Seven Years of WOT
A reflection piece by Women On Tap CIC founder, Rachel Auty.
2023 marks the seventh year of Women On Tap - a passion project that has since evolved into a certified social enterprise and registered trademark. Here’s a look back at the journey so far.
How it all began…
I was sitting in Magic Rock taproom beer garden in Huddersfield with friends in the summer of 2016, and we got chatting about women drinking beer. A thought dawned on me - I’d been a beer drinker since I was old enough to drink. I remember drinking pints of cheap Mild, John Smiths, then Copper Dragon’s Golden Pippin like it was going out of fashion as a student in Nottingham in the mid-90s. I knew very few women like me. But beer has changed enormously since then. I was sitting in Magic Rock’s venue, sipping on High Wire Grapefruit in the sun and it was a far cry from the cheap ‘old men’s’ pubs in Nottingham.
I LOVED beer and all it meant to me. As someone who is, by nature, rather shy, beer has helped me understand who I really am. I’ve met some of the most wonderful people through beer-y exploits, and I’ve had countless beer experiences where I can honestly say I’ve felt truly light, free, connected, and 100% authentically myself.
And so the seed was sown. Did more women drink beer now? How could I find out about women working in the industry? Did women brew?! I wanted to find more women like me. Women On Tap was born.
2017: Year one - Humble beginnings and Melissa Cole
A two-day takeover at the then newly-opened Little Ale House in Harrogate, and it was a blast! The taps featured cask and keg from the likes of Nomadic Brewery, Atom, Steam Machine, Mallinsons, and Dancing Duck. It was a great feeling, hearing the locals learning about what was going on in the pub that weekend, and being told their pint was made by a woman.
We even got on the telly for a bit of an oddly-framed ‘beer is so popular now, even women drink it’ thing. Ah well, it helped us reach more people!
2017 was also the year I discovered the legend that is Melissa Cole. I’d got in touch with her on the off-chance: ‘Oh hey Melissa, I’m running a new festival in Yorkshire celebrating women in beer..’ ‘I’ll be there’ she said. And she was. She ran two beer tastings for us in the tiny basement of The Little Ale House and my god what a defining moment that was. What an incredible human she is. It made me stop and think we might be onto something great here.
As well as the tastings we had an exhibition of stunning artwork by local artist, Frances Payne, and we had some live, fully unplugged music in the beer garden with The Paper Waits - a Harrogate band boasting the stunning vocals of Ellie Hunzinger.
What a weekend! Would we do it again? Probably.
2018: Year two - Crowdfunded growth
Now, we ran year one on a shoestring and where we did need a bit of cash, we just paid for stuff ourselves. We knew if we wanted to repeat the event and expand it, we needed some form of dosh.
We decided to launch a crowdfunder. Crazy, right? Maybe, but nevertheless here’s the crowdfunder film, made by my wonderful friend Katie Greenhalf:
We set out to raise £500 to deliver year two, and we smashed that and our stretch target in just five days. On 5th April 2018 we successfully raised £1,825 with 65 supporters in 28 days. This was another defining moment. It honestly felt like people were nudging us on with this thing, every step of the way.
Once again hosted by The Little Ale House as the main festival venue, for year two events were held at Major Tom’s Social, North Bar Harrogate, Harrogate Brewing Co (Brewery and tap room), and Blind Jacks in Knaresborough. We also made the first ever Women On Tap beer – a salted caramel stout aptly named ‘Suffragist’ – brewed especially for the festival in collaboration with Leeds-based Nomadic Brewery in the basement of the Fox and Newt pub in Leeds. I recall making pan after pan of caramel by heating condensed milk on a single ring electric hob in that pub basement. It was a real and wholesome warm and fuzzy experience I’ll never forget. The beer was bloody delicious, too!
The enthusiasm and warmth extended to us by Katie Marriott has been instrumental in what Women On Tap has become. Thank you, Katie.
2018 was also the year we took the plunge and incorporated, becoming a proper official company, like, and a certified social enterprise.
Below is a film of the 2018 festival, made experty once again by the awesome Katie Greenhalf.
2019: Year three - Sponsorships and spreading our wings
In 2019 we went a bit bonkers. We managed to secure sponsorships from Cloudwater, North Bar, Brass Castle, Roosters, Black Sheep, Brew York, and Ilkley Brewery and suddenly it felt like we had a proper festival foundation in place. We took the event right across Harrogate, with a total of 26 events over 5 days across 13 venues, showcasing the very best in hospitality across the region, alongside creative talent & inspirational women.
2019 was also host to ‘Beer For All’ – a one-day conference in Harrogate bringing together leading voices in the beer world, showcasing new research, and tackling issues such as sexual harassment in pubs, with bold aims to positively change beer for good. We had presentations from Jaega Wise (Wild Card), Paul Jones (Cloudwater), Annabel Smith (Beer Belle), Beers Without Beards, and a Q&A with Sophie de Ronde (Burnt Mill). Oh, we’d arrived.
Another defining moment for me… mooching on round to the The Little Ale House in Harrogate after the conference with Jaega, Paul, Sophie and Annabel for a cheeky beer. HOW had we attracted all this beer talent to our home town for WOTFEST?!
2019 was also the year of Beer School, delivered by Nichola Bottomley across the festival, and for the first time we were able to commission a photographer and Nicci Peet joined us for the event, and we are still using her brilliant photographs today.
