Before the pandemic, Amber Dernulc attended eight to 10 beer festivals every year, plus a couple of other beer-related events every month. She has worked in the British beer industry since 2014 in various roles, including as the senior operations manager at Burnt Mill Brewery and as the procurement manager for distributor Jolly Good Beer. Traveling for such festivals and events was—and, as the industry’s calendar begins to fill up once more, will resume being—a regular part of her working life. That means in her latest role doing sales for the Queer Brewing Project, she’ll likely be placing herself once again in unfamiliar settings among beer-drinking strangers.
[Content warning: This story includes discussions of sexual harassment, assault, and violence.]
There’s a strict protocol in her planning when such travel is required, a balancing act of convenience and protection which she’s honed over the course of her career.
“Over the years, I’ve kind of had to learn what to do when I go to beer festivals,” she explains. “I generally make sure I’m not on my own. I’m either with someone who’s not only a colleague, or someone else in the industry, but is also a very good friend. If it’s in a city where I know where someone lives that I can stay with, I’ll choose that option … [but otherwise] I always book a hotel. I don’t trust Airbnb; I don’t think it’s safe at all, especially if you’re on your own. It’s no question.”
Opting for the security of a hotel rather than a short-term rental almost always comes at a premium. (Which, when coupled with the fact that women are much less likely to hold senior managerial positions in beer—and that women in the U.S. earn approximately 79 cents to every dollar men make, while women in the U.K. earn roughly 83 pence to every pound men make—means traveling for work has an additional financial toll.) But for Dernulc, it’s a small price to pay for peace of mind. She analyzes every single aspect of her travel through that risk-assessment lens to minimize any chance of vulnerability while on the road.
“If I was ever attending [a beer festival] on my own, it’d be like, ‘Right, don’t get too drunk, got to make sure we’ve already planned our way home safe.’ Even just walking with someone who’s staying at the same hotel, or getting an Uber. Everything has to be pre-planned,” says Dernulc, explaining that she even prefers to book the same hotel when she returns to certain cities to maximize her familiarity with her surroundings.
This planning regimen extends to the way she presents herself, both as an individual and as a representative of her employer. “I always put a lot of thought and consideration into the clothes I’m wearing,” says Dernulc. “Obviously, if I’m at a beer festival, I want to look professional. It’s my job. I want to look nice; I like to present myself in a nice way, but I have to be so wary of not looking too nice, or looking inviting. I really enjoy wearing makeup but I can’t wear too much, or wear a particular type of makeup, because I don’t want people to feel entitled to talk to me.”
Dernulc’s extensive experience navigating the choppy waters of being a woman in beer means she always has contingency plans in place. “In the festival, there is at least one stand that I’m always welcome to stand behind to get away from people. I always have to have my one safety spot, whether that’s a friend’s brewery or the brewery [where] I work—there always has to be a safe space for me. It could be where I keep my coat, or keep my bag, but it’s also where I can continually check in and reground myself, because obviously all fests are different environments.”
Dernulc’s experiences are far from rare. Weighing risk versus reward is a tightrope many women and femmes find themselves walking throughout their careers, and that’s certainly true within craft beer, where the boundaries between professional and social interactions are blurrier than in many other industries. Festivals and other such events are where much of the business of craft beer gets done—but in order to participate in that exchange, and to do their jobs to their fullest extent, women often take on an outsize burden in terms of exposure to potential harm.
A quick note on the genders specified in this piece: I’m following author Gavin de Becker’s lead from his book, The Gift of Fear: And Other Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence. In it he states: “Men of all ages and in all parts of the world are more violent than women. For this reason, the language in this book is mostly gender-specific to men. When it comes to violence, women can proudly relinquish recognition in the language, because here at least, politically correct would be statistically incorrect.” For editorial ease I’ve chosen to follow this convention, while acknowledging the additional risk those who exist outside the gender binary face, as well as members of other marginalized communities.
Though beer events can be fun and social, they are also fluid and unpredictable. To navigate them, as Dernulc describes, often requires making chameleon-like changes, subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—tweaking behavior when surrounded by strangers in order to remain safe.
