First female brewery owner & operator in the US was...?

I've never seen any citation except for Carol Stoudt; that even seemed to be the first thing said about their brewery in any article for the longest time. I have to assume it's correct.

 

Yeah, Stoudts in 87, New Glarus in 93. So you're not wrong.

 

Now if only Stoudt's was anywhere near as good as New Glarus you'd have an argument.

 

I guess that was phrased poorly and written in poor taste. Sorry, it's been a rough morning on my end.

 

Full disclosure, I know nothing about this topic, but could the thought process be something along the lines of for New Glarus, first female brewer at a standalone brewery? It extremely generous to even call it splitting hairs, but the restaurant for Stoudt's was there first, right? So they just added the brewery to the restaurant? Or was the brewery actually separate and not a "brewpub?"

Wouldn't really matter IMO, but I guess it's kind of an argument if the former. Sort of.

 

Brewery is a separate stand alone facility. The restaurant did come first and now serves the brewery's beers, but the brewery is a separate operation and in PA they actually have to sell the beer from the brewery to a wholesale distributor and the distributor then sells it to the restaurant (unless the PA laws have recently changed).

 

Well, if it was since before 1993, then I'm shit outta ideas on why the other claim is made. Unless @jesskidden has some crazy knowledge to drop, which I wouldn't doubt, then make it beer trivia I reckon.

 

Often such claims are made as a result of failure of an author to do their homework. Then others see it in print and repeat it as truth. There were women in major brewery positions before Carol Stoudt but she's the first female sole proprietor of a brewery in the US.

 

Could be. Never heard of stoudts myself. Plenty of breweries I've never heard of though. Thanks for the thread. Always cool to pick up a new fact.

 

Yeah, also it seems Carey was the Co-founder but not even the first at that. The original Dock Street brewing was also formed by a woman and her brewer husband and predates New Glarus (but did go out of business when it was sold by the original owners).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dock_Street_Brewing_Company

 

How about New Belgium and Kim Jordan? Pretty early in the game.

 

1991

 

If you're talking female owners of all time, then Cecelie (Celie) Spoetzl of Shiner Beer fame is the earliest that I know of, and she took over from her father sometime in the 50s or 60s. But she has passed on now.

 

In the post-Repeal era, "Grandma" Hornung predated Miss Celie...

As for a female brewer, Schlitz in their LA brewery had a female assistant master brewer in 1980, Marge Wyszynski, who was "believed to be the only woman brewmaster in the United States..." at the time. Googling her name will turn up a bunch of newspaper hits for the UPI story.

 

Meant to check on this the other day when this thread was still active- just doing some research (for another thread) and the oft-forgotten "co-founder" of the acknowledged first "new" craft brewery in the US, New Albion Brewing Co., Suzanne "Suzie" Stern, was referred to a "brewer" in several early articles.

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