Heather Opheim and Amanda Smythe are women who brew beer.
Smythe is the taproom manager and assistant brewer at Ocoee’s Toll Road Brewing. Opheim runs the whole show at Deviant Wolfe Brewing in Sanford. In doing so, they are carrying on a tradition that is, quite literally, thousands of years old.
Because women are the original brewers.
It is not a widely known fact. And sadly, says Tara Nurin, it’s not unlikely that a customer at either establishment might direct their questions to an 18-year-old busboy before the women whose sweat went into making the suds.
But, says the journalist and author of “A Woman’s Place is in the Brewhouse: A Forgotten History of Alewives, Brewsters, Witches and CEOs,” visibility in the breweries is, mercifully, helping to combat the ignorance.
In Orlando, Opheim and Smythe are front-liners in the taproom.
Nurin fights the good fight with facts.
Years ago, when the Smithsonian picked up a piece from The Conversation, a nonprofit site that runs stories by academics, Nurin was among the experts who pushed back against a sexy bit of misinformation that ran boldly in its title: “Women used to dominate the beer industry – until the witch accusations started pouring in.”
“There has been recent interest in tying together the history of the iconography of witches with medieval brewsters,” says Nurin.
Compelling? Sure. But, mostly false.
“The narrative is that the women who were brewing at the time, and very many of them did, were able to eke out some form of economic independence by selling their surplus beer… This was threatening to the status quo. And in order to put women back in their place, they started to be painted as witches.”
There is “evidence” to support the theory — like the iconic pointy witch hat being tied to that of the beer-hawking women of the era, who wore towering chapeaus to be more visible in the crowded marketplace — but much can be discredited one layer deep.
“People have gone to knowledgeable sources to find these were not the hats worn by this class of women in that occupation at that time,” she tells me.
What about keeping cats?
“It makes perfect sense that women brewing would have cats around to eat mice that would get into the grain sacks. But it’s another falsehood. Most women didn’t keep cats as pets at this time.”
And the broom?
“Yes, we picture witches riding around on broomsticks. And it is true that women at this time would generally hang what was called an ale stake, which looked like a broom, outside their doors to indicate to both the tax collector and potential customers that they had beer to sell on that day.”
But it wasn’t accusations of witchcraft that bumped women from their place in the brewhouse, it was what always makes the world go ’round: money.
In beer’s earliest days, over centuries and in different times and places, low-ABV suds were simply a safe way to hydrate in a world where water sources were sketchy.
“The Babylonian civilization, ancient Egypt, medieval Europe, colonial America…” Nurin lists. “What people found was that those who were drinking water would get diseases and sometimes die, while people drinking beer — which was boiled — were not getting quite so sick.”
High-alcohol beer always existed, too, “but depending on the civilization, was usually less recreational, more ceremonial or religious.”
Throughout all, however, it was women, whether for their families or as priestesses in temples, who were making it. Until beer became big business.
“Once you need a factory to produce it… you need access to capital and professional networks and transportation. Things women through most of history have not had access to.”
Even so, women remained a part of the scene.
“Even in the dregs of the 20th Century,” says Nurin, “but they were all but invisible. “What I credit for the return of the female beer professional is the craft beer movement.”
It’s where both Opheim and Smythe found their calling.
Opheim’s discovery of craft timed neatly around her 21st birthday when the bar where she worked began carrying beers beyond those with a household name.
“Things like Fat Tire by New Belgium and SweetWater 420,” she says. “It’s when I realized beer could have flavor.”
She was delighted when the now-defunct Red Cypress Brewing opened its doors in Winter Springs. Soon, she was working there as a bartender and gradually moved into other areas beneath the tutelage of then-head brewer Garrett Ward (who today, co-owns Sideward Brewing in Orlando’s Milk District neighborhood), and became cicerone-certified.
“It was a really good foundation,” she says. One that had her ready when Deviant Wolfe was ready to open.
It’s been said, if chauvinistically, that cleaning is women’s work. But if that’s the case, brewing is most certainly women’s realm.
“It’s more that than anything!” says Opheim. “The mash tun. The treatment kegs. Washing kegs. It never stops.”
Smythe echoes the sentiment. Some of her earliest tasks in the brewhouse — things she’s still doing today — involved keeping things tidy.
“You can so easily infect [the beer] with the smallest speck of dirt.”
Smythe’s love of craft brew was sparked at a downtown beer festival.
“All the owners, pouring beers they’d put their blood, sweat and tears into,” says Smythe, who stopped into Toll Road, then newly opened, a few months later.
“I told them I had no experience, but when they were ready to hire, I was there. And I’m so lucky because I’ve truly found a place where I’m appreciated, and I feel it.”
In fact, both women have found lots of inclusivity in Orlando, though craft beer is an industry currently struggling to bring even more faces — people of color and members of the LGBTQ community — into the fold.
Ward, who helped Opheim in her earliest days, says he’d be happy to hire anyone at Sideward when there’s an opening. They just have to be willing to do lots of unglamorous work.
“It has nothing to do with your gender. It’s about who you are as a person,” he says, noting that the women in his brewhouse — including Amanda Mailey, who has gone on to lead the team at Magnanimous Brewing in Tampa — were never treated differently.
“You have to do the physical labor just like everyone else,” he explains. “And it challenged them. Because that’s where people realize, ‘Oh, these aren’t the photos I saw on Instagram.’ It’s sweaty, it’s heavy.”
And it will make a man change his mind about working in beer as easily as a woman.
“You have to love it,” he says. “Both of the women I was working with [at Red Cypress] got further and further into the process, and they loved it.”
Opheim has been running the brewhouse at Deviant Wolfe for three years. Her total in the industry is 10. She’s got both silver and gold festival medals to show for her efforts, and she’d love to see more women in the industry. The brewery scene has seemingly tripled in Central Florida since she got her start, but female faces, for now, haven’t followed suit.
There’s room, she says, and a lot of open minds. Her boyfriend, Matt Biedrzycki, is a brewer at Hourglass Brewing in Longwood, where right now it’s a boy’s club, but where they’ve trained talented women who’ve since moved on to bigger things.
Though Smythe has no plans to open her own brewery, she loves her gig and treats Toll Road like it was her own.
“Being a woman brewer is empowering,” she says. “And doing it in Orlando is amazing because it really has felt very inclusive. Supportive. The men and the women.”
Every March, the women from all walks of Orlando’s beer industry do an all-female brew for International Women’s Day (March 8).
“It’s other women, showing up and supporting women in the industry and being a part of the brewing process,” says Smythe. “And we’re teaching them behind the scenes. And hopefully it sparks more to come forward into brewing.”
Nurin believes the women in the industry, who are often isolated as the only ones on their teams, are hungry for this kind of interaction.
Opheim headed up one recently at Hourglass Brewing in Longwood. The fruit of this labor — a mango-lime pepper sour called Boots on the Beach — will be on tap at both Hourglass locations, Deviant Wolfe and Toll Road, starting April 13, a potable symbol of what women have meant to the craft in the past and what they bring moving forward.
It’s a lot, says Ward, whose fiancee, Mandy Protheroe, co-founded Sideward.
“You have women like her, who are behind the scenes, driving the business, who don’t get the same credit as the brewers, so it’s nice to see those faces out front in the spotlight… Beer is for everybody, there should be no boundaries, no borders.”
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