Another year, another incredible buzz from working with, reaching and celebrating even more women in beer.
This is the year we trademarked ‘Women On Tap’, too. And Katie made another film for us - watch it below.
2020: Year four - The ‘nobody puts WOT in a corner’ lockdown one
So, 2020 was WEIRD. We were busy getting on with our lives and shaping up the festival, and the whole world stopped turning. Suddenly it was April 2020 and we all found ourselves confined to our homes, many people entirely isolated, scared, everything uncertain. What the hell was going on?… why? And for how long would it all last??
I became aware of everything slowly being cancelled. Time stopped briefly and you could almost feel people doing a recce of the situation before swiftly pulling the plug on… well… absolutely everything. No one had a clue what would happen next. All we could do was watch, and wait, and try to stay well and somehow, connected…
What a horrible, horrible time.
I was keen to not make any rash decisions. Call it gut instinct or whatever. I felt like I could still do something here. More than that - I felt like I HAD to do something.
As the whole world started to work out how to shift their entire life onto Zoom, I decided we’d go ahead with the festival but pull it all online. 2020 was less about celebrating women in beer and more about caring about our community and the industry that had ground to a halt.
Looking back now, I have NO IDEA how we did it but we ran a full online festival featuring panels, beer tastings, exhibitions of creative work, music gigs, and even a brewery tour. We made everything free and we raised £1250 for Refuge. Hell, my amazing friend Katie even made a film of it all.
It’s actually in many ways really painful to watch. It still makes me cry.
To everyone who shared that experience with us, I send you love and I hope you’re doing ok. It was quite a thing we all went through xxx
2021: Year five - The rule-of-six comeback fest
Right, time to get back to the pub with our friends, yeah? Well, almost. Covid restrictions were still in place and were changing regularly. Sometime after our usual festival dates of early May, the rules would be changed again to enable some inside gathering, albeit strictly under the rule-of-six restriction.
With this in mind, we decided to nudge the festival to June. This would give us the chance to not be entirely weather dependent and to put on some events physically IN the places we loved.
We pulled it off. We mixed some in-person events across Harrogate (Poetry on Tap, pop-up beer tastings, and live chalking on pavements about sexual harassment experiences) with online events (Fat Life Drawing, Back of a Beermat writing workshop, and yoga!). For the first time we also ran our Creative Commissions scheme where we pay a series of creators to do what they love and make a new piece for digital release during the festival.
In summary, 2021 was 14 events, 20 sponsors, 1250+ participants, and more than £6.5K paid to women for their work. We also made another beer, named WOT A YEAR for obvious reasons. It was a 5.9% IPA on cask brewed again with our friends at Nomadic. And after the year we’d had, a beer has NEVER tasted so good.
2022: Year six - Back in the pubs proper
Hoorah for the most normal-feeling festival since 2019. It felt SO GOOD to be back properly! One thing we had decided after Covid was that we would always retain an element of online activity. It’s important to us to be accessible to as many people as possible, and being able to join in from anywhere is a big part of that. Making sure there are things that are subsidised and free on the programme every year is also important to us.
For 2022 WOTFEST SIX presented 30 events, delivered alongside six brand new creative commissions, nine ‘women in beer’ tap takeovers and an exhibition, all celebrating northern beer women over five days across Harrogate and beyond.
Highlights for 2022 include: a beer and cheese pairing with local beer guru Nichola Bottomley; A Conversation With Women In Beer - an ‘audience with’ style panel event featuring women in a range of roles from Track Brewing Co, Brew York, Amity, and Thornbridge; a showcase of women in music; women in beer treasure hunts, quizzes, a ‘women in film’ night, a board games day, a painting pots & beer class, drink & draw, and online life drawing.
As a special collaboration with Lucky Saint and Club Soda, we also hosted an online Mental Health First Aid workshop for women working in the beer industry with 25 funded places available.
There was another festival beer, too - this time a pineapple sour brewed with sponsor, Brew York, named ‘Pineapple Cubez’.
2023: Year seven - National expansion
So here we are - our seventh consecutive year. What a ride! For 2023 we’ve got a programme of in-person and online events and activity over a 5-day period from 24-28 May. The main development this year is that, to mark our seventh year we’re working with seven national ‘women in beer’ partners and it’s SO exciting! I’ve been watching the work of the incredible women working hard to raise women’s voices across the UK over all the years I’ve been doing WOTFEST and every one of them has inspired me. To now be able to pull together and work alongside them is a dream come true for me.
It’s unclear at this point in time what the future holds for Women On Tap CIC. I have visions and things I’d love to do but I am a bit of a dreamer and whether it can become a reality will depend on securing funding and then assigning enough time to this project to make some bigger magic happen. We shall see.
I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been involved and supported over the years - from Melissa Cole to Katie Marriott to Katie Greenhalf to all our previous and current sponsors; to all those who have ever volunteered or freelanced with us; to all the venues who have embraced what we do; to our most amazing friends; to my annually neglected, wonderfully understanding daughters to my ever-supportive partner, Andrew; and to everyone who has come along, liked a social media post, or told anyone about us, ever. THANK YOU.
Another thank you has to go out to our 2023 sponsors - Thornbridge, Harrogate Brewing Co, