Portland festival celebrates women in brewing industry

Jenn McPoland has been homebrewing beer for about 20 years. It’s become her main hobby and something she loves to share. She likes to tell people, “If you can cook, you can brew.” McPoland says while the industry remains pretty male dominated, more women than ever are getting into the craft all the time. When she first got into SheBrew, a Portland one-day festival celebrating women in the industry, there were just two women-owned breweries in the state. Now there are a dozen or more.

SheBrew is in its ninth year, and draws professional brewers and homebrewers alike. Not all of the brewers own their own business, but all of them contribute a beer that they have brewed themselves. Profits from the event go to the Human Rights Campaign, which supports LGTBQ+ rights, and the Oregon Brew Crew, a homebrewing club. McPoland joins us with more about the event, along with Cason Wolcott, one of five brewers at Baerlic Brewing. SheBrew is happening on Sunday, March 10, in Portland.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to the SheBrew Festival. It’s happening this Sunday in Portland, a one-day festival celebrating women who are professional or homebrewers. Jenn McPoland is a homebrewer and one of the organizers of the festival. Cason Wolcott makes beer at Baerlic Brewing. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.

Jenn McPoland: Thank you.

Cason Wolcott: Thank you.

Miller: Jenn, first. How did you become a homebrewer?

McPoland: So about 15 years ago, a good friend of mine was homebrewing and she invited me to come to a beer appreciation class with her because she knew I liked beer. And I was like, “yeah.” And it ended up being a beer judge certification 14-week program. And every week, they talked about brewing techniques and after about the third week, I was like, “I can’t do this without knowing how this works, so you have to teach me how to brew.” And I’ve been brewing ever since.

Miller: What did you like about it? What’s kept you going?

McPoland: It is, honestly, my creative outlet. I love recipe formulation. I also love to cook and I approach brewing the same way I approach cooking. It’s like if there’s this recipe I want, I’ll look up like 10 different recipes for it and then just create my own based on the basics of it, and now I’m going to make it mine.

Miller: How long was it before you made a batch of beer that you truly liked?

McPoland: Oh, I was pretty good at it from the jump.

[Mutual laughter]

Miller: Really? Did other people agree?

McPoland: Yeah. Yeah.

Miller: OK. That’s impressive because it actually strikes me as it doesn’t seem hard to make beer, but it strikes me as hard to make good beer.

McPoland: Yes. Well, I mean, a lot of it has to do with cleaning and sanitation. If you’re a clean brewer, it’s not hard to make a good beer and it is following a recipe. So if you’re clean and you follow a good recipe, then you’re going to make a good beer.

Miller: That was not advice that was taken by some friends years ago who just used pickle barrels to do them and no matter what, every single beer tasted like pickles.

McPoland: That’s problematic unless you really like pickles. [Laughter]

Miller: Even so, I can tell you as somebody who likes pickles, it was still not a good idea. Anyway, advice for people who are out there right now with pickle jugs cases.

McPoland: Don’t do it. Don’t do it.

Miller: Cason, what about you? How did you become a professional brewer?

Wolcott: Oh, gosh, a few years ago I was bartending and I decided that I didn’t want to be people-facing anymore. I enjoyed drinking the beer. I enjoyed talking to people, but I wanted to do it on my time. Like Jenn said, it’s a creative outlook but it was me being also very meticulous about the beer that I wanted to drink and how clean I wanted things to be. And I hate to say this but brewers are almost glorified janitors. Like we make beer, we clean the tanks and then we clean some more and then we make dirty things and then we clean some more, and then here comes beer.

Miller: But the cleaning, it seems like it’s a key part?

Wolcott: Cleaning is a key part. When you watch those pressure washing videos, it’s very satisfying. That’s what brewing is for me. It’s very satisfying to watch things clean and then look, beer comes from it!

Miller: Why is it cleaning such an important part, I mean, separate from using plastic that is infused with a pickle taste? You’re both emphasizing this.

Wolcott: Cleaning is such an important part of the brewing process because you’re dealing with very volatile things. Yeast is like the most important part of the beer. It can be killed by a dirty product. It can and then you’re not producing beer anymore. It’s just sugar water at that point. You need the yeast to be happy and a clean environment. If you’re using certain yeast, if you’re using Brett yeast, let’s say, you can make your whole brewery a sour brewery because you were clean and doing some of your products.

