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 property in many places at many times. so business records didn't even mention their names if they did they would be called like mrs. joe smith or the wife of joe smith, even an obituaries and such so it's really really hard to do research on non-dominant populations, and that's what this concept of archival silences is um, also, you know women's work wasn't necessarily considered interesting enough. to be chronicled by historians, you know throughout history and you know, we're talking about women primarily in this conversation, but the same thing can be said about, you know populations of color gender non-conforming people. and so when you're trying to find the histories of these groups of people now, it's extraordinarily difficult. and so that's what an archival silences and i really encountered that. um my chagrin and researching the book and a lot of different ways but a couple of the ways are that i would have heard these sort of stories these general stories about women in brewing throughout the years, but then i would go and try to like find examples or find proof and i just couldn't find anything. it's just not there and one of the places where that happened the most and something that i really want to look into more that i wish i could have found more about to put more about in the book is the history of african american women brewing. we know a tiny bit about enslaved women brewing i mentioned ursula granger. yeah. but you know when you've got this intersectionality of like multiple non-dominant populations it gets even harder so it's really amazing that you know in modern times we have so many more female and females people of color etc who are doing the work of finding these histories and then writing them down both from the past and in the present, so hopefully moving forward it will become a bit easier. did you have a lot of great like resources and people who were able to help you find some of these sources? um, yeah, there is whole topic that i was never able to find anybody to talk to me about and that's um basically women who would be like our grandmother's great-grandmothers great great grandmothers in the united states homebrewing like throughout prohibition. yeah, you know occasion, you know, i would hear that women did brew secretly at home through them. what the 19th and 20th centuries, um every once in a while. i'll run into somebody who will say like, oh, yeah my great grandmother brut at home, or she ran a you know, it secret tavern out of our basement or something but a lot of times those stories died with those people and i wasn't able to find anything concrete to put in the book. still working on it if anybody has any of those stories, i would like to hear them. now i only know i think i was just my great my great great. grandfather that was yeah, he would have been brewing around that time, too, but yeah, so if anyone has someone posted in the chat and if you have any questions that you want to ask tara, we'll take questions at the end. but if you have any now, feel free to start posting them. yeah, and i don't actually have my chat open because the way i have to set my screen up for this, but libby if you want to call anything. yeah, and all i can try to open the chat in a little bit. and i know you've given like quite a few presentations about like brewing and alcohol production and historical virginia you presented on them and look at williamsburg. and i know you already talked about that that i know you have more that you can touch on if there's anything else about ursula or alcohol production in general in virginia while i was super excited when you told me that you brought your staff to see the breweries that i read the book and then like we have to go martha was very involved in beers, so i brought my team over to see it and i have to imagine there was more there at the time. but yeah, it was really cool to have like all the barrels and all of the bottling equipment still there and they mentioned a little bit about like some of the slaves that would have been helping out and peter hemmings and he was like one of the i think he was well you would know better than i would but i think he was running a lot of the cider production there. so it was pretty cool to actually get to read it and then go and see it and we're literally right there. so so i haven't been able to go myself because of covid um, but i seen pictures and it's nice that they do have a bit of information devoted to brewing and from what i can see. it's like some vessels stuck in a corner of the kitchen or something, right? yeah. it's not entirely inaccurate though. um, martha and mr. jeff mr. jefferson and martha i was schooled well when i lived in charlottesville, that's what we call him, right? when they drew up plans to for monocello, they included a brewing area in the basement along with like a rum storage seller, which i thought was pretty cool. it's not clear whether those were ever built. so for a lot of monticello's lifespan, it would the brewing would have probably just been done in the kitchen, you know, maybe a corner or something it was devoted to it, you know, maybe aging some storing. cider more cider was happening than beer for most of monticello's active existence, but it probably would have just been you know some stuff in the corner with some storage in the closet in the basement or something. um, martha however was a very prolific brewer she brewed great wheat beers. i think i wrote. but she died young and her daughter also martha as an adult would help out. mr. jefferson when he was away once in awhile, there's correspondence from him saying, you know, all the courts have