The issue with this type of article is that it's less interested in being an accurate depiction of reality than it is feeding certain popular narratives. There

The issue with this type of article is that it's less interested in being an accurate depiction of reality than it is feeding certain popular narratives. There's a kernel of truth: women in many cultures held responsibility for food preparation, and beer was an important method of preparing and preserving food. Brewsters are thus an essential part of the history of brewing. You can go too far in this--men also made plenty of beer (e.g. monastic), but it's true that beer-making was feminine-coded until the early modern era. But there is absolutely no evidence that accusations of witchcraft were used to murder innocent brewsters so that dastardly men could come and dominate the market. What does the article attribute this to? > Just as women were establishing their foothold in the beer markets of England, Ireland and the rest of Europe, the Inquisition began. This makes no sense at all. The Inquisition wasn't some universal phenomenon that swept the entirety of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals: it was a locally scoped institution centered on Catholic Mediterranean countries, particularly Spain. Catholic Ireland barely experienced it owing to separation from the continent, and Protestant England didn't have one at all. Let's be generous, though, and reinterpret this sloppiness as "men used the religious turmoil at the time to accuse women of witchcraft with a renewed salience." Indeed, the article says: > To reduce their competition in the beer trade, these men accused female brewers of being witches and using their cauldrons to brew up magic potions instead of booze. With "these men accused female brewers of being witches" being a link to https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/the-dark-history-of-women-witches-and-beer https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/the-dark-history-of-wo...! Wonderful, maybe some concrete evidence. But as we click on it to find out about these accusations, it turns out the article doesn't even make a claim that female brewers were accused of being witches, let alone provide evidence that it happened. It's a flimsy series of unsupported claims only held together by the hope that readers will turn off their critical thinking because it's being published on smithsonianmag.com, and the knowledge that anyone calling out its flimsiness will be accused of being a misogynist. Of course, for every one person who realizes the article is nonsense, a hundred people will now know for a fact that women invented beer and witchcraft was used to steal beer from women because the Smithsonian said so.