The Pink Boots Society (PBS) is a global network of women in all fields of the industry, but mainly in beer. Since its inception in 2007, the group has expanded into nearly 40 states and seven countries, including Peru, Spain, and New Zealand. The annual Pink Boots Collaboration Fermentation Day, formerly known as Pink Boots Collaboration Brew Day, invites breweries, cideries, meaderies, and other fermented beverage professionals to purchase the proprietary Pink Boots hop blend from their partner Yakima Chief Hops, which donates $3 from every pound directly to PBS.

San Diego chapter co-leader Amy Spackman says that participation this year presents some unique challenges, as well as a few opportunities. Some recent changes have been made to increase inclusion in the group, most notably by encouraging homebrewers and breweries of beverages besides beer to participate and become members. This is the first year they’ve been explicitly invited to participate, although Spackman hopes that as the pandemic recedes, overall support will increase. “Right now, all of our educational resources are obviously beer-centric, but the more awareness we get, the more knowledge people can bring in,” she says.

Participation in 2021 is notably low, she admits, and that’s entirely thanks to COVID-19. The notoriously thin margins for most hospitality businesses have been stretched even further over the past year, with reduced revenue on top of unpredictable expenses like constructing outdoor patios to adhere to regulations. To give up any additional funds, even for a good cause, can be a hard sell.

Despite that, several breweries have stepped up to take part in the collaborative March brew day, including Mujeres Brew House, Stone Brewing, Athletic Brewing Company, Second Chance Beer, 3 Punk Ales Brewing, Karl Strauss, and more. However, breweries, wineries, and anyone else interested in purchasing the hop blend can do so at any point in the year while supplies last. Spackman hopes this extended time frame will encourage people to take advantage when their finances allow, and will continue highlighting women in beer even after Women’s History Month ends. “The March ‘Women’s Day’ emphasis is still going to be there,” she says, but “we shouldn’t think about a major section of the population just once a year.”

Breweries and any other fermented beverage business that wishes to take part in the 2021 Pink Boots Collaboration Fermentation Day can register and purchase the Yakima Chief Hops blend on the PBS website at any time. Consumers can expect to start seeing the first PBS beers hitting taprooms in late March and early April.

Pink Boots Day at Karl Strauss in 2020

Courtesy of Karl Strauss

The post What You Need to Know about This Year’s Pink Boots Brew Day appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

The Feed / Mujeres Brew House

Esthela Davila knows beer and she knows Barrio Logan. As a kid she played in these parks and streets. If she steps out the front door of the newly opened Mujeres Brew House and looks to the right, she can see the green house she grew up in. Her parents still live there. Mujeres serves a beer named after that house—La Casa Verde, a single IPA with 6.5 ABV whose hops blend comes from Pink Boots, a global nonprofit that supports women in the craft beer industry.

“The whole intention of Mujeres is to make girls comfortable,” she says.

Davila and her business partner, Carmen Favela, who co-owns Border X Brewing in Barrio Logan with her husband, David, started Mujeres Brew House as an informal monthly gathering at Border X. Their intent was to help Latinas feel at home in the world of craft beer, which has been tirelessly and somewhat fairly lampooned as the realm of bearded white men. They’d gather, taste various styles, demystify the brewing process, run through basic vocabulary, and just commune. As more and more women showed up (men, too, who are always welcome), Carmen felt a need for a home that wasn’t borrowed.

“It was never my intention to have a brewery,” Davila laughs. “Carmen recruited me. She said we should take over the Alta Brewing space. We laughed it off. But David overheard her and said, ‘Why don’t we talk about that?’”

David emailed Jim Brown, who owns Bread & Salt—the 45,000-square-foot gallery and experimental center for the arts housed in a former bread factory (the city’s first to deliver bread by car, a century ago). “They’d been looking to get into a project with women,” Davila explains. “The next morning we had a meeting. By 1 p.m. I had the key in my hands.”

Women have been brewing beer ever since humans discovered fermentation. They were iconic bootleggers during Prohibition. But the industrialized beer business marketed mostly to men, and that left a lingering gender gap. Slowly but surely, women are coming back to beer—as consumers, as employees, as brewers, as owners and entrepreneurs—with encouragement from groups like Pink Boots, Women in Craft Beer, and Mujeres Brew House. According to Imbibe, 11 percent of women drank beer more than once a week in 2020, up from 6 percent in the 2019 report.

Today, Davila will work her accounting job for an auto parts company. She will drive from San Ysidro to Valley Center handing invoices to mechanics. Then she and Favela will spend nights and weekends bringing Mujeres to life in a pandemic. A mural is being painted. The old bread-loading docks will be turned into a beer garden. Their head brewer, Samantha Olson (Fourpenny House, Bivouac Ciderworks), will fill the tanks with their first batches. Eventually it will be part brew house, part educational center, part gathering space for women in beer.

“The brewery will be all female run, with female brewers,” Davila explains, clarifying that men, kids—everyone—is welcome. “In January we hope to have brewing classes where people learn the entire system, including how much you have to clean—because brewing is 90 percent cleaning.”

For her, doing this here in Barrio Logan is everything.

“I get to do this in the neighborhood I grew up in,” she says. “People still think pretty bad about Logan, but it’s not like that—at least to me. Yeah it was pretty bad back in the day, I’m not going to lie. But more and more people are feeling more comfortable coming here. I took a moment during our soft opening to look up from the bar and I saw this room full of people who wanted to come celebrate women in beer. My dad came; half my family was there. I try to be a badass, but I teared up.”

The post Craft Beer By Women, For Women appeared first on San Diego Magazine.