One of the blokes: Brewsters, branding and gender (in)visibility in New Zealand’s craft beer industry

Abstract

Beer drinking has long been valorised as a masculine performance and a social ritual. But as more women enter the craft beer industry, new opportunities emerge to reframe the cultural discourses around beer. With an interest in the stories women brewers (‘brewsters’) tell, we conducted interviews (n = 6), and a textual analysis of brand strategies (n = 10) used by women-owned beer brands in New Zealand. With an attention towards how gender identity factors into these narratives, we found that women largely reproduce the narrative trope of ‘authenticity’ utilised by craft brewers broadly. Gender identity is largely rendered invisible at the expense of promoting authenticity as a seemingly gender-neutral value. In New Zealand, however, these strategies must be contextualised in a cultural history in which beer drinking and national identity are fundamentally intertwined, and in ways that have has always been coded masculine. Our findings suggest that while branding can potentially enhance the visibility of women as legitimate producers of beer, New Zealand brewsters maintain craft beer as a Pākehā (White European) middle-class masculine cultural form.