McPoland: You can also end up with infections which end up with crazy, awful, terrible off flavors, which is why a lot of homebrew is bad because bacteria can get into your beer really easily if you’re not being super, super clean. And then your beer tastes terrible.

Miller: Cason, you said that you were interested in particular beers, you wanted beers that you liked yourself. What have you been attracted to as a professional brewer?

Wolcott: The best way I can describe my drinking style is that I’m a marathon drinker. I’m an ABV shopper. I like the lower ABVs. I like to have more than one drink at dinner. I’m not looking for the triple hazy IPA. I’m looking for that light lager, that crispy gal drink. You know?

Miller: You want to be able to not have a 10% alcohol beer. You want to be able to have three, that is 4%?

Wolcott: 100%. A summer beer is my go-to beer all year round.

Miller: In terms of the market, where do you see taste right now? I guess what I’m wondering is how popular you think those lower alcohol beers are? Because I can still see a lot of 7%, 8%,10% beers out there, or more, that seem more like barley wines or something.

Wolcott: I think it’s seasonal for sure. In winter time, you want to sit in front of a fire with a barley wine because it’s a heavier drink.

Miller: A kind of alcoholic milkshake?

Wolcott: No, unless you’re adding lactose. Milkshakes. [Laughter] No, no, no, no. But in summertime you want a more refreshing drink. You want something that you can mow the lawn with, right? I think tasting-wise, it’s very seasonal. So I guess, ask me in summer and I’ll tell you something different.

Miller: Jenn, what is the idea behind this? We could talk for a long time about making beer and maybe we should. But there’s also this festival that’s coming up that you’re once again one of the organizers of. What’s the idea behind SheBrew?

McPoland: SheBrew, at its core, is a fundraiser for the human rights campaign. So it’s all for equality. 100% of our proceeds goes directly to nonprofit and it started out as a tiny little fundraiser. It was the brainchild of someone from the HRC and someone from my homebrew club, which was her wife. And she was like, “oh, we should do something with homebrew and we can make a fundraiser out of it.” So it started off as 10 homebrewers and a handful of local brewers that wanted to support equality. It was at the Q Center which is like a cracker box and we had 50 whole attendees that first year. And then it’s just grown from there.

Back in the day, that first festival, we only had two female brewers in the area. There was a third one, but I didn’t know about her yet. And now we have over 50. So it’s grown a ton but it’s still, at its core, a fundraiser for equality.

Miller: It’s grown a ton, but Cason, do you have a sense for the percentage of brewers in the region who are women?

Wolcott: I feel like Portland is very lucky in the percentage of women that are actually brewers here. You go somewhere else, it’s going to be 0%. Here, we’re still very marginalized. At my work, I’m one female brewer out of only five brewers, but it’s still one in 20 female brewers. Don’t quote me on that. [Laughter]

Miller: You just say it and you quote yourself and I’ll just listen. Jenn, what about homebrewing? Is it the same where it’s still male-dominated?

McPoland: 1,000%. In fact, there’s a sister event that happens the weekend before the festival, which is the SheBrew National Homebrew Competition for Women. And we are only one of three female homebrew competitions in the world. And it’s not a lot of people entering.

Miller: Why do you think that is?

McPoland: It’s kind of the same thing with professional brewers and homebrewers. The more you see women doing it, the more it becomes something you might want to do. When it’s just the only time you ever see homebrew being done, it’s by men, a lot of women think “Oh, that’s a guy thing. That’s not something that I’m going to do.” But if they see women excelling at it and making really great beer, then they go, “Oh, that’s something I want to try. She can do that. I can do that.”

Interestingly, at the competition, one of our national judges has said that that competition typically has the best beers out of all the comps that he judges. And I think it’s because women also judge themselves more harshly and they only enter their best beers. Whereas, a lot of guys that I know, as well, will just enter whatever they’ve got to see what happens.

Miller: Huh

McPoland: Yeah.

Miller: Because they get a pass in life? I want to hear your theory.

McPoland: No, no, it’s the whole, like, I’m just going to go for it. It doesn’t matter if I’m qualified, I’m going to try it anyway and see what happens.

Wolcott: They also already have the ego.

McPoland: Yes.

Miller: Jenn, what can folks expect at the festival?

