The scent of sacred smoke hung heavily in the air, strings softly strummed under deft fingers, and the full moon cast its steady light. Undulating voices echoed and bounced off pipes and gleaming vessels, and feminine figures cloaked in steam sifted through flower petals and lit candles in anticipation of midnight: the witching hour. Flanked by the priestess of a local coven, who led the blessing of the beer, and accompanied by the harmonies of witchfolk band Lenore, Natalie Rose Baldwin knew this particular brew was going to be something special—bewitching, even.
“The night was mostly about connectedness we were all having with one another and with the beer,” explains Baldwin, research and development brewer at Breakside Brewery in Portland, Oregon. She coordinated the magical, midnight brew event to celebrate the return of spring by making a collaborative rose petal Saison, supercharged by the full moon’s energy and the group’s intentions. The final beer, Basic Witch, incorporated what Baldwin refers to as “apothecary-esque” ingredients, and was designed to convey a sense of feminine celebration and togetherness to those who ingested it.
Baldwin doesn’t subscribe to a particular belief system like Paganism or Wicca. Instead, she says she brews with intuition, often utilizing flowers, fruits, and specific intentions in her recipes. “Sometimes it drives my boss nuts,” she laughs. “It’s brewing with a feeling.”
Baldwin is part of a growing number of people in the United States who are eschewing organized religion and instead turning to self-guided reflection to grapple with the meaning of life and our place in it. Couple this shift with the rising popularity of witch-centric pop-culture, from television (Netflix’s “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”) to books (there are a ton to choose from) and even witchy fashion and politics, and suddenly it’s cool again to channel Stevie Nicks and dance under the full moon. [Editor’s note: It wasn’t always?] Against this backdrop, it’s hardly surprising that witchcraft is also making a return to beer.
The parallels between witchcraft and craft beer mean the two are ripe for collaboration, but that’s nothing new. For millennia, women worked with yeast (even if unknowingly) when baking bread, and used similar herbs in midwifery as they did when brewing beer for family and friends. These medieval “alewives” identified themselves as such through the use of imagery we now associate with witches: pointed hats, broomsticks, and cauldrons not unlike the brewing vessels of today. (It’s worth pointing out that, although historians continue to debate the definitive link between alewives and the stereotypical portrayals of contemporary witches, the abundant resemblances between the two are noteworthy.)
These women’s efforts were mysterious; before scientists understood how fermentation worked, it was credited to unexplainable, mysterious forces. “It must be fucking magic!” exclaims Grue, an amateur homebrewer and practitioner of chaos magic (a movement that relies on individual belief as a tool to accomplish tasks, rather than canonical rules seen in more structured groups) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
“There is magic in the process, and we believe in magic.”
Women were good at beer making. In fact, they were so good that they earned the ire of male religious leaders who decried alewives as immoral. Over time, brewing came to be considered men’s work, and the role of women in beer was co-opted. There was even a word specifically designated for these women brewers: brewsters. Judith M. Bennett’s 1999 book, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, outlines how the male-leaning “brewer” eventually overtook the more feminine “brewster,” replacing the term almost completely in contemporary usage.
“Women’s work has now become men’s work,” writes Bennett, calling this transformation “a story of how women were forced out of an industry as it became profitable and prestigious.”
According to the Brewers Association’s 2019 report on gender disparities in craft beer, men currently hold 92.5% of brewing positions in the United States. In the timeframe of human existence, a male-dominated brewing industry is a relatively new phenomenon, and Grue sees the same thing happening in all sorts of industries today.
“Beer brewing was the woman’s job,” says Grue. “Then it became hip and became a man’s job, just like computer programming … it all ties in together.” To her, the overlaps between witchcraft and brewing are inescapable. “I do see an overlap [in] how brewing can be an occult process and a ritual, how it ties into alchemy.” She explains many similar ingredients, plants, and herbs used in brewing can also be found in traditional witch spells.
Jeff Wiederkehr, co-owner and director of brewery operations at San Diego, California’s Burning Beard Brewing Company, agrees. “There is magic in the process, and we believe in magic,” says Wiederkehr, specifically about the brewery’s latest venture into wild ales. Last year, Burning Beard built a wooden chapel around its coolship, complete with a stained glass window altar with candles strategically tucked in the corners. Dowels dripping with proprietary yeast hang above the open vessel like Satanic totems, inviting in all manner of microorganisms—and maybe some chaotic vibes.
