Why Witches Are Often Portrayed While Brewing

With pointy hats, bubbling cauldrons and broomsticks, witches are ubiquitous icons of Halloween. In recent years, a popular theory has emerged that the images we associate with witches stem from a historical smear campaign against female brewers.

The story goes that alewives once wore pointy hats to advertise themselves to potential patrons, hung brooms on their doors as a sign of an alehouse, brewed beer in cauldrons and kept cats to chase away rats nibbling on their grain. Men seeking to push women out of the growing beer industry supposedly portrayed female brewers as witches, giving rise to the imagery we associate with witchcraft today.

“The story is true, but the facts are not,” says Tara Nurin, a journalist and author of A Woman’s Place Is in the Brewhouse: A Forgotten History of Alewives, Brewsters, Witches, and CEOs. According to Nurin, misogynistic portrayals of female brewers might have cast them as witches, but modern witch iconography didn't originate with alewives.

Rather, beer historian Christina Wade says that many of the stereotypes associated with witches come from medieval persecution of heresy, long before women brewers faced discrimination in the 1500s. Still, the exclusion of women from the brewing industry did coincide with a wave of witch hysteria that swept across Europe.

"You can easily see how the two can get conflated,” says Nurin.

Women have been brewing beer and other alcoholic beverages around the world for millennia. In many societies, alcoholic beverages were sometimes safer to drink than water and provided a calorie-rich addition to a person's diet. Brewing was part of the household tasks performed by women dating back to ancient Sumer and beyond.

Beer making was largely a cottage industry, says Nurin. Alewives brewed beer for their families and sold the excess. But the economics of brewing began to change after the Black Death in the 14th century. The plague killed an estimated 25 million people in Europe, creating new business opportunities for survivors while mercantilism rose in Europe.

As businesses commercialized, local governments began to regulate food and drink. Many of these new rules alienated small-scale businesses run by women. “A really strong example is the German Purity Law of 1516,” says Nurin, which only allowed hops, barley and water to be used in Bavaria. “Women were foraging and using whatever they can find to put into their beer for flavoring. But then all of those ingredients were outlawed.”

Nurin also points to Edinburgh, Scotland, where single women were legally barred from the profession in 1546 and some were even banished from the city. Meanwhile, professional guilds formed across Europe, many of which excluded women from the trade.

“Misogyny is insidious and it's in every aspect of medieval life,” says Wade. Notably, in John Skelton’s popular 16th-century poem, "The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng," the poet describes alewife Elynour’s unkempt looks in great detail, adding that she adulterated her ale with drool and hen droppings. Other depictions in churches showed alewives as lecherous harlots cavorting with the devil and tempting men into gluttony. Concurrently, witch paranoia was intensifying in Europe.

Healing and magic have long been part of pagan lore, says Wade. During the Middle Ages, those who subscribed to these beliefs could be condemned as heretics. “A lot of the stereotypes that we assume to be associated with a witch were first associated with heretics,” she explains, and these associations predated the growing discrimination against alewives and the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Wade writes that the idea of witches flying on broomsticks can be traced back to 12th- and 13th-century pagan beliefs about magical flying women. In these depictions, women flew on staffs, animals and any number of mountable objects, not just broomsticks. Cats were also originally associated with evil and heresy before they were linked to witchcraft. The idea of animal familiars arose in England in the 16th century and included weasels, toads and bats, not only cats.

The imagery of broomsticks and cauldrons also doesn’t align with alewifery. Brewers sometimes hung an alestake, a staff with a wreath at the end, on their doors, but Wade posits that broomsticks were likely tied to witches simply because they’re a common household object. The brewing vessels that alewives used also came in a variety of shapes and sizes. They were not limited to the round, bubbly cauldrons seen in modern depictions.

Pointed hats were a later addition to witch iconography. The idea was popularized through children’s chapbooks published in the 18th century. As to where those books got the idea from, Wade says there’s no scholarly consensus. One theory suggests that the imagery came from antisemitic depictions of Jews or from the pointed hats worn by people condemned during the Spanish Inquisition. She also points out a resemblance to capotain and phrygian hats that were popular Puritan garb in the 17th century.

“Most of the time during the actual witch trials, witches are depicted wearing normal clothes like everybody else,” says Wade.

Furthermore, the idea that witch iconography stems from alewives further falls apart through Wade’s analysis of witch trials in her book The Devil in the Draught Lines: 1,000 Years of Women in Britain’s Beer History. Although some of the women tried for witchcraft were alewives, they likely weren’t specifically targeted because of their occupation. Rather, paranoia around witchcraft arose as the Black Death and Protestant Reformation conjured religious fanaticism. Independent women were easy scapegoats, particularly when new economic orders were being established.

“If men wanted to remove women from competition they could just besmirch their reputation by saying they engaged in sexual activities," says Wade. "Witch trials in England were expensive and hard to prove, so there were lots of easier ways to remove your competition."