blown on the site are they were terrible corks. can you get me better ones in boston, but can you go there and like figure it out or so and so who holds the keys to the storage cellar is sick. so can you go, you know open the storage cellar or something? um once he retired he got very much more actively interested and involved in brewing and he'll he finally did build a brewery and a malting facility and at that point he had peter hemmings who was one of his his favorite enslaved people brother to james hemmings and sally hemmings. he had him trained in brewing and he was such a great brewer according to the president's correspondences that he would invite other statesmen to send their people to get trained by people brewing and one of those people was actually james madison. so wow, very cool. that's how i was not remembering that correctly. so, thank you for clearing that up. we have to move on to our next year moving on. mmm okay, our next one we are going to do equal pay. it's cold ipa. so so we have on the can women earn 82 cents for every dollar a man earns and women earn less than men and nearly all occupations. and this is the beer that's the collaboration with the pink food society. so every year i think this society creates a blend and then spuries can do a collaboration brew with with pink boots and use the hops in their beers. so if you're not familiar with the style called ipa the way that we brewed it was we created a more of a lighter base. ipa and then we let it we fermented it with logaries, but we let it rise to hit a pretty warm temperature and usually year fermenting your lagers relatively cold. so that's what makes this a cold ipa. i have to admit this might be the first cold ipa. i've had i definitely haven't had more than three. so i'm excited by this. it's a brand new hot style. it's yeah, that's pretty new style. this is probably only my third one that i'm gonna be trying more of the styles that i'm making. um, you might taste your smell. thanks to mango maybe a little bit of pine if you've ever used some spruce in your beer like salsa women back in the day. i may be little bit of bubblegum. all right, you know speaking of equal pay. um, i quote a contemporary woman in the book who recalls a conversation she had with her mother. when she finds out that her mom. couldn't sign for the more couldn't cosign for the mortgage on your house reading that. yeah, remember and i think it was the 60s because at the time and until the 70s and it's actually because of ruth bader ginsburg, and i'm seeing some reference to yeah women couldn't they couldn't hold credit cards in their name. amazing and so that trickled down into other legal and financial contracts. yeah, but yeah, they couldn't i didn't know that until i wrote the book. it was like 1970 3ish women couldn't have their own credit cards, but it was not that long ago. i don't i didn't know that until i read. yeah. crazy, yeah, it could like took me a minute to grasp that. but it still happening today people pay so. still big big issue and so we are having an event next week just a little time here and we're gonna do the equal pay will be released on draft at the outpost tap room in lexington, and so every dollar um one dollar for every pint that we sell is going to go to the pink boots society and then if you are women or a woman or you identify as a woman, you're you'll receive 18% or 12% sorry 18 math 18% discount. i am your bill to kind of accommodate for the pay gap so i hope that you would join us for our little event. i love that idea. that's such a that's so good. did you tell the press about that? that seems like something some of the press might be interested in because of that? no, i didn't. but i hope that people can make it. so you're free. come have a beer. i do want to talk about bomberg. because so vomberg germany when i was reading that and i must have just missed you because i was actually i was living in germany. i'm just after you had visited so you talk about your time and bombard and visiting environment if you're not familiar with firemen, they're a molting company and their very very well known throughout the brewing industry. they make amazing malts, but sabine environment along with thomas cross fireman, they run the malt factory there and i had a really really amazing opportunity that sabine offered for me to work there as a visiting brewer and i was able to work there for six months and she focused it on education. so i was there to mostly learn. and so i know you mentioned this a little bit in your book and some being she is really kind of kick-started. the craft industry on on getting their malt widely available to a lot of the american craft breweries, so it's pretty cool and she was very very kind and generous to me while i was there and i saw that reflected in your book as well. so if you want to talk about that your time in germany and maybe your time my sister doris as well because that's also an amazing story. and so yeah environment malt is i would say pot arguably the most revered specialty malt. in the world. i cannot go to a brewery and any country and not see bags of it all over the place. and sabine is a the fifth generation owner first, um first female and while was there visiting um, i had the opportunity to meet with other. female brewers and brewery owners who were the first generation to the first women in a long um line of brewers and brewery owners and their family for instance the final sisters. i visited while i was there in bomberg. they're nearby elsewhere in bavaria. they are 11th generation. i think 11th or 12 generation for owners of this family brewery and they're the first females. to to run it and brewing as you know, libby