Chattanooga’s women brewers are making a bold statement
Once upon a time, beer was a craft product, made by the same women who grew the oats, wheat, corn—even pumpkins—they brewed it from. Medieval nuns and housewives brewed beer; so did goodwives in colonial America. As production became more centralized, men took over as brewers. In some areas, women were forbidden to join brewers’ guilds (though they might work in breweries owned by their sons or husbands).
With the craft beer movement, women again play a strong role in beer-making, and changes have come even in the last decade. As recently as 2013, The Atlantic wrote, “Even though plenty of home brewers are women, there is still skepticism about their roles when it comes to business.” Today, though, the atmosphere has changed. In Chattanooga, women are central to the beer community—brewing as well as, of course, drinking.
Beer Pioneer
When craft beer took off in the mid-1990s, Teresa “T.C.” Sentell was well positioned to start on the ground floor. She started bartending at Big River Grille & Brewing Works in 1995, but by 1999 her persistent questions led to a job in the brewery. Her work ethic paid off with a head brewer position—though if you ask her what she does, she’ll simply answer, “I’m a brewer.”
T.C.’s day is one of hard work. She starts early, adjusting the proper temperature in the kettle to “mash in,” or add the milled malt to hot water to create mash.
“When the temperature in my kettle is right, my brew day starts,” she says. “I open up the gates and milled malt comes into my kettle and I’m committed. I’ve gotta brew this beer at this point.”The next hours pass in a flurry of activity.
“I spend time to convert starches into sugars and get the hops added in,” she says. “I’ll start at 8 a.m. and by noon we’ll be at a point where I have the kettle filled with wort and hops are being added to it. Then by 2 p.m. Clay (Big River’s other head brewer, Clay Gentry) is about to send it to the fermenter. After it goes to the fermenter, we start cleaning.”
T.C. reckons a brewer spends 85 percent of her time cleaning. “We go through everything the beer touches once we’ve done the boil process,” she says. “We use caustics, acids and sanitizers in the tank, the vats and the hoses to fight any kind of bacteria we can think of. It’s very serious.”
Cleaning may be the biggest challenge in brewing, but it’s not the only one. When T.C. first became a brewer, she encountered hostility from men in the community—for instance, at events men might overlook her to ask questions of her male assistants.
“My assistant would say, ‘I don’t know all that, she’s the one with the answers',” T.C. recalls. “The man would look at me, turn his back to me, and keep asking the assistant the same questions, to where I’d have to get over in his face to answer him. That doesn’t happen much anymore…
“I had to live through the time where it wasn’t as accepted to be a female brewer but you know, I just keep doing what I love. I’m a grandmother now, but I can run circles around these young guys still.”
T.C.’s challenges have been more than matched by her achievements, such as creating good beers and seeing people enjoy them. And, she loves her work.
“There is something to learn every day,” she says. “It makes life worthwhile, asking, ‘What am I going to learn today?’ And it’s really neat to come up with a recipe, to brew it, and then to serve it and see people actually drinking and say, ‘This is good!’ That was my recipe!”
Building a Women’s Beer Community
Women brewers have flourished in tandem with women drinkers. Sandy Hunt, formerly tasting room manager at Moccasin Bend Brewing Co., now hosts beer dinners and produces Brick House Brews, a line of small, experimental batches whose proceeds are devoted to charity.
“We thought it would be a good way to do small batches and explore what kind of beers we can brew, and also how we can give back,” she explains. “It’s brewed by women, for women.”Brick House Brews’ charities are small and local, from breast cancer support services to housing for people fleeing domestic abuse.
“[The community has] been really receptive,” Sandy says. “People, especially women, really like the idea that there is something for them. I’m not going to brew a light lager or a cider every time. It’s going to be different things.”
More widely, Sandy sees breweries and taprooms, her family’s and others across the city, as “an environment where women feel safe. They can have a beer and they don’t have to worry about being hit on. It’s a very laid-back vibe.”
