On July 4, a select few drinkers at the Devil’s Den bar in South Philadelphia put their lips to a tangible, aluminum piece of beer history: special-edition Miller Lite cans featuring the name and likeness of Mary Lisle, allegedly “the first American woman to own and operate” a brewery in colonial North America. The goal of this project—encapsulated by the tagline, “There’s no beer without women”—was to raise awareness of women’s historic and contemporary contributions to U.S. beer and brewing, with proceeds benefiting the Pink Boots Society, a professional development organization for women in beer. As Miller Lite’s marketing manager Kelsey Ott put it in a press statement, Mary Lisle’s mantle as “the first documented [woman] brewer in American history” offers a proxy for the “countless” women brewers in American history that we have collectively failed to record, remember, and properly credit for their work.
Miller Lite’s parent company, Molson Coors Beverage Company, is right about this larger claim: Women have helped shape, and continue to exert power within, the U.S. beer industry, particularly in their role as brewery owners. It’s critical to bring this influence to the public consciousness, and to reflect on the social and economic barriers that impede even more women, especially single women and women of color, from owning breweries today. But the literal face of their project is a bit less accurate.
Miller Lite chose Mary Lisle because she’s regularly cited as the first recorded woman to brew beer commercially in American history. Google it, read popular beer history books, or dare to crack a few dry academic ones, and Mary Lisle’s story of inheriting her father’s Philadelphia brewery in 1734 appears time and again. But Lisle’s title as the first recorded woman brewer is a misconception, one of those assumed truths that gets repeated because it’s believed and believed because it gets repeated.
In fact, records from early colonial America name many women who produced and sold beer before Mary Lisle. Among them was Sarah Frankes, who brewed beer professionally in Boston’s North End in the 1670s and ’80s, over 50 years before Lisle took over her father’s brewery. And no, Sarah Frankes wasn’t the first either. We’re not entirely sure who was—and may never be—but this story isn’t about firsts. Rather, it’s about the omnipresent, shapeshifting barriers that women have continuously faced across more than 350 years of American beer history.
Miller Lite is not at fault here—trusted misconceptions give us the illusion of truth, and trick us into complacency. If we’re not careful, they even keep us from asking necessary questions. What barriers, for example, did women like Frankes face when entering the 17th-century beer trade? How common were such brewsters’ experiences, and how did their work integrate into their larger, complex worlds? And most importantly, is this past really in the past, or is it something 21st-century women in beer have inherited?
Equally, we can ask difficult questions about gender and brewery ownership today. Why are so many women brewery owners today married to their co-owner? What happens when a single woman who wants to open a brewery seeks funding? And if we ask you, right now, to picture an archetypical brewmaster, how many of you imagine a cis man?
As we found out, the answers to these sorts of questions in both Sarah Frankes’ time and in our own share commonalities. And if that commemorative Miller Lite can was indeed a call to action, here is our response.
Sarah Frankes (née Weld) was born in late 1640 in Roxbury, Massachusetts, the oldest daughter of a fairly well-off store owner. At age 22, she married John Frankes (sometimes spelled Franks or Francks) and they started a family together. Sources suggest that John worked as a mariner sailing as far away as the Caribbean, which would have left Sarah to manage the home, finances, and several children by herself for extended periods. Nine years into their marriage, John was awarded a £71 settlement—quite a large sum for the time—following a dispute with ship owners over the transportation of some rum. John used the windfall to invest in an occupation that kept him closer to home. Less than two months after the settlement, he applied to the Suffolk County Court for a license to sell alcohol.
Though details of John’s maritime activities proved difficult to unearth, knowing that he transported rum from Barbados even once connects the Frankes to some of the Americas’ most horrific history. European sugar planters in 17th-century Barbados worked enslaved African laborers to death as a business model, relying on new shipments of prisoners to replace them. The sugar, molasses, and rum they produced both filled Britain’s imperial coffers and propped up their other colonial holdings, like New England, whose products and demand fueled Caribbean plantations. The Frankes used their own profits from this system of colonialism, slavery, and death to establish their tavern. Distance, neither across the globe or the calendar, does not lessen our connections to injustice.
