In 1492 Christopher Columbus arrived in America, as you know. And the first “official” brewery known in the New World was founded in 1542, by a Sevillian nobleman and merchant. But the truth is that we don't have much data on the role of women here (although I'll bet a beer that it was native women who work in manual production jobs). It seems that this first factory was not very successful, among other things because there were no hops in the American lands, and they had to start growing from scratch.
Regarding the United States, a couple of centuries had to pass before massive colonization began. The transatlantic travelers who arrived in the New Continent carried beer rations with them because they did not trust the potability of the water (normal, in Europe it was not) and because the trip was long. And it turns out that the beer on board the ship stayed good throughout the entire voyage.
When the colonists settled down, it didn't take them long to build small breweries for their wives. In colonial America, as they had in Europe, married women brewed beer to feed their families . And at all sociocultural levels. Martha Jefferson, the wife of US President Thomas Jefferson brewed a wheat beer with a great reputation, albeit with the help of her slaves on her Monticello plantation.
Another important brewer of the time was Susanah Holland. Her beer recipe led to the creation of the oldest independent brewery in Canada: Moosehead Brewery. Of course, she was the brewmaster and responsible for the production, but the company was named after her husband and their children.
In the same way, Native American women like the Apache or Maricopa also brewed their own beers to use in different rituals.
Louis Pasteur's 1857 discovery of yeast coincided with a massive wave of German immigration, bringing beer, refrigeration, cheaper packaging, and rail delivery to an expanding and consolidating large-scale brewing industry. No law kept women out of these factories but they entered as less qualified and therefore less paid labor.
In the 1920s, the famous Prohibition Law arrived, and brewing had to return to the home, where women, once again, took care of it. That is, they kept doing what they had been doing, but now with the addition that it was illegal.
Inside, outside, paid or not, what is clear is that culturally, beer was still associated with women. What happened so that the image we currently have of it is only associated with men, groups of friends, Homer Simpson or paunchy monks? I will tell you about this in the next post. Don't miss out!