Wiederkehr is in the gender majority of brewers, but clear minority of contemporary witch brewers. Similarly esoteric outfits like Pen Druid Brewing in Sperryville, Virginia and heavy metal-themed Holy Mountain Brewing in Seattle, Washington (which borrows from occult imagery) are run by men, but most witchy brewers practicing their craft today are women. Kathleen Culhane of Thirsty Pagan Brewing in Superior, Wisconsin is perhaps the most notable example of an openly practicing Pagan brewer, but other women—and to a lesser degree, men—are fusing sacred rituals with their brewing practices.
Grue personally practices sigil magic, which entails creating physical symbols on surfaces to manifest a desired result. “I usually just slap sigils on carboys or something. So while it would ferment, which is an alchemical process—the yeast eating the sugar—the sigil would kind of help charge it up.” To determine the specific sigil to use on a given brew, Grue considers factors like the type of beer being brewed.
“The good thing about chaos magic is it’s sort of loose,” says Grue. “If it were a super hoppy beer, the hops are used as a cleansing to drive away negativity. I’d maybe make a sigil that would be for a good year, to keep negativity away, to invite positivity then while it fermented. The fermentation would act as a passive charging of the sigil, then it would be bottled and people would drink it and be able to, in a way, be ingesting that charged sigil.”
Baldwin has her brewery’s blessing to dabble in the occult while Grue limits her magic to homebrews. Margaux Moses, owner and brewer at Wave Maiden Ale Works in Los Angeles, has centered her entire business model around incorporating the “wise woman tradition” of plant spirit healing, herbalism, and honoring the medicine wheel (a sacred symbol used by indigenous Americans that she employs to “explore this energy of the Earth on a cycle of rebirth and death”). She even includes every brew’s intention on its sales sheet, along with ABV and ingredients.
“To me, a green witch is one whose relationship with the Earth runs really deep,” says Moses. “There's an overarching thing of being connected to source energy. It's a path that involves not just being in reverence to nature, but really seeing and believing that we are one with it.”
“We need so much healing. People are so overstimulated. These plants, without them even really realizing it, are going to let them take a breath.”
Moses realized she was a witch in her early 20s, and pursued an education in traditional herbal healing with the ocean as her higher power. Coincidentally, she also cultivated an interest in craft beer while working at a Los Angeles beer bar, and eventually began homebrewing. Her two passions remained separate until she began taking on clients interested in plant medicine, who used her guidance to set their own sacred rituals in their daily lives. After getting her hands on a copy of Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers: The Secrets of Ancient Fermentation by Stephen Harrod Buhner, considered the definitive text for brewers interested in adding sacred rituals to their brewing practices, Moses knew there was an untapped market of drinkers looking to quench their thirst and their soul’s thirst for meaning.
“People are just craving connection,” says Moses. “[But] I had a lot of trouble getting people into their own ritual.” Her clients’ desires to add spiritual healing to their schedules were complicated by today’s fast-paced world. She wondered: “How do I get these plants into their rituals if their ritual is to have a beer with their partner when they get home from work?”
Then, a lightbulb went off.
“It works more intuitively than even ceremonial magic, where you can only do certain things on certain days at certain hours. With chaos magic, it’s like, ‘Fuck it, we do it live.’”
“That’s when I started to put my time and energy into my love of craft beer,” Moses says, calling beer a “way to share plant medicine in a more mainstream way.” Her first beer was a nettle beer, the memory of which still causes her to laugh. “It didn’t taste bad,” she admits. “[But] it’s been a massive trial-and-error experiment.” Intention and psychic energy are just as important as flavor in her brews; Moses’ beers have to taste good and make drinkers feel good. Once she opens Wave Maiden as an independent brewhouse in Long Beach by the end of 2020 (she currently brews through an alternating proprietorship in Santa Clarita, California), her ultimate goal is for her beers to serve as an introduction to a new way of thinking—and to impart the Earth’s sacred wisdom though a familiar beverage.
