From the buxom blondes on blonde ales to scantily clad “beer girls” passing out samples at sporting events, for decades women have been used to sell beer. There would be no billion-dollar beer industry if it wasn’t for the women slinging countless cases and kegs—both directly and indirectly. However, despite all those women gracing labels, the “fairer sex” is rarely the target audience for beer sales.
At least, that’s how it used to be.
If you want your beer served in stemware, you’re probably taking it too seriously, or so they say. Chicago’s Moody Tongue doesn’t care about what people say—or at least it shouldn’t. The six-year-old brewery recently moved to its new home on the city’s South Side, which features a tasting room for its “culinary brews” and dining room serving 12-course meals paired with barrel-aged Flanders red ales and black truffle pilsners, and yes, they’re served in beautiful stemmed glasses.
Brewmaster Jared Rouben, who spent several years in the kitchen of Per Se before transitioning from food to beer and overseeing brewing operations at Goose Island’s brewpubs, appears to be on a one-man mission to destroy every beer stereotype in the book—although the modest Culinary Institute of America and Siebel Institute graduate would never admit to such. “I started my profession in the culinary industry and really broke my bones there, transitioned to the brewing industry, and now I have them both together again. So you can see it’s all come together—it just took me a while to get here.” Rouben says. “For me, it’s a long-time dream come true being able to bring beer to great food.”
It’s not easy to stand out in any craft beer market, especially one as vibrant as Asheville, North Carolina. The home of Hi-Wire, Burial, and Wicked Weed has a population of less than 100,000, but more than two dozen breweries. When Archetype Brewing entered the scene in 2016 the team—led by co-owners Brad Casanova and Steven Anan—not only knew they wanted to be different, but that they had to be if they were going to make their mark in the city’s popular West Asheville neighborhood.
Inspired by Carl Gustav Jung’s principles of analytical psychology—specifically his work on the collective unconscious and its archetypes—the brewery is a conceptual one, to say the least. It specializes in “complex, mindful, living beer” brewed with traditional Belgian brewing practices. Capturing that ethos in a logo and, later, on cans, is neither easily said nor done. Enter Sean Jones, or Humid Daze as he’s known on Instagram.
“Don’t assume it’s always a guy making it,” says Sarah Hedlund, creative director at Toppling Goliath Brewery. Hedlund has been working for the brewery, known for its Pseudo Sue pale ale, since 2016. She’s the woman behind the company’s redesign as well as all of its beer names and labels. But like the work of many women in the beer industry, hers goes largely unrecognized. “We do have a lot of sales team members who are out on the streets and they always have people telling them, ‘Oh you should tell your graphic designer he does a great job, his artwork is super cool.’ I think they all get a kick out of correcting them.”
Last year October reported on women who were reshaping the beer industry by changing how it appears on the shelves. Until recently, it wasn’t uncommon to see a busty blonde adorning a bottle of blonde ale. Recently though, as the craft beer industry continues to mature and set aside its DIY roots for a more professional approach, women are leading the charge when it comes to elevating beer design. “We don't want to alienate anybody,” Hedlund says. “We don’t want to put anybody in a position where they feel uncomfortable purchasing our product because of the artwork—ashamed walking up to the teller with it.”
When Ria Neri opened Whiner Beer Company with her partner Brian Taylor in 2016 it was—like many craft breweries—a scrappy operation. Somewhere between sourcing a French foudre and outfitting an eco-friendly taproom, they blew through their branding budget, so they turned to Neri’s illustration skills for label art. On a whim, she came up with the cast of characters that adorn all of Whiner’s wild fermented beers: a grey cat with a cheeky grin, another dressed as a ninja, a mohawked black cat, a duck, and a mouse. But coming up with the label design for her burgeoning Chicago brewery was the easy part.
“There were bars that wouldn’t carry our beers because they were too cute,” Neri recalls. “There were bars that would say, ‘Oh, your tap handles are these weird little animals.’” At the time, the industry was filled with images of robots and vikings and dragons and robot vikings riding dragons (probably), and Whiner’s appearance was criticized for not being “strong” enough. “Those are challenges that we’ve met—I shouldn’t say we don’t care about it—but once you compromise yourself, you comprise your beer and the brand.”
When you land in Los Cabos, the first thing you see—even before you get off the airplane—is a royal blue warehouse. It’s almost the size of the airport itself, a looming welcome that has the word “Corona” painted across the side in golden letters. It’s a glaring metaphor about the state of beer in Baja California Sur, where craft is nothing more than a novelty. This is the land of the $1 cerveza after all.
“Carlsberg or Eepa?”
The question comes from a blonde-haired, blue-eyed and blue-clad flight attendant.
I look back at her, confused, and say, “Excuse me, what?”
She pulls out two cans from her roving bar. There’s a familiar green can in one hand and a less familiar blue one on the other. The latter is adorned with the signature Mikkeller cartoon people grappling over an airplane. She repeats her question again, this time with emphasis on the respective cans, “Carlsberg or Eepa?”
Rockmill Brewery’s Cask Aged Triple is more than your a typical Belgian beer. It has all the spice and dried fruit flavors one would expect from the genre, but it's also full of oak and smoke from time spent in local whiskey barrels.
Its bottle is just as striking. Capped with a cork-and-cage enclosure, the thick glass is adorned with the dark image of a metal horse on charred wood. They say you eat with your eyes first, but this beer suggests you drink with them too. The red-orange edges of the silhouette and woodgrain appear hot to the touch – maybe it smells like ash and burnt sugar – but this image was taken six-years-ago by Brian Kellett, the 31-year-old designer and photographer responsible for the Ohio brewery’s aesthetic.
In honor of the end of October, the team gathered via Zoom over the beers of their choice to reflect on three-plus years of beer journalism.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and heavily edited for length. The October team would also like to express deep gratitude to Adam Waito, who illustrated this article and countless others.