John, and possibly Sarah, ran their “house of public entertainment” until John’s death in 1676, and then Sarah took over the business outright. We know far less than we’d like, but records show that she inherited a reasonably advanced brewing system for her time and place; held onto her liquor license at a time when licensing was a highly politicized, subjective, and gendered power of government; and engaged in complex business relationships. At nearly every moment, her efforts were proscribed in some way by explicitly male influences, from her husband to colonial authorities. Even so, her life and experiences mirrored the evolution not only of early Massachusetts beer but also women’s critical role in its survival. Her experiences also embodied those of the countless women Miller Lite sought to highlight centuries later: those who worked diligently but for little recognition in a society and industry that was hostile to women brewery owners.
Were and are. Today, the barriers to women’s proportional representation among brewery owners aren’t legal fiat, but they nevertheless relate to Sarah Frankes’ time more than they should. Despite concerted efforts by the Brewers Association, Pink Boots, and other industry groups to encourage participation from underrepresented demographic groups, including women, wide gaps persist in ownership—especially for single women and women of color. The reasons why are varied, and take into account broader economic forces such as women’s access to credit and their lower lifetime wealth accumulation compared to men, as well as factors specific to brewing, such as the perceived maleness of beer as a product as well as the greater proportion of men in industry leadership roles.
Putting the past and present in conversation reveals how the bedrock assumptions about gender that dictated Frankes’ reality find stubborn representation in our own.
When Sarah Frankes was born, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had only existed for some 10 years, and neighboring Plymouth Colony was only 10 years older than that. At the time, the beer trade in Massachusetts was in shambles. According to research by historian James E. McWilliams, colonial leaders spent these early years trying to legislate into existence the kind of professionalized, male-dominated brewing industry they remembered from England (which was itself built upon centuries of marginalized women’s labor, though that’s its own story).
They failed so spectacularly that in 1639 they enacted colonial America’s first official ragequit: All brewing and licensing regulations were repealed, and authority over the matter was ceded to individual towns, none of which seriously tried to encourage commercial brewing. Instead, brewing retreated into the home, where it once again fell under the mantle of women’s work.
When Sarah was growing up, around half of Massachusetts homes engaged in domestic brewing, likely producing low-ABV Small Beer. Male heads of households often willed brewing utensils to their wives and daughters, reportedly to give them a means to support themselves independently. Indeed, there was an economy of sorts for domestically produced beer. The half of households who brewed sporadically supplied the other half on a barter basis, often to support major life events like pregnancies, illness, or celebrated family milestones.
It’s not enough to merely acknowledge that women performed this work. For decades, these women kept the embers of Massachusetts’ smoldering brewing trade from going out. One can see a parallel to the modern craft beer movement nationally: Though its most lauded pioneers tend to be male, women such as New Belgium Brewing’s Kim Jordan, New Albion Brewing Company’s Suzanne Stern, and Stoudts Brewing Company’s Carol Stoudt were equal co-creators in what was then a precarious and nascent movement.
As in colonial Massachusetts, skilled brewsters were integral to the revitalization of brewing. Both renaissances arose not through some industrial revolution (that came later), but from the creeping resurgence of beer drinking and production spaces out of the home and back into the public sphere. In colonial Massachusetts, the domestic became the commercial. In the modern craft movement, homebrewers opened small businesses. What began in the home as a hybrid hobby-passion—through skilled brewing and business acumen—became a viable commercial operation, with many women to thank for it.
Despite the groundwork laid by so many women who came before them, women brewery owners today still struggle to claim their rightful place in the public’s perception of brewery leadership. “I have definitely had so many people come up to me and say things like, ‘It’s so nice of you to help your husband follow his dream,’” says Bailey O’Leary, who co-owns True Respite Brewing Company in Rockville, Maryland with her husband Brendan. She says that misunderstandings about her role in the brewery are common among customers and certain peers in the industry.
“I have definitely had so many people come up to me and say things like, ‘It’s so nice of you to help your husband follow his dream.’”
