Today, when we have lost sight of our primary needs and seek fulfillment in consumption that we can identify with, that justifies our self-proclaimed status, brands are taking advantage of this. At the time of the 8th extinction , we consume Veuve Clicquot to show that we have the means and craft beer to show that we are in tune with the times. Similarly, the alcohol industry targets genres based on crude but working clichés. Put some pink on your bottle and some fruit flavors in it and boom, it's going to be a drink for women. This marketing disconnected from all reality is based on a pseudo masculine tradition of alcohol that I will try to deconstruct here by taking the history of the brewing industry as an example.

Beer, this essentially masculine and barbaric drink... What if I told you that until the monks in the Middle Ages took over the brewing tradition, there were almost only female brewers? And that during Antiquity, the biggest beer drinkers in the West were female drinkers?

For 14,000 years and the discovery of beer, and until the Middle Ages, beer was a product made by women and very often for women. And this until the church takes over the business, safeguards and imposes certain traditions along the way. If we do the math, beer has therefore been “masculine” for a fraction of its existence.

Still, since then, beer's image has changed. We learn in certain history books that the barbarians drank beer and that the civilized peoples around the Mediterranean drank wine. It was even one of the ways of recognizing a civilized people from a “barbaric” people. And again, we quickly make the shortcut between barbarians and masculinity. Later, the traditions became regionalized. The English, for example, popularized porter, the black beer of English dockers since the 18th century, which stinks of testosterone and manual labor. Abbey beers have remained popular ever since as well, beers rose to fame after great statesmen endorsed such as Hefeweizen in Germany by the Duke of Wittelsbach of Bavaria or Russian Imperial Stout by Tsar Peter the Great , but there are few if any “important” women in the recent history of beer.

Today, women are rightly reclaiming their place on the front of the stage even if the brewer remains in the collective imagination a cross between a bear and a Parisian bobo. Denunciations are raining down in the middle, things are moving slowly.

The fact remains that we must encourage these changes, associations of activists are multiplying such as the Pink Boots Society or Les Buveuses de Bières, but it is also up to us men to welcome these changes, to encourage them. . There is nothing that justifies the low presence of women in the circles of beer, wine or spirits if not the male ego and an outdated tradition. On the contrary, they must even regain their legitimacy in this world which has erased them and which tends to renew itself even if this is still too limited.

The image of the Sower by Oscar Roty underlines this legitimacy that women must recover. It is both a symbol of the republic, of renewal, of hope and fertility and a source of inspiration for more than 200 years. Armand Heitz's family has always put forward this inspiring image and that is why it is now present on the estate's cereal range of beers . Contrary to these beers using crude and gendered marketing, it is a meager contribution to show that women are not only a sales target but also major and traditional actors in the alcohol sector who deserve be associated with quality.

 

Gregory White