‘It’s a vocation’: the women leading Barcelona’s craft beer revolution

theguardian.com:

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,