![]() ![]() “I fully understand that eyes are on me as the first African-American master blender in history, and I embrace that responsibility - but I don’t focus on it.”ĭealing with residual sexism in the industry is hard enough - for many women distillers, the problem is not their co-workers, but their customers, especially men who bristle at the possibility that a woman might know more about whiskey than they do.īut she recounted her frustration when, during a public event where Mr. “I think we have been an example in this industry by showing that women can carry these roles and not just be a figurehead,” she said. Butler its blender of the year, but she said she still sometimes worries about how people perceive her, especially as a Black woman. ![]() It’s a paradox that weighs especially heavy on Victoria Eady Butler, the master blender at Uncle Nearest, a Tennessee distillery founded by the entrepreneur Fawn Weaver in 2017. Austin and the Milam & Greene team, who say they want to be respected for their achievements, not their gender - but also recognize that their standing makes them role models, with a responsibility to support other women trying to break in. That tension is a challenge for women like Ms. “The most dramatic inequity in pay and the most dramatically misogynistic corporate cultures, but I have also experienced an industry that has elected to have me as a leader multiple times.” “In moving to the whiskey industry, I’ve experienced the best and the worst,” she said. Austin, 37, helped found the New York State Distillers Guild in 2013, and later worked with Dave Pickerell, a consultant who jump-started dozens of craft distilleries, and at the sprawling Tullamore Distillery in Ireland. She studied chemical engineering in college and was working for a wastewater-treatment company in New York City when, in the early 2010s, she started volunteering at the Kings County Distillery in Brooklyn. Heilmann have opened doors for younger women distillers, many of whom arrive with technical training in chemistry and engineering - important assets, they say, for breaking through what can still seem like an old boys’ network.Īmong them is Nicole Austin. That keen sense can be a big asset when you’re trying to decide if a fermentation is ready, or if you need to tweak the spice notes in a batch of whiskey. Bartoshuk, a professor of food science at the University of Florida, estimates that 35 percent of women qualify as what she calls supertasters, while only 15 percent of men do. Scientists have long known that women have more nuanced senses of smell than men - Linda M. There’s a reason besides hard work that women make natural distillers and blenders. In his book “ Whiskey Women,” Fred Minnick writes that women in medieval Europe used their distilling acumen to make medicine, but were also persecuted when those same skills were denounced as black magic. “What’s different today is that they’re getting recognition for the contributions they made through time.”ĭistilling used to be considered women’s work, part of their duties around the hearth and home. “There have always been women in the industry,” said Andrea Wilson, the master of maturation at Michter’s, a distillery in Louisville, Ky. In the process, they’re not just getting long-deserved credit - they are reshaping what remains a male-dominated profession. In the last few years, though, women have started to take on leadership roles in production - distilling and blending - at corporate operations like the Cascade Hollow Distilling Company in Tennessee and start-ups like Milam & Greene. Similar stories abound in the American whiskey business, where women have long played a quiet and underappreciated role, often in places like the bottling line or the marketing department. And three years after that first, frosty reception, they find themselves not just accepted, but celebrated by other Texas distillers. Undaunted, the Milam & Greene team persevered, winning competitions and critical acclaim, including an award at the Texas Whiskey Festival in April. ![]() “There were literally complaints, like, ‘Why are they in here?’” Ms. But it didn’t help that all three of them - Marsha Milam, an entrepreneur Heather Greene, the chief executive and master blender and Marlene Holmes, the master distiller - were women, trying to make it in an industry well known for its assertive, sometimes aggressive masculinity. The cold shoulder might have come because they were new to the scene, or because a portion of their whiskey was made outside Texas. They were excited to introduce their new whiskey, until they found their assigned table - stuck in a corner, far from the action. In 2018, the three founders of Milam & Greene, a distillery in Blanco, Texas, made their first trip to the San Antonio Cocktail Conference, one of the state’s largest gatherings of bartenders, distillers and their legions of fans. ![]()
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