CHEERS TO WOMEN IN SUPPLY CHAIN!

March is a month when we celebrate International Women’s Day, and we celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. We are celebrating and embracing our differences and remind ourselves that no job has a gender, and that great performance and innovation knows no gender, age, religion or race.

We are sharing with you today an interesting story on the history of Beer and the role of women in Brewing.

It is an established fact that women were the first brewers. Already 6.000 years ago women were brewing beer in ancient Mesopotamia. Sumerian female priestesses brew beer and worshipped Ninkasi – the goddess of beer. Brewing beer could also be quite a career, and Sumerian queen Kubaba jumped several job-levels from brewer to queen thanks to her great beers.

The Egyptians further evolved the Sumerian brewing methods, and they too had a goddess of beer – Menqet. In their mythology beer actually saved all of mankind. The sun god Ra asked his daughter Sekhmet to destroy everyone on earth, but when she had a drink of beer she turned in to a kind and gentle friend of humanity. So, beer truly helps settles our differences.

Thousands of years later, a woman was responsible for the most important innovation in beer. Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen was a brewer and herbalist who first described using hops in beer in the 12th century. Hops enabled brewing at scale. The beer would last longer and hence you could make larger quantities at a time and ship it to different cities and even export to other countries. In that way, Hildegard’s invention was an enabler also for Heineken’s growth through global export.

The female leadership throughout the evolution of beer is not the only reason for us to celebrate gender diversity. Did you know that only the female hop plants are used in Beer production? Hops are essential to beer brewing, and it is the female hop flower that produces the famous cone-shaped hops.

Another reason to raise a glass to all the women of the Supply Chain and say THANK YOU and CHEERS!