Changes brewing: meet the women crafting a career in beer

So too the iconography. The sweat. The facial hair. Working hard and playing harder. A whole lot of bloke.

So naturally, for generations, beer was seen as solely a masculine domain.

Of course, beer has undergone a revolution over the past 15 years as more discernible drinkers have shifted away from mainstream staples such as VB, Toohey's New and XXXX Gold.

While craft beer might have moved away from the old VB beer stereotypes of hard-working blokes, it replaced them with the bearded-hipster typecast.

Today there are more than 700 breweries operating in Australia, pumping out an ever-increasing array of styles such as hazy, pale ale, pilsner, stout, IPA and sours.

And many of these craft breweries feature women in prominent roles.

It's a fact that many craft beer devotees aren't aware of.

"We had a guy come in here with a BentSpoke shirt on and he said, 'I didn't know there were women brewers?'," IronBark Hill Brewhouse co-owner Hayley Drayton says from the floor of the Hunter Valley brewery.

"I said, 'Do you see the irony that you're wearing a BentSpoke shirt?' He said, 'What do you mean?'

"I said, 'You do know that all the beer that's brewed at their Braddon brewpub is brewed by Tracy [Margrain] from BentSpoke?'

"He had no idea. He loved craft beer, but he didn't know there were female brewers. But there's such a large number of female brewers and you wouldn't realise it."

Hayley and her husband, Andrew Drayton, have been brewing craft beer from the heart of Hunter Valley wine country since 2017.

In the early days, Hayley's role was focused on book-keeping, administration and social media, "all of the boring things", before she started taking a hands-on approach to brewing beer.

"I didn't want to be stuck working behind a desk on a computer," she says. "I wanted the challenge of doing something different."

For the past three years, Hayley has been studying brewing at TAFE in Sydney, where she is one of three women in a class of 40.

Hayley's move into the brewing side of the business has seen IronBark Hill's range of beers increase.

She was behind the creation of their popular Wheatermelon and the Peachy Keen NEIPA, which launched around Christmas.

"Wheat beer had a little bit of a resurgence a few years ago," Hayley says. "I said, 'You know what, in summer I love eating watermelon, so what if we put watermelon in a beer?'

"Andrew was very apprehensive and didn't know if it was going to work. I said, 'You've gotta trust me.'

"We went out and bought a blender and we literally diced and spliced and put it all into a juicer, blended it all up, added it during the fermentation stage and when it came out it was so refreshing."

One of the biggest supports, Hayley says, has been the Pink Boots Society.

Pink Boots Society is a global non-profit organisation created to empower women and non-binary people in the brewing and distilling industry.

It was created in the United States in 2007 and opened its Australian chapter in 2012. Today it has more than 250 Australian members and 3000 globally.

Members regularly meet for brew days at various breweries to network, share knowledge and experience and generally offer support in a traditionally male-dominated industry.

It was through Pink Boots that Hayley Drayton met Grace Fowler, the co-owner and head brewer of Bathurst's Reckless Brewing Co.

Reckless proudly markets itself as the "largest woman-led-and-run brewery in Australia."

"We never set out to have so many women in management here, but we have more than 50 per cent of our management positions filled with women," Fowler says.

Fowler started her career in the beer industry at contract brewer Icon in western Sydney. She then spent five years at Akasha, where she rose to senior brewer.

In 2019 she, her husband Jarrod Moore and friend Alice Wilson launched Reckless. The brewpub opened just three weeks after Fowler welcomed her second child.

Both Drayton and Fowler say they've experienced "unconscious bias" from men while working in brewing.

"I've been at the brewery in high-vis wearing my boots, working on the tanks and had a contractor come in and ask me where the brewer is," Fowler says.

"I was literally wearing a shirt that had 'brewer' embroidered on it. I pointed at the shirt and said, 'I'm the brewer' and he said, 'I thought that was your last name'."

When it comes to women in craft brewing, BentSpoke's Tracy Margrain is among the most respected.

She and her partner Richard Watkins started BentSpoke in 2014 in Canberra and it's since grown to become one of Australia's most celebrated breweries. Margrain is the head brewer at the Braddon brewpub.

BentSpoke's flagship Crankshaft IPA won the GABS Hottest 100, Australia's biggest craft beer poll, in 2021 and 2022.

"My partner and I pick up different ... flavours, so I think it's great having a different set of eyes on everything you do," Margrain says.

Over her career Margrain has encountered some "outdated attitudes" about female brewers from customers, but says the industry has been overwhelmingly supportive.

"The brewing community is so small and tight now, you can't be that kind of business or type of person that has that attitude," she says.

"Brewing has to be inclusive now, not just to women, but to people who are transgender. The industry has to keep moving."

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