,
too!”

“There’s no shortage of
women in the world of wine and fine food,” says Clark.
“Those are the women who are most open to trying craft beer,
which is seen more and more as part of the wider world of
good food and drink.” Maybe you can get some copies of Lucy
Saunders’ excellent new book, The Best of American Beer
& Food, to set the hook on women like that. Open the
page to the Lamb with Ratatouille and Hefeweiss Sauce, and
you’ve got a sale.

I believe that women are
just like men when it comes to their tastes. That women,
like men, have different tastes as individuals, and that
they are not gender-selective for sweets and glop any more
than men are. That women deserve to be treated with the same
respect when selecting a beer that men do, not a patronizing
assumption that they want something light, fruity, candyish,
or wine-like. They, like men, may not even know what they
like. But I believe that the best way to find that out – for
both of us – is to offer them the same kind of choices that
I would a man.

Which means that sometimes
I do offer them – women and men! – a mix of Young’s Double
Chocolate Stout and Lindeman’s Framboise, a raspberry
truffle in a glass that I find to be pretty damned good
myself. Sometimes you just can’t fight success.

WHO’S WEARING THE PINK BOOTS? A “male-dominated” industry is not the same as an “exclusively male” industry, of course. Katie Tame works in production at the Harpoon Brewery in Boston, in the Quality Control lab. She oversees the beer production at Harpoon, helping to make sure that every drop of beer that leaves the brewery is up to snuff. Tame agrees with Clark that the industry has been a man’s game for years. “It’s interesting that brewing is male-dominated now,” she says. “In Egypt, way back when, women did the brewing, but it’s turned around. When industrial brewing first started, the social standards that were set up oriented females to work in the house, that was their role. Males went out to work in breweries. It’s also a very fast-moving, high-energy output job. The physical aspect of it is like fire-fighting. Women might not have that ability, or may not be seen to have it.” She brought up Teri Fahrendorf, a woman who’s been brewing great beers for years at the Steelhead breweries on the west coast. Fahrendorf, a highly acclaimed brewer and well-liked member of the craft brewing industry, took a leave of absence recently to tour the country, brewing with women brewers and stumping for a woman’s brewing organization she’s forming, the Pink Boots Society. “Teri has said that there aren’t a lot of women in brewing,” Tame notes. “But when I started, I got a lot of support from the men at the brewery. No one questioned why a woman was brewing. I actually think of myself more as a scientist than a brewer. Tame thinks that women represent a great opportunity for craft brewers and, by extension, retailers. It’s a matter of getting the beer out there for them to try, and letting them know it’s okay to be seen drinking beer. “Craft brewing is growing tremendously, particularly Harpoon,” she says, “and with more exposure . . . It’s not that women need to be encouraged, they just need to see other women drinking beer. There’s an idea that women feel they need to hold up some kind of demure aspect, be women, and then women see men drinking beer, so . . .” She doesn’t subscribe to the idea that women need a different kind of beer. “I don’t think I think about beer differently than the men,” she says. “Whenever we do a taste panel, everyone has their own thoughts about beer flavor, and so do I.” Then she pauses, and laughs. “I just started homebrewing, and I’m bottling a garlic beer,” she says. “That’s one difference, but it’s me, not a woman difference: I like garlic. The guys told me I needed a good ale as a base, but I just want garlic in it!”