Cultural appropriation is one controversial aspect of modern-day, witchy brewing—particularly in the context of white women working from indigenous traditions. Moses stresses a healthy respect of traditions in her practice in and out of the brewhouse, especially when it comes to the use of endangered sage. “It’s important for me to be responsible for my impact,” she explains. “To be totally clear about sage—this is a plant that I personally have found as an ally, a tool in my practice. I’ve used it to smudge (a single leaf at a time), tinctured it, added it to various herbal preparations—I have a relationship with the plant. I’ve also planted, grown, and tended to it, as well as made offerings to it in the wild. What I see as a problem lies is buying bundles of the endangered plant, lighting it, and walking away without being properly initiated into the practice. In my opinion, this is appropriating spiritual practice without responsibility, and also contributes to ecological devastation.”
Just as pumpkin beers and the arguments that inevitably come along with them harken the arrival of fall, so the season also ushers in a time of reverence for witchfolk. The ancient Celtic celebration of Samhain comprises a sacred set of days for practicing Neopagans and those following other related belief systems, and is said to provide an especially powerful timeframe in which to harness mystical energy. Grue recalls one of her homebrews, a Black IPA, that happened to manifest itself on Halloween.
“The sigil work was really more for connecting with ancestors and ancestor worship. It was really strong and potent—it jumped out at me,” she laughs. “I had some interesting results with it. I didn’t plan it for Halloween, but things kind of just fell into place—things just somehow aligned. I took it as a sign.”
She’s quick to point out that, although the fortuitous timing of this particular brew may have affected its divine potency, chaos magic is unique in that practitioners create their own dogmas to achieve desired results, rather than subscribing to more organized disciplines such as Wicca. “It works more intuitively than even ceremonial magic, where you can only do certain things on certain days at certain hours. With chaos magic, it’s like, ‘Fuck it, we do it live.’”
As a green witch with a more articulated canon of rituals, Moses plans to specifically harness holy times of year such as the winter solstice and Yule to pay homage to the deities and plants associated with those holidays. Musing aloud, she supposes that winter would be the ideal opportunity for a brew that attracts positivity to those who drink it. “I’d want them to remember it might be dark and cold, but they have an inner flame and spark,” says Moses.
At Wave Maiden, Moses has a specific process to begin her brew days. “The way I brew is the way I was taught to make any plant medicine,” she explains. “I open up my own space using sacred smoke. That can be anything from burning a resin, depending on what kind of energy or what the season is or how I’m feeling … or a single leaf of sage, because sage is endangered and we’re not trying to appropriate. I’ll use sacred smokes to help dissipate negative energy and reset the body; it helps me with my focus and cognitive thinking and dropping into what I’m trying to do. Then, setting sacred space is calling in the directions. Sometimes I’ll read a more lengthy poem or prayer that calls in the directions, and sometimes it's just as simple as stating the directions themselves: North, South, East, and West.”
She continues: “The spirits of above are our plant spirits and our guardian angels and spirit guides. The energy of below, which is our ancestors, and then the last direction I’ll call in is our center, which is our hearts. So after that, I generally measure out my plants—I will audibly, out loud, ask them to share their plant medicine, so whether I want to call out specific energetics of the plant, or just invite them to share with the people that drink them. That's sort of how I like to get in the day.”
Watching people empower themselves to change their relationship to the Earth is what drives these witch brewers. “We need so much healing,” says Moses. “People are so overstimulated. These plants, without them even really realizing it, are going to let them take a breath.” She laughs and admits that she occasionally visits bars where her beers are on draft just to watch people try it for the first time. “It’s really amazing to observe.”
She sighs deeply at the memory. “That’s the stuff that sets my soul on fire. I want people to not only have an option that might have some sort of benefit to their being and their spirit and lift their vibration up a little bit higher, but also to have a takeaway and be invited into exploring the plants after they leave the bar.”
She pauses for a moment. “If this can serve as a gateway to invite people into something that might seem very abstract or maybe too hippie, if I can invite them in through something that’s already familiar and a positive in their life—that’s really a way to reach the masses.”
Words, Beth Demmon Illustration, Ben Chlapek Language
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