That’s disappointing, but not a surprise. Women’s ownership remains uncommon in the brewing industry. According to a Brewers Association survey from 2021, just 2.9% of U.S. craft breweries are owned exclusively by women, despite the fact that more than 50% of non-management staff at craft breweries are women. U.S. Census Bureau data from 2017, the most recent year for which such figures are available, indicate that 6.2% of breweries in the U.S. are majority or exclusively owned by women. (The Census Bureau and BA define “breweries” differently, in this case, partially explaining the discrepancy.) Nationally, about 21% of all businesses that employ workers were majority-owned by women, according to U.S. Census Bureau data from the 2020 Annual Business Survey, the most recent year for which such figures are available. U.S. breweries today are not often owned by a woman alone, and when they are, it’s at a percentage much lower than that of overall businesses.
“It doesn’t feel good,” says O’Leary. “When we first opened, I wasn’t nearly as assertive in saying, ‘This is my dream, too. We’re equal.’”
While women brewery owners today are more empowered legally, professionally, and socially, some of the historical inequities from Sarah Frankes’ time continue to echo.
As women kept brewing traditions alive in their kitchens in the mid-17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony, a few rudimentary public drinking spaces endured. Called ordinaries, these spaces differed from taverns as we might think of them, and even differed from kindred English ordinaries across the Atlantic. They operated out of the proprietor’s home, did not offer food or lodging to patrons, and relied almost entirely on the labor of family members. Per McWilliams’ research, few towns licensed more than one ordinary, and existing owners regularly schemed to influence who else might set up shop. Unsurprisingly, ordinary licenses were overwhelmingly held by men. These ordinaries would seed a more robust and complex generation of drinking establishments by the early 1670s, including the Frankes’ newly established tavern.
And yet these ordinaries still operated out of homes and depended on family labor. While we can’t say how often with precision, records prove that the brewers in these ordinaries were women at least some of the time, even when the official license-holder was male. It’s not a stretch to speculate that many of the women who incubated Massachusetts’ brewing industry in their kitchens also labored with neither ownership nor proper acknowledgement of their contributions.
This invisibility manifests throughout American brewing history, and still persists today. In a 2020 analysis of craft beer documentaries conducted as part of her Master of Arts in Anthropology thesis for the University of Nevada, Reno, Melissa Hafey found that on-screen portrayals of heterosexual couples who own breweries overwhelmingly diminish the wives’ contributions. (The BA survey found that 44% of U.S. breweries have at least one woman owner, a not-insignificant number.) Hafey writes that these documentaries “position women as always secondary and sometimes opposed to the success of their brewer-husbands, thus foreclosing the possibility that women might be a valuable driving force behind breweries even when they are co-owners of the enterprise.”
This invisibility may have been present in the Frankes’ tavern, too. Between 1672 and 1676, John’s license privileges came to include cider, a newly popular beverage in the colony, and there is additional evidence that the business was generating real revenue. John was able to post a monetary bond on his business—a welcome guarantee to colonial authorities that he would uphold Boston’s laws and social order—and there is evidence that the Frankes hired a domestic servant to assist in their home.
If they didn’t start out that way, the Frankes soon began brewing their own product. By 1676 they owned a sizable copper kettle, 16 beer barrels, tubs, troughs, coolers, and all the sundries to produce beer (and probably cider) on a scale far beyond the kitchen. While more impressive systems existed in Boston during this time, the Frankes’ setup (valued at a cool £25) would have put them ahead of many peers. An open question, however, is how much of the tavern’s labor was performed by Sarah.
As we’ve already seen, women’s labor had been instrumental at every stage of brewing’s revitalization across Massachusetts, not to mention within the longstanding English traditions that seeded it. It’s certainly conceivable that John operated the tavern and brewing system by himself, or that they shared some unknown division of the labor. It’s also possible that Sarah was the brewster and beating heart of a tavern subsumed by her husband’s name. It’s impossible to say based on the information we have today, except to acknowledge that both our sources and the society that bore them intentionally chose to obscure women’s contributions in most matters. And so, if Sarah did indeed contribute to the operation of the Frankes’ tavern and those contributions were ignored by the record, it would be further proof that the oversight and omission of women is a practice deeply rooted in the nation’s history and tradition.
