This Woman Brewer Wants You To Know Beer Isn't Just For Men

Megan Greenwood talks about the lack of female representation in breweries, and how beer marketing and drinking needs to be more inclusive of women.

Megan Greenwood is the founder and owner of Greenwood Brewing Company in Phoenix, Arizona. She started her career as an engineer but began her brewing journey at home in 2014. Greenwood champions female beer drinkers, brewers, artists, stand-up comedians and non-profits at her female-designed taproom in downtown Phoenix. In this edition of Voices In Food, Greenwood talks about the lack of female representation in breweries around the country, and how beer marketing and drinking needs to be more inclusive of women.

I like to say that most, or all, women are beer drinkers; they just don’t realize that they enjoy beer. It’s traditionally been a masculine beverage, which is why we associate it with men, but it is absolutely a woman’s drink. There are a lot of women who consider beer their alcoholic beverage of preference.

When I would go out and have beers with my friends, I was automatically stereotyped — and continue to be — for the style of beer that I like to drink. So, for example, my husband loves beer; the more colorful, the better. I like a traditional beer, a great classic Pilsner, or a hoppy IPA, but my husband likes artificially flavored fruit beers. So, whenever we go somewhere, I automatically get served his fruit beer. It’s years and years of a culture that has been ingrained in our minds that women prefer a certain thing and men prefer a certain thing, and that’s just not something that we can generalize.

I began Greenwood because I didn’t feel like women were seen as consumers of beer. I did a survey of 200 women to understand how they felt about beer, and all the women absolutely love this product, but no brewery is thinking about them. Over 97% of brewing companies are owned by men, and 77% are owned exclusively by men. Around 3% of brewing companies are owned by women.

When I was starting the brewery in 2017, I was Google searching “women and beer” images and “men and beer” images. “Men and beer” images were just men casually drinking beer at a table and connecting with friends. Google images of “women and beer” were mostly women in bikinis holding a beer or women in lederhosen serving a beer. And obviously, those are the only two outfits women wear when they are drinking beer.