festival of the book presenting reading under the influence a. woman's place is in the brewhouse with tarot. neuron. i'm sarah lawson associate director of the virginia center for the book a program of virginia humanities. thanks for joining us. a couple notes before we begin please share your questions for the author using the q&a tab on zoom. also, this event has optional closed captioning which you can turn on and customize at any time with the tab at the bottom of your window. if you haven't already read today's book, we hope you will for details about how to buy it from a local bookseller. visit vabook.org where you can also explore the schedule of upcoming festival programs and watch past events. while you're there, please consider making a donation to support the festivals ongoing work at va book.org slash give thanks to our sponsor for this annual event w tucker lemon, virginia humanities board member and advocate for reading. under the influence thanks also to our community partner for this event devil's backbone brewing company and our bookseller fountain bookstore in richmond, virginia. now and please to introduce our speakers tara nouren author of a woman's place is in the brewhouse is passionate about promoting women's challenges and achievements and the history of women and beer kara is also a veteran freelance journalist and beer and spirits contributor for forbes an educator and a marketing consultant. and libby rother is innovation brewmaster at devil's backbone brewing company. she discovered brewing while studying operations at miami university and then the vlb in berlin, germany. going on to work at five different breweries over two continents. she currently heads the bounce back bounce box brewing program at devil's backbone. thank you both for joining us tara libby take it away. all right, so we already got quite the intro from sarah so tara and i will be hosting reading under the influence. so throughout the event we will be going through four different beers for tastings and while we're sipping away. we will talk with tara about her book. so sarah already mentioned to tara niran is author of a woman's place is in the brewhouse a forgotten history of ale wives brewster's witches and ceos. just a quick italian. so tara is actually really closely. and related with virginia because she had her first job out of grad school and worked as a reporter for wvir under long-time news director, and anchor dave cook. so if you if she looks familiar that might be one of the many reasons why. and so eric, can you just provide a brief overview of your book to get a little bit of context for our conversation? and then i think tara's gonna kick off the event with a reading from from her book as well. that's right. thanks libby. hi everyone. it's really nice to be joining people from charlottesville and albemarle county and so a little tiny bit about me in addition to libby's great introduction. people always want to know how it is that i am writing that i came to write this book and basically i've been writing about beer as a freelance journalist. since 2005 in the philadelphia metro area, and i've been really focusing on women in beer that entire time gotten involved in a lot of different women's organizations in the beer space started one or two of my own and published this book last year. a couple months ago about six months ago now, um and the background to the book is that this is the first book to chronicle the history of women in beer and women actually have been brewing beer or you know some semblance thereof for probably about 200,000 years basically for out most of human history water was either not safe to drink or was believed to be not safe to drink. people didn't drink soda. there was soda wasn't invented juice wasn't invented. people didn't drink milk wine tended to be upper classes so a beer has been the staple beverage for the family in most civilizations throughout human history and because of that it was a kitchen chore and who is usually in charge of kitchen chores women what has happened with stunning regularity. is that in every single civilization throughout time and space, you know, you have women being the brewers and then one of three forces sometimes all three at the same time would come in and replace the women with men and those would be politics religion or economics. um, so if you're scratching your head thinking hi, i didn't know women were involved in beer. i didn't know women liked beer women are the original brewmasters. and so that's a lead in to the book a bit of a setup and i will be reading a quick little snippet from the chapter about colonial america. and virginia and the chesapeake colonies specifically a little admission here is that i'm going to be reading off a pdf for the first time so you might have to bear with me a little bit as i scroll down and it doesn't always scroll as quickly as i am. but i think we'll be okay. so, um if you've got the book, you can follow along i am skipping a bit. so, um, you know, it might not be as easy to follow along as you may think anyway, um, so here we go, virginia colonists brewed their first beer in 1584 almost 30 years before the founding of jamestown, and i just want to interject with the fun fact if you go to one of the two jamestown sites, there's actually they're actually the remnants of a home and there's a plaque there that gives the name of the woman who owned the home and says that she actually brewed there which was shocking to me because normally history does not recognize that so fun fact, um, so molting barley didn't grow well on much of the east coast at the time and virginians were too preoccupied with tobacco fields anyway, women that's in the tobacco colonies of virginia, maryland and a bit of north carolina tended to replace hops in that case hops and barley replaced them with spruce. molasses sassafras pumpkin parsnip walnut chips dried and baked persimmon jerusalem artichoke and a lot of flint corn. southern colonists, however, primarily slicked their thirst for alcohol with apple cider and brandy as you know, being virginians apples, aha grow very very well much better than the ingredients for beer do when they did want beer wives of middling income farmers purchased ingredients from larger farms, and they relied on their husbands kids and enslaved women and men for brewing help. wives of large-scale farmers sometimes hired male servants and almost always employed slave labor. beer insider where the two beverages colonists literally couldn't live without. sarah hands meacham writes in a place where the water was unsafe or at