McPoland: You can expect over 50 beers and ciders. We have NA [non-alcoholic] options. We’ve got an NA beer, we’ve got hops saltwater. We got some homemade sodas. We also have a handful of local women makers with everything from jewelry to baked items. We’ve got kombucha. We also have two women-owned food trucks there and Bard Board Games is going to do a whole tent of games. So it’s very family-friendly as well. It’s a very inclusive festival.

Miller: Does it feel different, Cason, in this festival from other beer festivals that you go to?

Wolcott: Absolutely. I don’t go to other beer festivals. I go to SheBrew.

Miller: Why? Is that because you’ve been to others in the past?

Wolcott: Yes.

Miller: OK, so what are those like other beer festivals?

Wolcott: Other beer festivals are–I’m going to say the wrong thing–very bro-y. I’m not going to….

McPoland: Get drunk.

Wolcott: Get drunk and hit my chest and be like, “Oh I’m the coolest one here.” I’m going to go and have a really good time and hang out with my friends and be in a very inclusive environment at SheBrew. I’m not going to be like, “That beer sucks. That beer is good. You shouldn’t drink that.” I’m going to go and enjoy every single one of them.

Miller: The bro-yness you’re describing, is that from the people who are attending the festival only or is it also from the brewers at these other festivals that you no longer go to?

Wolcott: It’s attendants for me. I love a lot of my male brewer friends and 99.9% of them are very welcoming to having female brewers. It’s the people that are the, “Well, actually…”

Miller: Ha. I wish the people could see. You pushed your glasses up.

Wolcott: “Well, actually…”

Miller: People who try to tell you what beer is [and] you actually make beer. That still happens?

Wolcott: Every single day. Every day.

Miller: Do you think that is because you’re a woman?

Wolcott: Absolutely. I think the narrative needs to change that. It’s not a man’s world. It is an equal opportunity world now and it’s not women who can do as good as men. It’s women can do, because they can.

McPoland: Another thing about the festival that’s different is - and this dawned on me recently, I don’t know why I hadn’t thought about it before because we’ve always done it this way - you go to a regular beer festival and you look up at the sign and it’ll say “Fort George Brewery Stout,” whatever. We celebrate the brewer themselves. So, every beer sign has the brewer’s name, where they’re from, what brewery they’re from and then we run a slide show, too, that has all the brewers throughout the entire fest. So it’s really not just like really great beers and ciders and fermentables, but it’s about celebrating these bad-ass women.

Miller: The interesting thing about that is that it needn’t be a festival that happens to celebrate women where that is the style. I mean, you’ve made the decision to say this was made by an individual and so you have their name there, but any festival could do that whether it is celebrating women who make beer specifically or people who make beer. But you’re saying it’s more sort of, this is a corporate logo which hides the brewers names in other places?

McPoland: You don’t know who brewed it. At SheBrew, you know exactly who brewed it. And you can walk up to Cason and be like, “oh my God, I just had your beer and it was amazing.”

Miller: Cason, you made a beer just for the festival. What did you make?

Wolcott: I made a beer called Just Beach. It’s in homage to the “Barbie” movie because that is my new personality now [laughter] but it is a Mexican style lager with fresh lime zest and salt.

Miller: In the beer?

Wolcott: In the beer.

Miller: So you don’t need to put in the glass?

Wolcott: You don’t need to add any lime. It’s got plenty of lime in there.

McPoland: She brought you some crowlers of it.

Miller: I appreciate that. Just briefly, Jane, do you have beer at the festival too? Are you, are you a contestant or an organizer?

McPoland: I used to bring my beer.

Wolcott: She’s way too busy now.

McPoland: Well, the thing is, there’s three main organizers of this and then my husband is the beer ninja. So during the fest, we make him wrangle all the kegs. But for the most part, it’s just Shannon Scott from HRC, myself and Christine Garcia, who’s our graphic artist and runs the website. There’s just the three of us. So the first two years I brought my own beer. I was one of the 10 homebrewers that we always have and I realized it was just impossible because as an organizer, you have to be available. So, no.

Miller: Jenn McPoland and Cason Wolcott, thanks very much.

McPoland: Thank you.

Wolcott: Thank you.

Miller: Jenn McPoland is a homebrewer and one of the organizers of the SheBrew Festival which is happening this Sunday at The Red in Southeast Portland. Cason Wolcott is a brewer at Baerlic Brewing.

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