hell hath my fury

“Initially, brewing was carried out as home brewing by women for domestic use only. It was part of the daily housework next to cooking and baking bread.” (Handbook of Brewing, Priest and Stewart, 2006)

“Traditionally, [African] beers are made by women brewsters, as was the case medieval Europe, and they may be consumed with some ceremony.” (Brewing, Briggs, Brookes, and Stevens, 2003)

And here are some articles:

A (Very) Brief History of Women in Beer

http://growlermag.com/women-in-beer/

“Women’s role in the history of beer is often forgotten,” says Sofie Vanrafelghem, author and master beer sommelier. “One of the very first written documents to refer to beer,” she says, “was an ode written 3,800 years ago to the Sumerian goddess Ninkasi, whose priestesses brewed beer in her honour.”

This data’s been on my radar for a while now. I remember being in one of our favorite places in Dublin, Porterhouse Central, and spotting a sign hanging up above one of the aisles that said BEERS BREWED BY MEN, NOT MACHINES. A nice enough sentiment, but unfortunately / unnecessarily gendered.

I was in a bit of a mischievous mood and said to the barman, “No women?” “Nope,” he said.

I said, “You should really get at least one woman brewer in here. For historical reasons if nothing else. Didn’t you know that until a couple of centuries ago it was illegal for men to brew in Dublin?”

He was kind of stunned. True, though. It was traditional in the city from Viking times that only women should brew. In fact there was a sense that it was unlucky for men to brew, that the beer would fail, that it didn’t like them.

My bartender was a little bemused by this. “But why would that be?”

I just kind of laughed. “Women,” I said. “Yeast. We have a relationship.”

this is the masked bee! she has no friends and hates everyone. Sometimes when she has kids she raises them alone and doesn’t let the father come for day trips. she loves pollen but does not like waiting for it so she chews flowers open which is essentially stealing. we love her anyway.

these bees are homalictus bees! they are the rainbow gay bees. Females tend to live together in one nest and guard the entrance. one time we found 160 gay girls bunking together. They’re so irridescent and small that they might look like flies but they are really just tiny lesbians.

and this is the blue banded bee! she may look like she’s wacked out, but really she is pretty chill. she just wants to live independently (or with some friends) in a nest or burrow and look after tomatoes.

This is a tree bumblebee- they’re pretty similar to honeybees in that they have big nests with a polyandrous queen. However, these guys love to be around humans and in gardens, and are super resilient- there are now large populations in Iceland. They have a more complex social hierarchy than most bees, with multiple worker castes. If a worker gets close with the queen she can mate with a drone and lay her own eggs in with the big pile, but eat the eggs of any workers beneath her that try to do so.

This is a valley carpenter bee- the only bee that can thermoregulate and had a circulatory system complete with aortic arch. Carpenter bees are good because they are too big to get into many flowers and have to be extra hairy to get pollen. They live in raw wood in small family units of all females (mothers and daughters or sisters) and are excellent cooks and workers. Males cruise around mating with multiple females and then leave.