least believed to be that's my parentheses and milk was generally unavailable tea and coffee were too expensive for all but the very wealthy and soda non-alcoholic fruit juice were not yet invented alcoholic beverages were all that colonists colonists could drink safely. some wealthy colonial women took a nip every day. there's stamina and women who couldn't afford spirits considered low alcohol beer insider healthy daily drinks for the whole family. they and their enslaved people use them to treat everything from a runny nose to hysteria and breastfeeding women drank hobby beer to help their milk run. here was so critical to the functioning of the family that needs him reports an englishman named john hammond severely castigated the brewsters of maryland in virginia in seven in 1656 for failing to make enough corn-based ale to meet the colonies needs. calling these multitasking wives and mothers negligent idol careless and slothful. he admonished they will be judged by their drinks. what kind of housewives they are. great guy so um as the wife of thomas jefferson martha jefferson developed a reputation for brewing. excellent wheat beer at their families monticello estate in charlottesville, virginia where she oversaw kitchen staffed by enslaved women and children most notably long-time kitchen manager ursula granger. martha prided herself on bargaining for ingredients once writing that she bought seven pounds of hops with an old shirt from enslaved people who grew hops in their own gardens. eventually an official hopgarden was planted at monticello and the plantations enslaved staff did the malting onsite as well. that's it for you. i usually what i went to monticello. i was looking for the hops because hops are very hard to get rid of once they start growing. so, but i did not find them. i have a picture. i believe that there might still be some there. i have a picture that lee grave who some of our viewers might know he wrote a couple books about brewing in colonial in virginia in general sent me a picture that he took somewhere at the estate, but i don't know where exactly so i do believe they're still there, but i don't think okay like promoted or marked or anything. i think yeah blue thing. very cool. okay, i think we are gonna start off with a beer. so hopefully all of you received your your bounce box for the month so you should have four different beers that are around women empowerment that came along with tara's book. and just to give you a little intro on bounce box bounce box is doubles backbone innovation program so currently we're just creating four new beers every month, and then those beers are going to directly to consumers and we receive feedback on how all of these beers are and work to speak them later on. so for this month because of tara's book and because of march 8th being international women's day and with all of the pink boots collaboration, which you will hear more of i'm sure very shortly we have four beers that are centered around women empowerment. so our first fear is called all dolled up and i'm gonna show you the can because the artwork is amazing. it wasn't hard work on your cans, by the way. i'm having a great time looking at them. yeah, so i'm gonna i'm gonna give a quick shout out to naya moore. she's actually she's a local graphic designer at richmond, and she of the labels for these beers, so i did break down her she has i think her insta handle is just nigham moore. so if you want to look her up, is an amazing lady. this is all dolled up and so you can see the label. this is a beer that was kind of meant to break the stereotype of women having to look and dress like dolls so we should be able to dress and express ourselves. however, we like this is an apertivo style spritz ale so i already broke into mine, but it is a cheers everybody. it is a hybrid ale so that means that it was brewed and fermented a half and half with barley and then also pinot grigio juice so you can drink this like you would a champagne or a wine spritzer and then it was conditioned on elderflower lime and mint so very light refreshing. and as a little bit of tartness and that's the elder flower. sorry, no. i was just going to say while you were taking a sip that as i said a minute ago. i think it will go fabulously with thai food. yeah, so this evening, that's my bearing recommendation. i can get into that. yeah. so while you enjoy your beverage well keep that talking about this book and we already know that sarah is the wine and or the spirits of america contributor for forms. so i am just curious how this is of a niche. subject to write about so how did you get into writing about beer? so after i did two years at channel 29, i went on to the memphis market was a tv reporter and then came to the philly market and in 2005. i left tv started freelancing and my biggest client was the philadelphia tourism bureau. so in 2005 my strong belief was and continues to be that philadelphia was the primary east coast city for craft beer, which we called microbrewing at the microbrews at the time and working for the tourism bureau. i was writing a lot about these new breweries popping up beer bars etc, and i was getting advice that journalists should not be generalists journalists. it would be who freelancers to pick a niche basically and so, um a developed a love for covering economic development when i was a reporter in in charlottesville might be one of my beats was louvanna county and i just loved covering, you know, the changes that were happening to the county. and so i saw that breweries were and probably would continue to be um, amazing economic drivers for communities and they probably because we can really know for sure at the time but yes, they have become that those um, and so i basically decided right time right place right gender, you know, i was one of only maybe two to five women writing about beer regularly at the time in the country. and yeah, so and i also really loved um, just the communal aspect of beer and how eco-conscious most brewers were at the time and athlete do still continue to be so. yeah, and because i've been a lifelong feminist combining women with beer giving coverage, um exposure to the few women who were in beer at the time there were not quite so many as there are now and like a really natural fit. yeah, i'm really like reading about all the women. yeah, it was so so cute and i feel like there's so few now, but i can't imagine. like not even knowing if there was another woman brewer at all and then finding one very very cool. um, well, you know as i say, sometimes it took me a couple years to write