On Aug. 10, Dames and Dregs Beer and Festival, an afternoon event billed as "featuring female inclusion in the craft beer industry," is back for its second year.
Beyond being a premier tasting experience, with women from 40-plus breweries and distilleries participating, this year’s Dames and Dregs has broadened last year’s popular “Dames Talk” with four panels covering Beer and Brewing, Business and Culture, Community and Activism, and Science and Sustainability.
“It’s a festival that’s more than the beer,” is how co-founder Rebecca Royster explains the scope of the event. “It’s about celebrating beer professionals who are also women.”
Recently, I sat down in the barrel room at New Realm Brewing for a roundtable discussion with Royster and five women who work at breweries around Atlanta and are supporting Dames and Dregs.
Our host, Christine Stevens, who is a brewer at New Realm, treated the group to a taste of the beer she brewed for the festival. Dubbed Good Beta, it’s a hazy double IPA made with the Yakima Chief Hops 2019 Pink Boots Society Blend, which is produced annually to help support women working in the brewing profession.
Royster, who has worked at the Porter Beer Bar and Orpheus Brewing, started things off by talking about the challenges of working in a business that’s often perceived as mostly white and male-dominated.
“As a woman who’s frequently worked with people who don’t look like me at all, it’s just something I’m aware of,” she said. “But one of the things with Dames and Dregs that I try to be mindful of is that Christine is not a female brewer, she’s a brewer, and a woman at the same time. And so in all of the language I send out for the festival, I try to make that very clear.
“I try to avoid using woman or female as adjectives preceding a job role, because our male counterparts aren’t typically identified by gender first. We do want to celebrate women, but it’s more to draw attention to the fact that there are lots of women in this industry, and not isolate gender from what you’re doing day to day.”
Asked about getting a fix on the growing number of women in the beer business, Sarah Young, the executive vice president and an owner at Wild Heaven Beer, joked about attending industry events like the annual Craft Brewers Conference.
“The bathroom lines have always been really short, so that’s a plus,” she said, as everyone around the table nodded and laughed. “But every year, at every conference, year after year, the lines are getting longer, even if we’ve still got a ways to go.
“I’ve never really thought that much about my gender in this industry. Once you get into it, everybody is very supportive. It’s the people that are outside of it that make you think a little bit more about it. And you have to sometimes try a little harder to be taken seriously. All of our roles are very different but super difficult. I could never be a brewer. It takes a lot of patience and it’s a very lonely job, sometimes.”
Both Stevens and Salina Copeland, who is Three Taverns Brewery’s packaging manager, talked about some of the physical challenges of working on the brewery floor.
“My job is hard,” Stevens said. “It’s a lot of hot, sweaty work, and sometimes I think a lot of women are really smart, and they just stay out of it.”
“It’s definitely hard work,” Copeland said. “You have to have a passion for it to get back there. It’s male-dominated, but so is beer drinking, so I think that’s why we see so few women, especially in production. But as craft beer grows, the more diversity we get in consumers, and that’s why we’re seeing more diversity in brewing.”
Ashley Henry, who is the tasting room manager and events coordinator at Arches Brewing, echoed that.
“I’ve found that the beer industry seems from the outside like a very exclusive group, but then once you become a part of it, you start to realize that it’s very inclusive,” Henry said. “I’ve never walked into a brewery and started asking questions about a beer and been shooed away. Whereas I feel like as a woman, in other parts of my life, that’s definitely happened, and that was my draw to make a career move into the brewery world.”
Stevens and Dallas Fitzgibbon, who is the lab manager at Monday Night Brewing, both have degrees in biology that they’ve applied to the science of brewing.
“I have been interested in brewing and packaging, but I do love my lab, so it’s kind of like a hard transition between working in the nitty gritty and seeing it under a microscope,” Fitzgibbon said.
“I also run our lab here, and do all our measurements, and I think there are a lot of people in brewing who have biology or chemistry backgrounds,” Stevens said. “The hard sciences tend to prepare you for the kind of processes that you’re going to deal with.”
Summing up the reason for Dames and Dregs, Royster said, “Women are capable, and the idea of the festival is to have a platform for people to see that.”
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