The biggest clue that Sarah was a bonafide brewster, and a skilled one at that, is what happened when John Frankes died in October 1676. Sarah inherited his brewing equipment and, apparently, his tavern license. By all indicators she continued brewing and operating the business without missing a step.
When her license came up for renewal the next year, however, Sarah had to navigate a regulatory system oriented to keep women on the margins. According to historian Sharon Salinger, colonial authorities in Massachusetts (and several other colonies) considered taverns and ordinaries to be more than retail drinking spaces. Tavernkeepers were expected to be upstanding members of the community who prevented their patrons’ conduct from devolving into illegal activity or disruptions of the peace. License holders had to know and uphold the laws, keep out unfree patrons ranging from indentured servants to the enslaved, and police rowdy behavior. Taverns were regarded, quite seriously, as a line of defense between social order and chaos, and conventional thinking at the time assumed that women were too weak to handle such responsibility. It was rare for a woman to get licensed in rural areas with few or even just one establishment. Urban areas were another story.
Licenses were regularly granted to women in larger towns—as high as 40% of all licenses in Boston. Salinger suggests that this was because cities experienced higher demand while also hosting a much larger proportion of women-led households, meaning either widows or because certain professions (like mariners) would remove husbands from the home for extended periods.
“Taverns were regarded, quite seriously, as a line of defense between social order and chaos, and conventional thinking at the time assumed that women were too weak to handle such responsibility.”
But even in this environment, only certain subsets of women were likely to receive a license. The right boxes needed to be checked. Financial need and a lack of (male) support were large factors. Widows, for instance, were far more likely to be granted licenses so that they could achieve some means of independent income, like the wives and daughters who inherited brewing equipment in previous decades. Licensing widows was therefore a self-serving trend for colonial authorities, as destitute women were more likely to require public welfare services.
But even then, licenses were not created equal. Authorities regularly attached stipulations about what beverages a licensee could sell, what price they could charge, and even that they could only sell out-of-doors—meaning they were denied actual premises and were only allowed to sell off the street. While women could theoretically be granted any type of license, Salinger’s research shows that over time in Boston, they increasingly received less lucrative and more restrictive licenses than men.
When Sarah re-applied for her tavern license in 1677, both her status as a recent widow and the fact that she had upheld the responsibilities of tavern ownership for months already (if not longer) would have been instrumental in her approval.
It’s not always enough, however, to get a foot in the door. The same biases that limited womens’ access to taverns and beer production in 17th-century Boston also subjected them to strict scrutiny by authorities. Sarah probably witnessed an extreme example of the stakes for women tavernkeepers around the time she and John had first opened their establishment. A widowed Boston tavernkeeper named Alice Thomas was brought before the Suffolk County Court in 1672 on a litany of alcohol-related charges, including selling liquors outside the scope of her license, selling on Sundays, and accommodating the wrong sorts of patrons—namely “unfree” servants, children, criminals, and characters known for their “carnall wickedness.”
Thomas had betrayed her covenant with Puritan social order so egregiously that the court made an example of her. In addition to fines and jail time, Thomas was forced to stand upon the public gallows for an hour with a noose around her neck, and later pulled through the streets behind a wagon while being whipped. According to Salinger, these forms of public shaming were designed to reaffirm the Court’s power.
Such a barbaric display feels alien to contemporary eyes, but it’s not. Systems designed to unfairly filter the marginalized from access to beer spaces have simply changed shape. Women still face gendered obstacles and scrutiny on the road to business ownership in brewing, and in other industries. They generally receive less bonus pay and earn less on real estate investment, contributing to lifelong deficits in wealth compared to male counterparts. All that makes it less likely that single women will start their own businesses—breweries or otherwise. What’s more, research from Yale University’s School of Management concluded that when women launch startups, they ultimately own 39 cents of founder equity for every dollar going to male founders. Women’s lower lifetime wealth accumulation and levels of company equity, relative to men, help explain why it’s still rare for single women to own their own breweries.
“I never applied for credit cards because that’s just not something poor people do. Extending yourself beyond your means and not having the cash in your bank account, you don’t do that. I would be incredibly afraid to go to the bank and ask for a loan on top of just checking the box saying ‘Black and female.’”
