Now in its ninth year, the SheBrew Beer and Cider Festival will be held Sunday in Southeast Portland, celebrating female professional brewers and homebrewers while continuing to build on the strides they have made in the traditionally male-dominated industry.

The festival itself is a testament to the efforts of the brewers and their community, growing from a first year that featured 10 homebrewers, a smattering of professionals showing their support and about 50 attendees.

It has grown annually, with this year being split into two sessions at The Redd on Salmon Street to accommodate an anticipated record crowd of 1,500 coming to sample the offerings from over 50 female-identifying professional brewers and 10 homebrewers.

Professional brewers will include Natalie Baldwin of Wayfinder Beer, Anna Buxton of Steeplejack Brewing, Tonya Cornett of 10 Barrel Brewing, Whitney Burnside of Grand Fir Brewing and Madeleine McCarthy of Von Ebert Brewing.

Seven ciders are in the mix this year, along with a hop water, two gluten-free beers, a wine spritz and a wine radler. The festival doubles as a showcase for female makers and artisans, featuring vendors who craft everything from jewelry to board games. Local food trucks Salvi PDX and Hearth & Soul Pizza will provide food for the festival.

SheBrew also will announce the Best in Show winner of the National Homebrew Competition, held this past weekend at Zoiglaus Brewing in Southeast Portland. The winner among the 86 entries earns the opportunity to collaborate on a beer with Baldwin. Additionally, 10 homebrewers featured at SheBrew compete for the People’s Choice award, selected by festivalgoers, with the winner brewing with McCarthy.

The event is a benefit for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, and the Oregon Brew Crew, a Portland homebrewing and educational nonprofit. The nonprofit event has no paid staffers, instead relying on the work of volunteers and donated efforts of outfits like Day One Distribution, a Portland beverage distributor that handles keg deliveries, storage and clean-up for the event.

Jenn McPoland, a co-founder and one of three SheBrew organizers, along with partners Shannon Scott and Christine Garcia, says the festival grows more popular every year because it’s a unique event that’s not just about the beer, but rather it celebrates the brewers themselves.

“We’re not the average ‘come and drink beer and get drunk’ fest,” she said. “We’re a beer fest that’s also a fundraiser, then we have female makers where we’re very selective about who we invite. It’s cool stuff made by local women.

“People talk all the time about how they go to our fest and it just feels different,” she said. “It’s really inclusive; it’s super chill.”

And the SheBrew taplist features a diversity of styles, not just a collection of IPAs.

“There’s like three IPAs, but they’re all different, and there’s two hazies, but they’re also very different,” she said, adding that the list features offerings such as numerous types of rice lagers, classic pub styles and “super wild and crazy stuff.”

GET TO KNOW THE BREWERS

Here are three brewers who have brewed for this weekend’s events:

Sonia Marie Leikam, founder and brewer at Southeast Portland’s Leikam Brewing, brewed Papa Don’t Preach, a hazy pale ale with passionfruit, mango and habanero.

Leikam illustrates the quintessential homebrewer success story. “We were classic homebrewers, making beer in the backyard,” she says, “and people kept telling us, ‘Oh, I love your beer. You should start a brewery.’” So in 2014 she did, and together she and husband Theo Leikam now run Southeast Portland’s Leikam Brewery, which opened its taproom in 2019 in the Mount Tabor neighborhood. And yes, it’s known as Portland’s only kosher brewery, but it’s also a place that is thoughtful and community-based.

SheBrew is part of that community, Leikam says. She has participated since the very first SheBrew, and she says that inaugural event was one of the first opportunities for women brewers to be able to step into the spotlight to a larger audience.

“We’ve been pretty lucky here in the Portland area and Oregon in general, in that we actually have a community of women, which is a little unusual,” she says about the brewing community. “But this really has been an opportunity for women producers to actually shine in front of the public. Because that doesn’t happen very often.

“There’s been a lot of work done in the creation of internships and opportunities for growth, both with scholarship, but also mentorship,” she says. “I think that’s the biggest piece that this competition also offers, that it’s connected to the largest homebrewing competition for women in the nation. It offers an opportunity for us as professionals to also be able to support and mentor women homebrewers.”

Leikam says she believes there’s better infrastructure of resources now for businesses to tap. But 10 years ago, SheBrew was the first space where she felt she really belonged.

“I was not only welcomed but enthusiastically welcomed, and there was excitement about me being in the beer space,” she says. “It’s a really special event. I think people know that.”

Jennifer Gregory, co-founder and brewer at Dragon’s Gate Brewery in Milton-Freewater, brewed Faerie Bones, a Belgian white ale brewed with blueberries and Crocket Road lavender.

Finding a brewing community can be difficult for a woman in Milton-Freewater, the Umatilla County city.

Gregory, who co-founded Dragon’s Gate in 2012 with her husband Adam, found that connection in the Pink Boots Society, an international nonprofit that supports women and nonbinary people in the fermented beverages industry. But being in northeastern Oregon made consistent participation difficult.

“It’s really neat being a part of Pink Boots,” she says. “But being on the other side of the state, you just get disconnected.”

Her first SheBrew last year changed that.

“I met some fantastic ladies last year, and we’ve been keeping in touch,” she says. “That’s been great.”

Dragon’s Gate is a small, farmhouse brewery that’s open to the public on weekends, when it offers its Belgian style beers. Two months before the pandemic hit, the Gregorys bought four acres of property along Oregon 11 near the farm, and this year they hope to build and open a tasting room so they can be open six or seven days a week.

She and her husband both brew, and she said their beers have started to build a reputation, with people traveling from as far away as Seattle to sample them on weekends. But visitors often assume Adam is the brewer.

“It’s fun because you get eyebrows raised sometimes when I tell people I brewed the beer,” she says. “Or sometimes they’ll immediately start talking to Adam, and he’ll say no, actually my wife brewed that.”

Jess Hardie, co-founder and brewer at TPK Brewing of Portland, brewed Improvised Weapon — Guava, a light, easy-drinking ale with wheat, Willamette and Cascade hops, and “a hoard of guava.”

Hardie is among a new wave of female brewers whose energy and creativity is invigorating the brewing world, regardless of gender. In October of 2023, she and business partners Elliott Kaplan and Dana Ebert together opened TPK Brewing with a fresh idea: Pair beer with an immersive tabletop roleplaying experience.

Since then, the brewpub in Southeast Portland’s Mount Tabor neighborhood has hosted packed houses of beer lovers and Dungeons & Dragons fans, among other games hosted by TPK game masters. Hardie crafts the beers she makes to pair with characters or experiences within the games being played at TPK.

“It’s been really fun, busy, especially getting to know the community and getting used to timing beers and releases with when they meet the character in game,” she says of TPK’s first year. “It’s been really fun. Things have been good.”

Hardie says events like SheBrew help women brewers continue to make progress on the issues they have historically faced in the industry.

“The louder we are and the more allies we have to call out problematic things as we see them has definitely helped over the years,” she says. “As a community, people have been more comfortable calling it out versus, you know, that’s just the industry.

“Like, no, actually this is not cool,” Hardie says. “Especially as we see more women in management roles or in roles where they’re heard and their voices are uplifted, we feel more comfortable saying, you know what, that collab you want to do with that brewery, I’m not doing it. I don’t support what they have done in the past.”

“We’re not the average ‘come and drink beer and get drunk’ fest. We’re a beer fest that’s also a fundraiser, then we have female makers where we’re very selective about who we invite. It’s cool stuff made by local women.”

— Jenn McPoland, SheBrew co-founder