the proposal and then get a publisher and had the book actually been written a couple years earlier it would have been completely different and one of the main reasons for that is that there were really only a handful of women who were known in the industry at that time. and so they would have been very prominent in the book and then by the time i actually did write it in about 2020 some of those women didn't end up actually even making the book at all because there were so many more to cover. no, it's really just this amazing progress that happens very very fast. let's start. well, that's really good to hear. maybe not for the lady who didn't make it, right? that's something i still lose sleep over actually in the book. really, you know all the all the all the thousands of women who really deserve to be in there, but in 300 words and 200,000 years. it's only so much. oh, yeah. so how did you actually get started writing the book and like what what pushed you originally to? to be the first author of a book about women beer. so you mentioned the collaboration brew days. those are an outgrowth of an organization called the pink boots society, which is an international 501c3 devoted short providing networking empowerment and education for women in the work in the alcoholic beverage space. um, it was started as an organization for beer women the founder of that is a mentor of mine and she actually wrote the forward her name is terry farindor. he was very small here on the cover and and she and i were on the phone one day in about 2015 or 2016 and she said tara no one's written a book about the history of women in beer and you need to write it. you're the one and terry loves joke about herself that she to volunte tell people what to do. ballin told me and and she had given me some great ambitious ideas prior to that that i was. kind of too intimidated to pursue that wasn't really the right time and but with this i thought um, you know, a lot of people write books and they're not even professional writers. i bet i could actually do this and and so that's what i did and and i'm eternally grateful to her for forgiving me the idea. it's really it was absolutely a book book that needed to be written. yeah, so that's very thankful for it. i love it. thanks. well, we couldn't move on to our next year. everyone has to be drinking quickly here. i thought about bringing a little dump bucket over here, but then decided nah, i can finish. yeah, i don't think i could i do have that. i do have my little bucket over here. so our next fear we're gonna move on to you. it's called bomb -- queen or be a cute and it is a pale ale and just hold this up for you here. um, so mom asked queen and dry hops with a hop called african queen and it gives a lot of like orange and floral candied notes. so perfectly fitting because tara writes a lot about many about ask claims and her book and there are various sections in the book about brewing in africa both an ancient times and traditional brewing and today. there are some really incredible women running breweries craft breweries in africa, so that that's a fun tie into the beer. i can't wait to try it. there anything that you you would i know we're we only have so much time. but is there anything that you would tie in because i think that's that's really interesting the women who are kind of bringing back. um in african countries they're bringing back like older traditions and they're talking about like how it's something that they always done and are still doing is there anything that you would touch on with that? well like you're saying um, i mean so basically the way beer is made in africa. you've got these huge multinational corporations and then you've got village women who have been brewing for generations. very small scale cottage industries. they basically like sell the beer out their front door. generally. it's the men who drink it and they tend to pass it around in these communal vessels for you know, not even pennies right and it is passed it is a skill passed down natural linearly, but in the past generation or two, it's just not really cool anymore to typically africans drink, you know, the multinational beers, but there are craft breweries. like i said popping back up some run by women and they tend you really? highlight the traditional ingredients and the traditional styles and produce them with commercial equipment that has never really been done before and happily those styles and ingredients are very slowly starting to find their way into some american craft beers and i think that's a whole new frontier that we're gonna start start to see more of very interesting. thank you. so you shouldn't smell a little bit of like a candied orange a little bit of floral. it's got like a pretty like full body, but it's cut by a light acidity. my school color i don't know if i've ever had a single hopped beer with with um. african queen, this is cool. this is my first one too. so. yeah, i'm going to try many different types of years for the first time because we are always making so many new beers, so get to try out a lot of different ingredients. so you actually run the innovation program at devil's backbone. am i correct about that? i would say be full innovation program, but i do around the brewery. yeah, yeah. small town hack later system and we work for we work on all different types of years. we do four different beers every month. we're starting to work on like making years for scale and trialing out. there's that way we're starting to get more into the beyond beer around sayers it got my wine that type of thing so, a lot of fun stuff small team, but very good team. so i want to move back into a little bit more about. monticello and virginia, so you had mentioned the term archival silences and this actually the first time i had heard of that term when reading this book. and you also mentioned the word her story, which is very fitting for this book as well. would you mind explaining to our audience what those two words mean? sure, so her story is a word that people use sometimes because if you if you're really into it right down the word history. yeah, or at least visualize it picture in your your head. it's his story. right, so we don't want to perpetuate sexism in our language. so sometimes i do use the term her story instead. so what that leads into is this concept of archival silences and typically only the stories of the dominant population and a society get written down. um in the case of women historically they've been illiterate so they couldn't even write their own stories down, but they couldn't own pr