It was Steve Huxley, a Liverpudlian and long-term Barcelona resident, who introduced the city to craft beer when he opened the Barcelona Brewing Company in 1993, but it was a woman, Judit Cartex, who helped establish Barcelona as Spain’s craft beer capital.
“Beer has always been a part of my life,” she says. “We were poor and all we had to drink was tap water, no Coca-Cola. Except on Sundays my mother and grandmother would open a litre bottle of beer to watch football on TV. Very English, no?
“It was Steve who opened our eyes to the possibilities of craft beer, not just in Barcelona but in the rest of Spain,” says Cartex, who learned her trade from Huxley and ran her own brewery, Cerveza Barra, until the floor collapsed and the building was condemned.
“As a brewer you feel you’re contributing to the common good. It’s not a job, it’s a vocation,” says Covadonga García Pérez, 24, one of many female brewers in this traditionally male world. She brews at La Textil, a sleek new brew pub in central Barcelona that is also a restaurant and a music venue.
García Pérez is collaborating with another young woman, Cristina Fernández Romero, 27, who usually works at Espiga, a brewery just outside the city, but has joined her at La Textil on a brewing project.
They have named their new beer Punto Violeta after the campaign to provide safe public places for women who are being harassed.
“We want to reflect that women are welcome with open arms in the world of craft brewing,” they said.
Respectively from Asturias and Madrid, the two ended up in Barcelona because “this is where it all began and where there are more craft beer bars and breweries”.
Fernández Romero says she became interested in brewing during her Erasmus year in the Czech Republic, where she was astonished at the range of different beers.
“I was amazed that using the same products you could make so many different kinds of beer,” she says.
A hundred miles from Barcelona, Quiònia Pujol has taken things a step further, brewing beer from barley and hops she grows on her farm in the village of Almacelles.
“I don’t drink commercial beer and when we started this in 2013 it was in order to make beer that I want to drink,” says Pujol. “We grow everything we need to make ecological craft beer. A beer farm like this is unique in Spain and possibly in Europe.”
Pujol sells about half the Cervesa Lo Vilot she produces to bars in Barcelona. She dismisses the concept of a distinctively female brew, a view shared by Cartex, now director of the brewers’ convention InnBrew, who says: “I don’t think women make different or better beer. The difference is men don’t like to admit they don’t know something but women aren’t afraid to ask, so we learn more.”
Cartex is typically forthright when asked about misogyny in the hitherto male milieu of craft beer.
“I worked in construction, I play football, I ride a motorbike, I was a drummer in a rock band – all very male worlds,” she says. “As a woman in the craft beer scene, I’ve never had a problem. I’m 53 and I’m a big woman with a lot of attitude and I don’t take shit from anyone. It might not be the same for younger women.”
However, far from encountering opposition, the young brewers collaborating at La Textil say that men are glad to see more women in the business.
“What I like is that, when it comes to things that are physically challenging, male colleagues, instead of saying: ‘I’ll do it’, help me find a solution so I can do it myself,” says Fernández Romero.
“It’s a dream doing this job,” she adds. “I feel like I’ve found my place in the world. We’re making something that makes people happy, something they can share.”
