The women brewing change in India, one beer at a time

This photograph taken on February 20, 2025 shows Varsha Bhat, a brewer, tapping beer at a brewery near Whitefield in Bengaluru. [Photo, AFP] As a fixture of India's burgeoning craft beer scene, Varsha Bhat is a rarity twice over: first as a woman who brews alcohol, and second as a woman who drinks it. Bhat is staking a claim to a male-dominated industry in a country where social mores compel most women to stay teetotal. The 38-year-old had for years weathered barbs from male peers questioning whether she had the muscles to carry hefty bags of hops or was calm enough to deal with the job's pressures. But after a decade in the industry she has risen to become head brewer at one of Bengaluru's most popular pubs, catering for the city's moneyed young tech workers. "There's nothing a woman can't do that a man can... from recipe development, to the physical work, to managing a team," Bhat told AFP. "We've taken that step to come forward and say that we can do it," she added. "There was a stigma... we're breaking those stereotypes and barriers." Bengaluru has long been renowned for a more liberal drinking culture than the rest of India -- a country where 99 percent of women do not drink, according to government figures. Its signature tech industry employs a young and highly educated workforce drawn from elite universities, often arriving without established social connections to the city. That provides a roaring trade to Bengaluru's thriving craft beer bars, with in-house breweries employing hundreds and a clientele both eager to meet new people and ready to burn money. The city's workforce is an anomaly in a country where, according to official statistics, only 25 percent of working-age women are formally employed. By comparison, they account for nearly 40 percent of those working at Bengaluru's tech firms -- a testament to the city's ability to draw ambitious women from elsewhere in India, large numbers of whom are seen chatting raucously with friends in bars after hours. Role model Among them is Lynette Pires, 32, who moved to Bengaluru to work as a pharmaceutical researcher but quickly found herself drawn to the brewing business. Her path to becoming the brewer at a burgeoning outdoor beer garden in the city's south forced her to assert herself over male colleagues who refused to take her seriously. "Standing there in mostly a male-dominated room and trying to get your opinion across or trying to get them to listen... you have to learn how to overcome that and move past it," she told AFP. Four years ago she founded the Women Brewers Collective, which, along with more than a dozen other women working in the city's brewpubs, aims to smooth the path for those who come next. "I definitely want to be a role model for other women brewers," Pires said. "That's what it's all about -- to inspire and help develop other women who are entering the industry." Bitter men, bitter beer While Bhat and Pires are trailblazers in their own city, women have been the pillars of the brewing industry since ancient times. The first recorded beer recipe is thought to have been written on a piece of clay in 1800 BC as an ode to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer. Around the same time in Mesopotamia, the Code of Hammurabi, among the earliest known laws, referred to female tavern owners. Given this history, it was "crazy and a little immature and ignorant when people say it's a man's drink", Girija Chatty, host of a podcast about India's beer industry, told AFP. Drinking is often frowned upon in India, with independence leader Mahatma Gandhi one of the most strident voices in favour of temperance and abolition. India's 1949 constitution enjoins the government to ban drinking except for "medicinal purposes", a clause largely ignored except for prohibitions imposed in some states. Even among the small minority of Indians who do drink, the divide between the sexes is stark -- nearly 15 times as many men as women imbibe, according to a government health survey published in 2022. Among the small number of women who frequent bars, that divide and its attendant social expectations are still easy to spot. Chatty cites the regular instance of waiters reflexively handing the drinks menu to any man seated at the table -- rather than the woman who asked for it in the first place. "If women can handle bitter men," she joked, "they can very well handle bitter beer."

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The women brewing change in India, one beer at a time

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