in germany is super traditional. yeah, very, you know, we don't have the stereotype of the burley german brewer for nothing. i mean, that's that's what it in until now so i huh? i was just gonna say so i had time to kill in europe which sounds really snooty, but i actually did so i was really happy to have the opportunity. i took a side trip to bomberg which has a distinction of being the capital the world's capital of smoked beer. and as as i'm sure you had a lot of maybe when you're there, um, so i went because i really wanted to be in the book and it just so happened that my dear friend denise jones who's also in the book was working as a distiller there at the time so i went and you know did this long interview with mean she lovely and she lent us the company car? so denise and i went with another environment employee the only one of the three of us who spoke any german and met all these female brewers in bavaria and went to see sister doris. who is the last in a 1000 or so your line of german brewing nuns. she might even be the last one in all of europe. so, you know, we think of monks in the middle ages the no the renaissance etc. brewing will nuns have been there right alongside them all through central and western europe. there's actually a very famous brewing nun from around the year 1100 or so from germany. and so there's been this line for a thousand years and sister doris is it and she's mmm, i guess probably in her 70s by now and she works, um at the abbey her brewing equipment is from the 60s. i think her newest equipment is from the 80s 1980s. that's just best buy at least 1980s and whatever the other nuns at the abbey don't drink she sells in order to sustain her own brewing operations, and she does floor molting, which is the old traditional way of malting and now she does have one assistant finally and the guy and when she decides to retire and there's not really anybody else at the moment to step in so, you know the people watching this may she's gotten tons and tons and tons of international press. so just kind of famous in the brewing world. but yeah. she's it. but anyway, i wouldn't have been able to go meet her and interview her if it hadn't been first beans generosity and and gregor the guy who spoke the english was the one who translated and yeah, mr. doris cooked us lunch and and we sat in her little apartment in the brewery. it was did you get a chance? to there oh, i didn't. huh jealous, so the pink boots society does well before covid they were running these annual trips to germany and that was like a you know a stop every year they would bring all these female brewers to go readers see her operations and such and and she loves it. she loves the attention. her beers amazing. i love i love when she was saying that she hopes that the other nuns don't drink too much beer, so that's it's still. i think the role at that abby. it's smaller store fabby. i think the nuns can drink whatever they want at lunch time, and i think they can take two home a day two bottles home a day consumption and hit right into that's why sister doris was like i hope they don't drink too much because i need to you know, i need to sell something. yeah. so fun all right. well, it's already almost a quarter till i don't know if anyone in the audience. we want to open it up to the audience if anybody has any questions. you can just post it in the chat. otherwise, we will just keep something on some beers and oh we have some. oh -- sister doris. great job sarah you're on it. oh q&a, here we go. and oh, we have somebody turning information from chicago. do you want to read the question out loud? yeah. sorry. yeah, because i don't want to steal the focus from virginia, but i'm tuning in from chicago learned about this event through the chicago reader newsletter and waiting for my hold at the library. so i haven't read the book yet, but do you have any fun stories about brewers in chicago? yes, i do as a matter of fact, and i need to be mindful of the time or i could talk about it forever. so i went to grad school at northwestern in chicago. yeah, and when i got there i couldn't understand why evanston was had been a dry town until oh, that's right. almost when i was there. i never heard of a dry town before i was from merrell. i'm from maryland. we don't have those things and and so it turns out that pretty much the seat of the temperance movement is evanston, illinois. and so i guess the question is do i have any fun stories about brewers in illinois? no, i have some unfunded stories about not drinking it in the chicago area francis willard was had of the women's christian temperance unit union for decades, and that's where she was based. hence the evanston connection. um, my publisher is chicago press in chicago. um, but you know, what far as like contemporary brewers in chicago one of the women. i actually can't think of any stories about brewing women in chicago, but there is a woman who should have been in the book and like we said couldn't i wasn't space for her. her name is avery um, and she do, you know avery libby she was a brewer at jester king in austin, texas for a long time. and that's a killer brewery. and so when she moved up to chicago to her own thing she she really has has garnered a lot of attention for herself. and right now i'm only saying her first name because of course i'm blanking on her last name. but um, yeah if you're interested just type in avery brewer chicago and she'll come up i do plan to do an event at temperance brewing in evanston. probably this spring so definitely some chicago ties. maybe not exactly the answers you were asking about but um, yeah a lot of the history temperance is centered around that area. no was