Just ask Sarah Perez, brewer at Maui Brewing Co. in Kihei, Hawaii. Despite decades of experience in the brewing industry, Perez says financial hurdles have thus far kept her from opening her own brewery.
“For sure, I’ve definitely wanted to own a brewery or brewpub even,” Perez says. “But you can’t take your clout and ‘people who know you’ into the bank for a loan.”Perez says that her identity as a divorced, Black woman raised by poor white parents is a large part of her trepidation when it comes to interacting with banks and lenders. She worries they may be less willing to lend to her, or will lend to her on less favorable terms, because of those factors. Many Black entrepreneurs share her sentiment: Research from the University of North Carolina’s Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise in 2020 found Black entrepreneurs are about three times more likely to not apply for credit due to fear of credit denial.
“I never applied for credit cards because that’s just not something poor people do. Extending yourself beyond your means and not having the cash in your bank account, you don’t do that,” she says. “I would be incredibly afraid to go to the bank and ask for a loan on top of just checking the box saying ‘Black and female.’”
Perez says she’s even been told by a realtor that she should be careful which mortgage lenders she works with, and to seek out “banks that are interested in making sure that their numbers are [racially] balanced.”Her trepidation about asking for brewery funding as a woman is founded. A 2021 Fundera/NerdWallet analysis of funding for women entrepreneurs concluded that, “There is a consistent and systemic disparity in how men and women entrepreneurs can finance their small businesses. Women receive fewer, smaller loans for higher interest rates, and this doubtless contributes to their disproportionately small influence over the national economy.” Wholly women-owned companies have for the past decade received about 2% of all venture capital funding in the U.S., according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. Even among Small Business Administration loans—intended to help new, small businesses—women receive 2.5 times less money than men do, according to the Fundera/NerdWallet report.
“I have the drive and the hustle to do business, but I don’t know what pulls me to the other side saying ‘no,’” Perez says.
Michelle Foik, co-owner of ERIS Brewery and Cider House in Chicago, Illinois, has reached the owner side of the process. She owns ERIS with business partner Katy Pizza, whose husband, Nunzino, introduced the two women. Foik grew up in a family that owned a hotel and restaurant in Wisconsin, and she began working in the family business as a dishwasher and busser at 13 years old. She hasn’t left the hospitality industry since, working at bars, restaurants, and breweries from TGI Friday’s to Goose Island Beer Co. to Revolution Brewing in the subsequent decades.
All that experience, Foik says, did give some investors confidence in her ability to run ERIS. But her co-founder’s husband, who does not have an operational role in ERIS but previously owned a hop farm, was equally responsible for bringing in investors. Even though ERIS is co-owned by two women, one of their husbands still played a vital role in establishing the business. “We did get some of the money because of Nunzino. … I decided to be with someone that is also known in the industry for making financial decisions for investors very well,” Foik says. “But I think a lot of the Revolution investors involved in ERIS came because of me.”
It’s impossible for Perez, Foik, or anyone else to know exactly how their journey to opening a brewery would be different if they happened to be of a different gender, or race, or class. Yet there are moments when gender explicitly comes to the fore: Foik says the woman who headed the department of the bank that ERIS worked with stated she was enthusiastic about their business precisely because it was woman-owned.“She said, ‘This is what we need. We need more of this.’… She was behind us 100%,” Foik says.
But Foik also describes a negative experience with a city official who she says condescended to her and Pizza because they were women; after meeting with them to tour their facility, that official later apologized for underestimating their business plan. In moments like that, Foik says she was grateful to have fellow brewery owners, both men and women, that she could talk to, and to ask whether they’d encountered similar experiences.
“I wanted to know: Is this typical, or is it just because it’s us?” Foik says.
Sarah Frankes might have asked herself similar questions. When her license was renewed in April 1677, there was a catch. Sarah could only operate her public house provided that “Samuell Bosworth keepe [her] house or some other carefull & suffitient man to manage it.” Though no reason was specified, colonial authorities decided that Frankes was not responsible enough to operate her business without male supervision. The move may not have been exclusively motivated by Frankes’ gender—two male licensees in that same session were also saddled with supervision. But the record doesn’t rule out her gender as a factor either, and research from scholars like Salinger provides plenty of evidence that women in general faced special scrutiny and barriers during this period.
