Last February, a group of St. Edwards’s University graduates went on a brewery tour. They looked around and noticed they were not only part of a small number of women at the brewery to begin with, they were also the only women there not on a guy’s arm.
Shortly after, these six women founded Bitch Beer, a blog based here in Austin with the aim to not only celebrate the city's craft beer scene but also to help women find their place in it and reclaim the term “bitch beer.” For the uninformed, we’ll tell you what that is later.
For now, let’s jump right into an interview the Austin Post conducted with four of the six Bitch Beer founders – Caroline Wallace, Holly Aker, Wendy Cawthon and Shaun Martin – at Austin’s newest brewpub, Pinthouse Pizza, on Burnet. Fresh off their first visit to the Great American Beer Fest (GABF) and Austin Beer Week, there was plenty to discuss.
Austin Post: So how much of a driving force was it in the creation of the blog to bring together the women you know exist in the Austin beer community but maybe who don’t know each other or are in disjointed groups?
Shaun: Actually, we went into it not knowing anyone. It was our first brewery tour that we all went on together – we all liked drinking beer and drinking local beer….
Holly: And writing.
Shaun: We decided that would be something we would be passionate writing about, and as we got more involved in the community, we started meeting these incredible women and learning a lot more about Austin beer and the local beer movement.
Caroline: It’s been a really awesome experience. We all came into it being friends and liking beer, but coming from all different taste levels and experience levels when it comes to drinking beer, and it’s amazing how fast we’ve picked up on new things and learned.
Shaun: I think, for us, it’s about making things accessible rather than writing in a Beer Advocate way. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but there are people who would rather know, “This beer tastes like citrus,” over what hops were used.
Caroline: You’ll never see the word “mouth feel” on Bitch Beer unless it’s a sex pun.
Austin Post: How much of a learning process has it been for you guys? Where did you start with your beer knowledge, and how much have you grown since then?
Holly: We started out, just basically like, "We like beer." We all had moderately good taste, but this has been a way to explore more beers and try new styles. It’s been a great way to taste a lot of amazing beers.
Shaun: I’ve just been drinking beer for about a year. I had never had good beer before, so I thought I didn’t like it and refused to drink it. I would drink wits [Belgian wheat beers] and that was it. Now, I drink everything. In trying every beer from almost every brewery in Austin, I started to appreciate more flavors.
Austin Post: So what are you guys really liking as far as what’s going on in Austin right now for beer?
Caroline (as a Pinthouse bartender walks by): Pinthouse Pizza! It’s been amazing to see what’s been happening in Austin the last few years and knowing what’s to come.
Shaun: Definitely. There have been four breweries [or brewpubs] that opened just since we started the blog! It’s incredible.
Austin Post: Right; one of the things I wonder about is that with so many breweries and brewpubs – with so much going on right now – do you think that at some point, the market will hit a saturation point and some of these folks will start to die off?
Caroline: We talk about this a lot, especially given the craft beer bust in the 90s. When we were at a brewery in Denver, a brewer was talking about how he’d been brewing for 30 years and had lived through the craft beer boom and bust in the 80s and 90s, and he said he gets asked often if it will happen again. His thinking was that at that time, there was only one generation into craft beer. When the economy tanked, it was just that one generation that couldn’t keep up. Now that there has been a second and almost third generation into craft beer, it seems like at this point, the market could only expand. We’re not fortune tellers, but I’m optimistic.
Austin Post: So are you guys involved in local blogger groups around the city?
Wendy: Yeah, we have a great connection with Addie Broyles on Austin360. She not only puts us on her personal blog rolls but also the Austin 360 blog rolls.
Shaun: We met Addie through the Austin Food Bloggers Alliance, when I was working on a cookbook for them. She was really enthusiastic about what we were doing and has been great about spreading the word.
Holly: It’s been really great being involved with the Austin Food Bloggers Alliance.
Caroline: Yeah, we actually just joined a few weeks ago but have been talking with them for a while.
Shaun: We’ll have a craft beer vignette that will be included in the book, which will come out some time next year. It’s been a really cool thing. We didn’t even know we qualified to be a food blog! But it’s been a really great community to be a part of.
Austin Post: It seems like the Austin food blogger scene is getting to be a really vibrant community. Does it feel like that from the inside?
Caroline: I think so, and I think it’s something that could be emulated in the beer community. There are a lot of bloggers who see each other out and that sort of thing, but coming together could be a good way to remind us that we’re all in this community together.
Austin Post: What have you done as far as marketing goes? How are you trying to get more readers?
Wendy: There’s been a great Twitter presence. It’s growing really quickly as we travel more and write more.
