Bottoms Up Down Under

I love a delicious beer even more than I love wearing a nice pair of strappy heels. Until a recent vacation in Australia, I never really felt like my love for beer was any more unusual than my penchant for strappy shoes. 

My family uses our Irish ancestry as a ready excuse to be zealous about our beer drinking. In fact, while my home-brewing dad discourages me from changing my car engine oil (why would I want to get my hands dirty?), he has encouraged my hearty drinking of good beer. So it never occurred to me that my beer drinking might actually be a challenge to my womanhood (oh, yes, I am a woman).

I know beer has traditionally been associated with men and manly things, like cavernous rooms with overstuffed black leather couches, big screen TV’s, and lots of corn chips and yelling. But I thought we had evolved to a beer drinking that could be done out in the open, by both men and women, while having real meals and real conversations.

But, when my husband and I were with some friends in Melbourne in a bustling pizzeria and I took my first sip of a Carlton Draught, I could swear music zipped to a halt, the restaurant went quiet, and my Australian friend said, "Mendi, you're drinking a beer?" She seemed both delighted, as if I had performed some unusual trick, like wiggling my ears, and disgusted, like I had just belched.

On a second occasion, after I turned down a glass of pink champagne with a strawberry floating in its effervescence in favor of a pre-dinner beer, I think I caught a wrinkled nose and an eye roll. I had to ask, "Don't women drink beer in Australia?" Their voices chimed, "Yes," while their eyes said, “Not real women.”

So, in a quiet act of rebellion, I suggested we go beer tasting a couple of times during our wine tasting tours. The first time, we visited a brewery at Healesville in the Yarra Valley that produced just one beer, White Rabbit. It’s a delicious dark ale that, like it’s name suggests, brought to mind just what a storybook beer might taste like: it was not too strong and not too mild, not too heavy and not too light—it was just right.  In fact, my friend agreed to a taste and couldn’t help but admit it was quite delicious.

Another day, we visited Red Hill brewery on the Mornington Peninsula where we tasted eight of their offerings and participated in a name-that-beer contest. The brewery says they are a “beer oasis in a sea of wine,” and their beers seemed somehow delicate no matter how dark and robust. Again, as part of my personal women-drinking-beer movement, I ordered a Weizenbock, a nice, nutty, dark beer, balanced and good. I drank my beer, glorying in its richness, as I watched some of my fellow women sipping chardonnay and mineral water, and the thought occurred, “Maybe I should just shut up and keep this all to myself.”

When I got back to the U.S., I decided to investigate. I had thought Australia was a beer drinking nation, a place where you got up in the morning and put beer on your cereal. After observing the paltry and expensive offerings in stores (up to $16 for a six pack) and the taps in restaurants (one "pub" had five selections) and my friends' astonished disgust, I thought I had better clear up my own stereotypes.

Though Australia seems to have more major breweries than the U.S., their number of microbreweries doesn't compare, something like 140 to our 1,400.  It was difficult to pinpoint how many women are drinking beer from country to country, but I was disappointed to find that only about 25% in the U.S. are imbibing and, women, even German women according to one Web site, say drinking beer is fattening and unsophisticated (what?!).

Chocolate cake is fattening too, and I don't see women giving that up in droves. And, who wouldn't want a nice chocolaty porter over a piece of humdrum chocolate cake any day of the week?

I suppose I'm just a little naive. I thought I could enjoy a nice bubbly beer without risking my womanhood or people thinking I was raised by wolves. I say, can't a woman have her cake and drink her beer too?