Sandy compares her process of beer creation to cooking. “Cooking is science and art,” she says. “It’s the same way with distilling and wine-making to a degree. You think, ‘It’s just beer,’ but you can get really creative with beer.”
That creativity extends to using beer in cooking or selecting foods to go with a beer with, Sandy adds. A host as well as a brewer, she thinks about serving and pairing her beers, as well as making them.
“I come from a family of really good southern cooks,” she says. “My mother was always experimenting in the kitchen, saying, ‘Here, try this,’ and so that’s kind of,”—she illustrates—“I brewed a mojito IPA because I had a mojito lager at one of our festivals. I got to thinking, this is citrusy, I can do an IPA, because I can find a citrusy hop that’s not super-bitter, that’s really aromatic. I can do this!”
Different approaches to beer creation combine so many factors—a brewer’s personal history and experience, what she learned from master brewers she studied with, and her own process of inspired improvisation or meticulous design. Sandy, for instance, is from a family of cooks but came to brewing through her husband, who has made beer for many years.
Gender is just one element of the creative process, something that may be all-important to one person and all-but-meaningless to another. Still, there are some commonalities. Women brewers may tend to speak of their work as a craft, rather than an art or science.
Craft, whether it’s quilt-making or woodcarving, tends to be intuitive and developed through apprenticeship, practice and experience, rather than formal study and lab-style experimentation.“Men like a lot of gadgetry,” Sandy jokes. “My husband (Moccasin Bend’s owner Chris Hunt) likes the engineering aspect of it. For instance, he’ll buy a special washer for something, whereas I’ll do the job with a brush, soap and water.”
Science and Craft
Though she, too, describes her work as craft, Melanie Krautstrunk, owner, along with her husband Joel, of Hutton & Smith Brewing Company, evidently delights in the devices she handles every day. A hydrogeologist by trade, Melanie planned to work in water resource management, then took a career detour into beer as she and her husband turned a craft into a business.
“We visited Chattanooga for 10 days in 2013 and decided to move here,” she says. “Downtown, people were supporting locally owned businesses and restaurants. There was craft beer in town, but room for more breweries to be successful.”
Hutton & Smith joined a growing community of craft brewers in Chattanooga. Big River’s brewers mentored the new business, for instance. Now, Melanie’s glad to see OddStory open within walking distance.
“It’s good to have two breweries on one street,” Melanie says. “People can take a beer tour. If you have enough breweries, it becomes a destination.”
T.C. has evidently blazed a trail for women brewers in the city, though she claims it’s just the changing times.
At any rate, Melanie says, she’s received only a warm welcome from the beer community. Her only difficulty as a woman in business has been with people outside the beer world—men who ask for the owner when they want to talk business.
“They go over my head and call Joel after they’ve spoken with me,” she laughs. “He just refers them right back.”
Walking through her equipment, Melanie points out the water storage tank, where Chattanooga city water is purified via carbon filters, UV and reverse osmosis.
“Water is overlooked in brewing,” she says. “[Our process] lets us add an extra layer of quality.”
But despite the science involved, Melanie describes hard work, rather than science, as the prime requisite for a prospective brewer—man or woman.
“It’s tedious, hard work with lots of scrubbing,” she says. “Many more hours than home brewing.”Still, she says, she has a great time. When she has an idea, she says, “I just want to get my hands on it. I’m going to put in a dash of this and that and see what happens!”
Drink Me!
If you crave a draught of Chattanooga craft beer in the next week or two, see what our women brewers have on tap for you. At Big River, look for Strawberry Saison. They’ll also be tapping a porter aged in Chattanooga Whiskey barrels.
At Moccasin Bend, the last Friday in July will bring a Brick House Brews event for charity, featuring Sandy Hunt’s Xtabey Chocolate Milk Stout.
And if you go by Hutton & Smith, ask for the Promenade New England-style IPA, named after a favorite climbing location in Vermont.