OnTap Magazine

20 | Autumn 2026 | ontapmag.co.za WOMENIN BEER FEATURE JOYA TAFT DICK EXCAVATING THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF Tara Nurin has spent three decades reporting on drinks, dining, and travel as an internationally recognized journalist, educator, and speaker. Roughly half of those years she dedicated to covering beer — and women’s roles in it. She is the author of the “first book to exclusively chronicle the history of women and beer.” Tara’s work over decades to center women in the beer narrative has not only deepened our collective understanding of beer’s history, but served as a reminder to those who most needed to hear it: that women have always had a place in the brewhouse. " I didn’t realize [until recently] that a vast swath of Americans think that beer was invented in Germany in the Middle Ages by German men…That’s what a lot of people think!” Tara tells me, with wide eyes. She then continues, “Look, we don’t really know what happened back then, but assuming that historians and archeologists are right, [southern] African women invented beer, or at least made it a regularly consumed beverage, and continued it on. They started the beer- making tradition, you could say.” If anyone, Tara Nurin would know. She is the author of A Woman’s Place is in the Brewhouse: A Forgotten History of Alewives, Brewsters, Witches and CEOs . It is, in her words, “the first book to exclusively chronicle the history of women and beer.” Published in 2021, it is the product of years of research, conducted amidst an industry that was rapidly evolving around her. Tasked with capturing not only women’s (central) role in beer-brewing history from early human activity at least 100,000 years BCE in Africa, she also found herself catching up with the recent four-plus-decades of women breaking down barriers in the beer industry — in the U.S and beyond. It was a daunting but imperative challenge. What existed on the subject —of women in beer history — at the time she started her research in 2015, I wanted to know. What was she building on? The answer, in brief: not a lot. Outlets would publish articles reminding readers that ‘women brew beer too!’ followed by ‘and here are some women doing just that in your city!’ There was also professor of history Judith Bennett’s 1999 book Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 , which is about Pictures courtesy of Tara Nurin"