February, 2006The
Thirst of the Fairer Sex
It's February, and lots of craft brewers are getting choked up
about Valentine's Day. "Serve your sweetie our chocolate-mango
IPA," croons one brewpub; "Our big bottle of
Belgian-basted beer will work wonders wine won't,"
alliterates another.1 Brewers are
hustling to put romance into beer, or beer into romance. I've
done it myself, writing a piece for Ale
Street News a few years back about Valentine's Day beers (a
natural for me: it's my birthday). These articles and ad copy
always lean heavily on chocolate, fruit, and big (wine-like) bottles,
preferably ones with corks and cages.
When I was in my courting days there were few options in
gussied-up beer. I wound up buying expensive bottles of champagne
that I didn't really like to drink, wine that always -- always --
gave me a crinkly headache the next day, of a particular type I
get from no other drink or situation; I still think of it as a champagne
headache. Cathy and I did that once, then I realized that she
liked beer as much as I did -- lucky me! -- so after that it was
beer for Valentine's Day. Now it's almost amusing to see the array of
choices offered for the romantic beer drinker.
But the subtext here is plain. This is not about beer for
romance. It's about beer for women. The assumption is that a
beer-loving guy is buying beer for a woman who thinks she doesn't like
beer, so the solution is to fool her with a beer that either
tastes like candy or dessert, or looks so impressively like wine that it
will overwhelm the woman into liking it -- or at least shutting
up so the guy can enjoy it. Great.
Women are under-represented at most craft beer festivals and
events. Women are under-represented on beer websites, on beer e-mail
lists, in homebrew clubs, at beer bars, in e-letter subscription lists
for beer writer's websites... You get the picture. There are
wonderful exceptions -- my wife, for one, and my friend Cornelia
Corey -- but they stick out in most beer crowds. There are fewer
women than men involved in the goings-on of craft beer, and even then, a
small but consistent percentage of them are there for reasons other
than the beer, like making sure their guy gets home alive. (This is
all anecdotal evidence, of course, but I do spend a lot of my time in
these situations, and I keep my eyes open.)
With the way they're treated, it's no surprise. A lot of
dogma-ridden geeks blame
light beer on women, and when the idea of getting women to drink
better beer comes up, they assume the worst, and pawn off candy
and trinkets on them. It makes geeks look like they're bartering with
savages. Would they try to tempt another guy into The Good Beer Camp
with fruit and chocolate? I doubt it.
It's a man's world out there. Craft beers are often named with
the kind of sophomoric humor that appeals more to frat boys than women
-- don't make me name them, you know who you are. We point the
finger at crude and sexist ads from the big brewers -- Miller's
Catfight, Coors's Twins, A-B's infamous farting horse -- but what
do we have to respond with: Doggie Style, Old Howling Bastard, Old
Thunderpussy? Women aren't all Precious Moments and lavender
sachet, but they aren't all scratching, picking, and belching,
either.
That's not the whole picture, of course. There are plenty of
perfectly acceptable names, label art that doesn't offend, and
female-friendly brewpubs. But there hasn't been a lot of outreach.
And I think that's too bad, because women could be a great market for
craft-brewed beer.
If I were a woman...I'd be insulted by the way
mainstream beer is marketed. It's just another reflection of the "perfect
woman" magazine image that's been sold to women for years. We
get Cooking Light here at home. Despite the name, it's a woman's
mag that happens to talk a lot about food. There are never any
beer ads in there except for light beers. There are all kinds of
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. I almost
got in, after grabbing their attention by sending a pitch letter wrapped
around a bottle of Dojlidy Porter, but I muffed it somehow.
Why don't women drink beer? More to the point, why do brewers
think women don't drink beer? They do, I've seen them. Smart, chic
women, too, I might add. I think it's the constant reinforcement of beer
belly this, beer bloats you that. Lies and misconceptions. The
beer belly? Nonsense. Beer does not cause a fat belly more than
any other food. Bloating? A lot
of foods cause bloating; beer causes it because of carbonation; if
you'd like to avoid it, drink a beer with less fizz, and pour
your beer into a glass, it releases more gas than drinking it from
the bottle. Tastes better, too.
I've never gotten the whole bloating thing myself, even when
I've had plenty of beer. A woman asked me at a beer dinner one time,
"But I don't like the bloated way beer makes me feel, how do you
deal with the bloat?" And I just looked at her. Hey, I
don't get car-sick, either, I don't even know what people are talking
about.
I don't know what to do about that. I can tell women that beer
doesn't cause bloat or beer belly. I can tell women that beer's
bitterness will make their food taste even better -- why should wine
have a monopoly on that? I can tell women that for the tiny
difference between "regular" beer and light beer -- there
are 153 calories in an Anchor Steam, 110 calories in Bud Light,
the calorie difference is half a freakin' pretzel! -- they're crazy
to give up on the flavor. I can tell women that there are a whole
spectrum of flavors in beer, from sweet to bitter to tart to smoky. But
I don't know how to break years of conditioning.
Actually, I do. I can give a woman a beer, and be bold about
it. One of the first successes I ever had with changing someone's
drinking habits was with a buddy's girlfriend. We were at an early
beer bar that has since gone the way of all flesh, and she was
drinking crap Chablis while we were clipping away at one of those
"Hall of Foam" cards; drink all 100 beers and get a t-shirt (I
still have mine). Why not try something better, I asked her. I
don't like beer, she replied. Try this, I said, and handed her the Mackeson's
Triple Stout I was drinking. She rolled her eyes at the
blackness of it, but gamely tried a sip. Hey, she liked it! No, she
loved it! And it wasn't fruity or chocolatey.
Since then I've turned women on to Guinness, Prima Pils, and
Kostritzer Schwarzbier, among others. I happen to 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 -- and men! -- a Chocolate-Covered
Strawberry. Because I find this mix of Lancaster
Brewing's Milk Stout and Strawberry Wheat to be pretty damned
good myself...even if it is made from a fruit beer and a
chocolatey beer. Sometimes you just can't fight success.
1No, not really, I made it
up...thank God