“I’m quite friendly. I’m quite tactile. I’m quite smiley, and I tell a lot of jokes. It doesn’t matter who you are, that’s my behavior and that’s how I talk to people,” says Dernulc. “But you have a lot of men who mistakenly read that as flirting or welcoming that behavior. And it’s like, no, I’ll talk to anyone like this, so you have to be really careful when you’re speaking to someone. I have to gauge my behavior and I have to check how friendly I’m being, how welcoming, if I’m bringing on unwanted attention.”
This self-surveillance, behavior modification, and continual risk-assessment take a toll in many ways, including professional development. When scouting for sources for this piece, I spoke with another woman in the beer industry (who prefers to remain anonymous) via Twitter DM. “Women definitely need to play by a different set of rules in this industry for our safety, even if it means missing out on networking opportunities by not going to events, leaving early, or always needing to move in pairs,” she says.
Lauren R. Taylor runs Safe Bars HQ, an organization that teaches employees at alcohol-serving establishments bystander intervention skills to prevent and interrupt unwanted sexual aggression. “Another enormous cost is making our lives small. We don’t go do the things that we want to do, we don’t talk to the people we want to. We see a smaller range of possibilities for ourselves.”
“I have worked for companies where I’ve been the only woman, and going out drinking with your colleagues isn’t safe,” says Dernulc. “I don’t feel safe.” Despite this pervasive feeling of potential danger, she doesn’t feel her career trajectory has been stifled due to her gender. “I don’t think [being a woman] has held me back,” she says. However, she admits women who are newer to beer may not have the same recognition or respect she enjoys as a veteran of the industry.
Despite their routine nature, so many of the adjustments that women make in pursuit of safety are invisible to their male peers, coworkers, and bosses, and have a real, deleterious impact on their work. “When I worked as a travel writer, I was studiously budgeting while my male counterparts could stay out all night ‘partying with locals’ and figuring out where they’d sleep once they got there. Honestly I was really jealous,” Emily Saladino, associate managing editor of digital for Wine Enthusiast, noted on Twitter.
In early 2020, I created a survey, sent to 149 male-identifying beer professionals, to ask them questions like: “Have you ever taken any safety precautions into consideration when traveling to beer events (conferences, festivals, etc.)?” and “Have you ever felt unsafe while working in the alcohol industry or attending an alcohol-centric event?” Although the survey only captured a small slice of experiences, the overwhelming majority of replies demonstrated, at the very least, a disparity between male-identifying people and female-identifying people working in the same industry.
When asked, “Have you ever taken any safety precautions into consideration when traveling to beer events (conferences, festivals, etc.)?” 73% replied “no.” Of those who replied “yes,” said precautions ranged from “wash hands” to “having a designated driver” or even “eating a big meal and lots of water.” Only a small fraction of respondents mentioned common safety concerns like “having a buddy” or “staying in a safe part of town.”
The same survey showed that 66% of respondents replied “frequently” or “occasionally” to the question: “Have you ever gotten ‘too drunk’ at a beer event in a city you don’t live in?” 34% claimed “it’s never happened.” But perhaps the most telling of all was the question: “Have you ever felt unsafe while working in the alcohol industry or attending an alcohol-centric event?” 68% of men replied, “I have never felt unsafe at any event.”
This disparity in men’s and women’s experiences in beer is nothing new. But for many, the extent of the bias, violence, and inequity women face only became clear when Brienne Allan, production manager at Notch Brewing in Salem, Massachusetts, posted a question to other women on her Instagram page on May 11, 2021: “What sexist comments have you experienced?”
The prompt inspired upwards of 1,000 people, most of them anonymous, to share their stories. That spontaneous outpouring has demonstrated just how often gendered barriers do hold women in beer back, whether through trauma, stifled career opportunities, sexist bullying, or physical violence and intimidation. Some of the stories also came from women who had already left the industry, driven out by such treatment, or stymied by the omnipresent hurdles craft beer has been so willing to overlook.
Overwhelmed with the responsibility of sharing these accounts, Allan describes the crushing and unexpected burden of becoming the keeper of craft beer’s biggest such reckoning to date. She points to the sheer number of corroborating stories about certain individuals or breweries as a harsh reality, but one that’s poised to galvanize real change. “One person speaks up [and] more and more happen, it becomes a, ‘We should probably start paying attention and taking people seriously’ [moment],” Allan says. “I feel like our society is conditioned to know that women get abused, and we’re all just kind of okay with it because we’re expecting it.”