Austin Post: Why do you think that is? Are people just looking for bitches who like beer?
Caroline: It could be the name.
Shaun: We also do a lot of guerilla marketing, like handing out cards and koozies.
Caroline: I also wanted to mention that when we got into this, our whole thing was about women in beer, and we’ve found that half our readers are men. We do a lot of beer news, and I think it’s interesting now to be a woman in craft beer and write about not just women’s issues, but about craft beer in general. One thing we’ve found that’s pretty interesting is that we’ve never really been chastised for being women in beer, but we have encountered some resistance about being young women in beer. People will say, “What do you know, you’ve only been drinking for two or three years?”
Holly: It was something we heard at GABF. People would ask us, “How can you know anything? You’ve been drinking such a short time compared to me.”
Austin Post: And what do you say to that?
Holly: We say, “Well, we’re here with media credentials at GABF!”
Shaun: One of the funniest ones: We were hanging with a brewer from Stone who mentioned New Belgium’s Lips of Faith series, and I asked him which beer in the series, and he just looked at me like “Oh, so you do know what you’re talking about!”
Caroline: That all goes back to our mission about making craft beer accessible. I mean, if you could get college kids into craft beer, it would be huge. We wouldn’t be just under 6 percent of the marketplace.
Austin Post: I think your accessibility mission is big – like making it OK to describe beer using so-called “dumbed down” words.
Caroline: Yes, you can educate people without going over their heads. Beer is fun; you don’t have to make it boring.
Holly: Yeah, this isn’t software. This is beer. You’re supposed to drink it and enjoy it.
Austin Post: You mentioned doing craft beer news, but do you guys also do posts targeted specifically at women?
Holly: I wrote a piece called Who Says You Can’t Judge a Boy by His Beer? It’s supposed to be a fun piece, taken lightly, but it’s basically like if you see a boy drinking Bud Light, nah! If he’s drinking Smirnoff, nah! But a boy drinking craft beer, now that’s hot. If he brews his own beer, I’m down for that!
Shaun: [Caroline] wrote a funny rant too.
Caroline: Yeah, several times I’ve had a guy try to buy me a beer, where he would ask me my favorite kind of beer and then kind of lead me through the styles in a very basic way, “Do you like IPAs? Do you like stouts?” having no idea I know what those are, that I know what I’m talking about. It’s a funny assumption to make.
Austin Post: Why do you think that is? Why do people make that assumption that the majority of women don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to beers?
Holly: Well, when the majority of women go out, I mean, they are drinking Bud Light.
Caroline: I think the statistic is that somewhere around 80 percent of beer drinkers are male. We can’t change the numbers, but 20 percent is still a hell of a lot of people.
Holly: And that 20 percent knows what’s up. It seems like if you are a woman into craft beer, you’re into good beer and you know your stuff.
Austin Post: Right, and I think like Shaun said earlier, a lot of people think they don’t like beer because they haven’t tried good beer. They don’t like Budweiser, so they think they don’t like beer. It’s maybe a lack of familiarity.
Shaun: Right, there are 84 categories of beer recognized by GABF.
Wendy: Yeah, I was a big white wine drinker before I started going out with these girls and drinking more beer. It has a lot to do with hard-set gender roles. I mean, you don’t watch a TV show or movie where a woman is drinking a huge schooner of craft beer. You see her drinking a glass of wine or a cocktail, and the guys have beers. And that’s the case in commercials too – girls drink Skinny Girl margaritas, and guys drink Guinness.
Holly: I would love to write a column but at this point can’t – the Bitch Beer Girl of the Week – someone in Hollywood, she’s famous, you know her, and there are pictures of her drinking craft beer. But they don’t exist. I wish there were some TV show with this awesome beer chick, but there’s just not.
Austin Post: That’s a good point. Even when I dress up, I’m more likely to drink a cocktail or a glass of wine, because it seems more feminine, despite the fact that I’m really a beer person and I love craft beer. This has been awesome – is there anything you guys want to talk about that we haven’t?
Shaun: I think the main thing that we wanted to touch on but didn’t is why we’re called Bitch Beer. People wonder why we need to use the word “bitch.” Caroline, you tell it better.
Caroline: It stems from, when you’re in college and just started drinking things like Smirnoff Light or Mike’s Hard Lemonade – that was a “bitch beer.” They were beers that guys got for a party and said “We have to get some bitch beer for the chicks.” It was a derogatory term. Our idea was, “Well, we’re girls. We love craft beer and will drink anything. Therefore, if girls drink bitch beer, then anything can be bitch beer.” We’re reclaiming that term.
