By Katie Lockhart | Huffington Post
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.
“I couldn’t get a single bank to take me seriously; that was the problem. I probably talked to 50 banks in Arizona. I couldn’t even get them to go from a phone call to an in-person meeting.”
– MEGAN GREENWOOD