The accusations have also made clear the wide span of predatory behavior in beer, from “it’s just a joke” comments at taprooms to illegal questions during the hiring process regarding family planning. Though some might not see such instances as having the same gravity as crimes like physical and sexual assault, in reality they contribute to the industry’s sense of permissiveness and impunity when it comes to sexist treatment of female workers and consumers. The sheer number of women who’ve grown disillusioned with the beer industry—as well as those who’ve left it completely—means it’s impossible to calculate the loss craft beer has faced as a result of such behavior.
The cascading volume of accounts put forward by Allan can feel overwhelming to process, even for a cynical beer writer who’s fairly used to these stories. But they’re far from surprising, or singular. Wine, spirits, and other beverage alcohol industries have also faced reckonings of their own. Sarah May, a certified sommelier and owner of Taste Georgia, a wine tourism group representing the country of Georgia, grapples with doubts about her chosen profession on a near-daily basis. “I find myself lately trying to avoid events simply because of men. I don’t dress how I want, cut my hair short, don’t go to tastings and even think about ending my career in the wine world just to avoid men … safety still isn’t free for women. The fact that this is still mostly unaddressed worries me.”
Neither alcohol itself, nor the celebratory or social nature of festivals, are responsible for the actions of predators. While Allan’s stories include a number of allegations perpetrated at specific beer events, the stories of everyday harassment ring just as harshly, especially to those who have experienced and internalized similar aggressions.
The avalanche of stories like those shared on Allan’s Instagram and on Twitter, coupled with reports that show 60% of women who work in hospitality in the U.S. have experienced sexual violence at their places of work, indicate that the dangers women find commonplace, men often remain completely oblivious to and exempt from—if they’re not complicit in perpetrating them or in staying silent when they witness others doing so.
Betty Bollas is president and co-owner of Fibonacci Brewing Company in Cincinnati, Ohio, and previously completed the Queen City Certified gender equity program to ensure patron and employee safety. She views this disconnect between the experiences of men and women as hugely problematic.
“I believe 100% of women have been sexually harassed,” she says. “I believe 100% of women have been sexually assaulted, because people aren’t always comfortable putting someone’s inappropriate touching under that, and it is under that! And who even knows under rape? There are so many things women are afraid to report.” According to RAINN, the United States’ largest anti-sexual violence organization, 1 in 6 American women will be the victim of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime, for an average of 463,634 rape victims over the age of 12 every year. Depending on race and ethnicity, this number is often higher; Native Americans are twice as likely to experience a sexual assault than all other groups.
The United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission defines sexual harassment as including instances of “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature,” specifying that it can also include offensive remarks about a person’s gender. “Although the law doesn’t prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious, harassment is illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted).”
Of course, different perceptions about what’s “appropriately” hostile or not fall into a murky legal area, one that typically does not favor victims. It can take many instances of unchecked microaggressions to build a case for harassment—which is all the more reason to call out behavior that’s “not that bad” before it escalates. Because it will, and it takes a very real toll. “Jokes” about a woman’s skill or appearance can lead to fellow employees treating them as less credible or capable, and normalize sexist bias. This can affect women’s potential wages and upward career mobility, as well as signal to others that it’s acceptable to treat a person as lesser than due to the way they were born or present themselves. Failure to respect the concept of consent, meanwhile, starts with bodily boundaries like unwanted hugs, and can escalate to assault.
Statistically, perpetrators of sexual assault are not random strangers at a beer festival, but more likely to be a coworker, colleague, or friend. Despite the lopsided risk, women like Dernulc still rely on other men, be it a boyfriend or coworker, as a cloak of protection when navigating crowds of (mostly) male beer drinkers at beer events. She laughs bitterly at the irony of needing a man to protect her from other men.
Allan, too, has stories of her own. “I get sexually harassed at festivals every single time to the point where I’m like, ‘I don’t even want to do this anymore,’ she says. “I don’t know why that [behavior] has to escalate at the festivals. Maybe it’s just a social setting where they’re surrounded by other guys doing it, and they think it’s normal and they normalize themselves.”
To navigate an industry where sexist bias, harassment, and threats of violence are commonplace, many women have turned to other women in support.
In Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship, author Kayleen Schaefer explains: “This is because women who say, ‘Text me when you get home,’ aren’t just asking for reassurance that you’ve made it to your bed unharmed. It’s not only about safety. It’s about solidarity. It’s about us knowing how unsettling it can be when you’ve been surrounded by friends and then are suddenly by yourself again. It’s about us understanding that women who are alone get unwanted attention and scrutiny.”
Many women in the industry have responded to such situations by traveling in numbers, or by keeping an eye out for one another. “If I see someone who’s drunk, I’m like, ‘Okay, are you safe? Who do you know? Let me get you a glass of water,’” Dernulc says.
Taste Georgia’s May views this solidarity among women as a necessity for existing in the alcohol industry. “At tastings and events, we [women] should go together, and stay together, and leave together. We are powerful in numbers. I find that I am harassed more when I go alone. Also I get mansplained to more when I go to events and tastings alone,” she says. Safe Bars HQ’s Taylor agrees. “The woman-to-woman network is still a real thing.”
This support system, while crucial and universal, is not always accessible. Breweries with small teams may only be able to afford to send one representative to a certain event, or only send one woman partnered up with a man. In these instances, Dernulc says her precautions would go into overdrive.
“If I was attending an event where I didn’t know anyone else and I was the only person from [my brewery] attending, I wouldn’t drink,” she says. “I’ll be really careful of how much I do drink, if I do, what I am drinking, and judge everyone around me as well. ‘Okay, I don’t like how that person’s looking at me,’ or you know you just get bad vibes from people and you actively avoid them.” Occasionally, these vibes are the result of prolific “whisper networks”: private conversations designed to warn one another of bad actors while avoiding legal or physical retribution from those named. It’s often the only line of defense available, and one marginalized groups have relied on for generations in order to survive.
When violence occurs anywhere, including at a beer festival, conference, or any other professional setting, initial reactions often fall on the victim, or ascribe blame to the presence of alcohol. This aligns with society’s current definition of “rape culture,” which public research university Marshall University defines as “an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture. Rape culture is perpetuated through the use of misogynistic language, the objectification of women’s bodies, and the glamorization of sexual violence, thereby creating a society that disregards women’s rights and safety.”
They go on to list examples of rape culture, which include situations like sexually explicit “jokes,” perpetuating a narrative that women who dress a certain way are to blame, teaching women to avoid rape rather than teaching men not to rape—familiar phrases and concepts to many women working in beer and beyond.
Taylor recognizes the importance of self-defense, but condemns the current power dynamic of women forced to be responsible for their safety rather than men being responsible for their actions. “The list of tips, like have somebody walk you to your car, I think are actually harmful,” says Taylor. “It sets us up for self-blame. There’s 431 of these things, and if one day you do 430 and you happen to get attacked, then it’s your fault.”
The anonymous source recalls the first event that led her to blame herself—a violent encounter after a beer convention in 2018. “I’ve never told anyone about it because I made a lot of unsafe mistakes leading up to it,” she explains. This common thread repeated itself through numerous stories shared with me for this story, with words like “irresponsible” and phrases like, “It was a mistake on my part, but I was having fun.”
In Kate Bernot’s piece “Get Out of Your Own Way — Employees Won’t Speak Up Until the Brewing Industry Tears Down Its Walls,” published on Good Beer Hunting on January 28, 2021, a source recounts the guilt and fear of retribution that caused her to remain silent about the coworker who sexually assaulted her. Having to choose between safety and a career is a damaging burden for victims to shoulder, and one that only inhibits conversations about sexist treatment in the workplace.
“Even when you put all these things into practice, and you are with a group of friends in a place you know, shit still goes wrong,” says Dernulc. She describes a trip to Amsterdam with friends, where a longtime acquaintance in the beer industry unexpectedly caressed her neck without warning or consent. It wasn’t egregious, she admits, but that testing of the waters was enough of an invasion to cause her to freeze. “I kind of looked at my group of friends, who were three other girls and two guys, and they’re all just staring at me like, ‘Are you okay? Did that really just happen?’ and I was like, ‘It happened, didn’t it? That wasn’t normal, was it?’ And the guys were like, ‘That’s not normal, let’s fucking go.’ So even when you are in a place where you think you’re safe, where you feel safe, it still comes out.”