Whatever prompted the decision, Frankes apparently found it distasteful. She operated under supervision for a year, but when her license was renewed again in April 1678, she promptly executed a plan to lend out her business instead of operating it herself. She signed a contract with three local men for the use of her license and brewing equipment in exchange for 40 pounds per year in rent, including stipulations about assuming responsibility for taxes and legal matters, bond against the value of her equipment, etc. As McWilliams points out, this type of complex business arrangement demonstrated the growing sophistication of Massachusetts’ brewing industry and, like her equipment itself, demonstrates that Sarah Frankes was part of a vanguard advancing colonial brewing.
That wasn’t exactly true of her lendees. The three men leapt into the brewing business but, perhaps like the modern stereotype of the overeager homebrewer trying to go pro, not a single one knew how to make decent beer at scale. Joseph Eliott, who was tasked with the actual brewing, produced such dreadful beer that they were shut down before six months had passed. Eliott’s beer was so reviled by the community that he fled town.
The remaining partners hired another man for the job, but his beer proved even worse. The whole debacle wound up in court, where numerous North End residents testified to the “disatisfactory” nature of the beer. Given the important social responsibilities placed on taverns to provide both service and order to the community, authorities ordered their tavern sign taken down, fined them, and assembled a grand jury to decide whether their license should be revoked. They decided it should.
A contract, however, was a contract. The partners still owed Frankes payment for rent and her equipment, so back to court they went. Frankes won easily. Joseph Rock, another of the partners, appealed to try and weasel out of payment, blaming Elliot for the tavern’s failures. He added a nasty swipe at Frankes for good measure, saying he could not “but take notice of Mrs. Frankes great ingratitude to the Town and Court…in assigneing [her license] to such an one as neither Court nor Town would approve of…” In other words: How dare she delegate her license to incompetent people (like me)!
Rock did manage to avoid some penalties by returning Frankes’ brewing equipment to her, but most of his complaints to the court about “the grasping nature of the widow Frankes” fell on deaf ears.
Frankes’ debacle renting out her business demonstrates how quickly the Boston community might turn on substandard brewers, and in turn underscores Frankes’ own competence. She had taken over after her husband died and had run the business for over a year without alienating the community. What’s more, Frankes’ license was again renewed in April 1679, a clear sign that despite her links to Boston’s three earliest stooges, local authorities still trusted her … to an extent, at least. The former stipulation that a man supervise her tavern was once again imposed.
We don’t know exactly where Sarah Frankes went from there. All we can say from the records we’ve found is that by the time she passed away in 1694, Sarah Frankes had left the tavernkeeping business to run a general store, much like her father had done. Estate records list no brewing equipment among her possessions, though it’s unclear when and why she sold them.
While there is so much we can’t know about Frankes’ daily navigation of the male-dominated society in which she lived, the details we do know paint a picture of a determined, capable woman who contributed greatly to the economy and social life of her community. They also show her to be a beneficiary of Britain’s vast and brutal colonial empire. Her contemporaries, Mary Lisle after her, and countless others since then have lived a similarly double-edged lives, either implicitly or explicitly reconciling their own web of marginalization and privilege. Women brewery owners today do, too.
But in excavating what we can of these histories, contemporary champions of women in beer must ask what conditions would enable even greater participation for women—especially those with fewer financial resources—to continue in the spirit of Lisle and Frankes. The industry is eager for women to participate, but larger socioeconomic forces have always to some degree constrained the choices women are able to make about business ownership.
Miller Lite’s Mary Lisle cans, limited in scope as they were, are an example of what it would look like not merely to celebrate colonial women brewers as some sort of proto-#girlboss. They acknowledge the barriers women still face to break into brewing, and benefit groups that aim to tear them down. It’s a modest start—one that Sarah Frankes might have something to say about.
Words by Kate Bernot and Brian AlbertsIllustrations by Colette Holston