it was interesting to hear about the temperature actually read about the temperance movement because it was like you got to see all the different perspectives and those things that i hadn't thought of before so well, it's kind of wild, you know, it was it was it was weird for me right researching and writing the sections on temperance and prohibition because you know i come from the alcohol world like prohibition bad, right? um a kerry nation bad, but i really a lot of kind of empathy and understanding for the women involved in the temperance movement. um, you know, they had their very legitimate reasons for wanting to cut back on drinking at that time. and in some ways they fails massively and in some ways they they really did succeed and we're still libby as you know, like grappling with the impacts of prohibition today. i mean, i'll a lot of the rules that govern like sales and distribution and even production and brewing in this country are still prohibition your laws. yeah. okay, we have another question one is for my mom. so guys. hi, mom. hi, mom. is there any so we have another question? is there any organized effort in the industry to promote women and minorities into brewing positions? and what do you believe needs to be done? thanks. this is a really entertaining session and this is from tom. thank you tom. that's a great question. um as you can tell i have long answers for everything so i will try to keep this one. there's so much i could say. yes, so i would say that well, first of all people of color are vastly underrepresented in brewing. um, i mean they're about 9,000 breweries now, and i think the tally of black owned breweries. is it at about 80 in the us? since the george floyd protests luckily happily. there's been a lot more attention paid to the issue. you know, there's been a really big collaboration brew effort called black is beautiful and thousands of breweries around the country brewed. this beer called black is beautiful donate the donated the proceeds to organizations, you know. working in black communities around the country. there are women a colleague of mine eugenia brown. she goes by blackbeard chick on instagram. she has raised money to fund scholarships for women of color to join the pink boots society and women of color to take their sister own exams. the cicero and exam is your equivalent of a somalia exam when the cicero and organization found out that she was doing this they matched her. they batched everything she'd raised and they are continuing to do that. there's an organization called beer culture culture with a k and they have partnered with breweries and universities around the country to fund scholarships for people of color. there's a really high profile scholarship started by garrett oliver. who is the long-time master brewer at brooklyn brewery. he is one of the first black brewers in the countries super famous in the beer world. he has spearheaded a very big brewing and distilling scholarship for people of color. i could go on and on and and there is um, i will give a shout out to something called the barrel and flow fest which is going into i'm gonna say like, it's fifth year in pittsburgh. it's a beer festival and conference that also showcases art and music, um, primarily black performers entrepreneurs. and brewers and and brings black beer lovers from around the country and white beer lovers, too. beer lovers of of all stripes but it is it's the first festival that really is focused on the black brewer the black the blackbeard drinker. what more needs to be done a lot? um a lot more outreach to get black people or people of color. more into the pipeline for brewing jobs more needs to be done to actively invite communities of color into the brewing space so that they feel invited and welcome partnerships worked out with organizations who worked in the various communities to again, you know breweries craft breweries position themselves is like community spaces, right, but they're a lot of communities who don't feel like it's their community. so a lot more outreach there and the last thing that i will say about this is one thing we we didn't get a chance to talk about. is that the me too movement came to beer last may and that really has changed a lot for women in the brewing industry, but part of what came along with that is a lot of just general workplace abuse was brought to light and so as a result savvy breweries not all the breweries, but savvy breweries have really started to examine. how would they're treating their employees basically and making themselves more professional by bringing in hr experts creating hr departments for the time and so i think between that and george floyd and the other stuff that i'm talking about, it's all. slowly but happening. it's all coalescing. i think to make the experience of working in the beer world. more healthier healthier for for people who are not part of the dominant white male population yeah long answer. i'm sorry. i can't help myself so much just i think up. blue this is why you have to get the book so that you can hear more about all of these cool stories. my mom had a question here about witches and beer. so if you want to know more about that definitely pick up the book it is fascinating. so you can purchase a look a few different places. you're also still able to purchase the book and if you're still interested in the beers you can go to bounce blocks.beer and you're still able to buy all four beers along with tara's book. you can also go to book shop.org and you can purchase the book there and they'll be able to send it to your local bookstore and not about wraps everything up for us. so thank you very much tara as a pleasure to be able t