Much like COVID-19 didn’t cause societal inequities so much as reveal the cracks that were already there, alcohol tends to exacerbate inappropriate behavior and unbalanced power dynamics. “Alcohol does not cause sexual assault,” Taylor points out. “It’s used as an excuse.” But for women working in the beer industry, and especially women attending a beer event away from their familiar surroundings, the knowledge that many use alcohol as a cover for their bad behavior only amplifies anxiety on the job.
Beer’s well-established white male dominance has meant the industry has yet to embrace the widespread changes necessary to make it a universally safe and uplifting place for women and marginalized groups. Initiatives like the Brewers Association’s Code of Conduct are surface-level helpful—albeit difficult to enforce—tools that aim to reduce the risk of harm. However, until the industry’s decision-makers face their unconscious biases, craft beer will never reach its desired potential as a harbinger of equity and safety. Additionally, when those in control of said outlets have been accused of actively or even passively participating in a toxic culture, victims cannot expect a fair process towards justice.
Furthermore, the cognitive dissonance of being constantly barraged with messages of craft beer’s inclusivity against the very real, very toxic, and very dangerous reality, has left an entire generation of women and other marginalized people looking around and wondering, “If craft beer is 99% asshole-free, why are we surrounded by them?”
“A country so clearly governed and controlled by men isn’t going to be realigned overnight,” says Schaefer in her book. Neither is the beer industry. Dernulc, for one, is ready for women to relieve themselves of their singular burden and address the root issue.
“It pisses me off that the conversation always falls onto women on, ‘How can you make yourselves safer?’” says Dernulc. “When you have panels at conferences that have to do with sexism or sexual harassment in the industry, and they’re all fronted by women, I’m like, ‘No!’ I want the men to be there and be like, ‘We need to sort this out. We need to be discussing what’s not okay so people can learn.’ That’s the change I want to see … it shouldn’t be discussing how women can keep themselves safe. That’s not the conversation I want to be having.”
Allan thinks more organizations need to share the burden that individuals have been carrying for years. “If breweries are putting on festivals and doing collaborations, they should be held accountable for who they work with, because they’re accepting that behavior,” she says. “I think that would be supportive, if breweries could step up and be like, ‘We will not tolerate this behavior any longer.’”
Jenny Pfäfflin, Advanced Cicerone and brewer at Dovetail Brewery in Chicago, pointed out on Twitter the lack of options for women seeking safety at festivals, leading Barrel & Flow Fest founder Day Bracey to add a no-tolerance Code of Conduct for all attendees at future fests. Hopefully, more will follow.
There is a clear need for such policies, as well as for women to occupy more decision-making positions throughout the industry. Dernulc describes another instance at Indy Man Beer Con a few years ago, where a customer of hers isolated her from her group and disregarded her discomfort while escalating his behavior. “I was absolutely terrified. I pushed him away from me, screamed, dropped my glass, and some guy started yelling at me for dropping my glass—a security guard, who did nothing. I was really shaken,” she recounts. Without being able to rely on the organizers for protection, Dernulc—and many other women—continue to depend on woman-to-woman networks and self-preservation for their safety.
At this point, dissecting the dangers women face while working in, or simply enjoying, beer feels disappointingly redundant. From Boulevard Brewing Company’s sexual harassment scandal in early 2021 to the absolute glut of stories shared by Allan on Instagram, the pervasive reports compiled on Beervana, and so many more, it’s clear that this issue has been widespread for a long time. Until the beer industry examines its entrenched misogyny, the risk of individual women coming forward may rarely be worth the collective reward.
“I’m fed up with seeing women discussing how they can be safer,” says Dernulc. “I want men to be going, ‘How can we spot the signs if someone’s being a dick? How can we spot the signs that a woman is feeling unhappy or uncomfortable?’”
Women and marginalized people have done the lion’s share of the work in raising awareness of and lobbying against sexist inequity in beer. Thanks to the testimonies of some 1,000 people over the last week, the issue has become unignorable—for now. If craft beer is serious about making real change into the future, the onus is now on men to uproot their misogyny, hold their peers to account, and work to make the industry a safer place for all.
Words by Beth DemmonIllustrations by Colette Holston
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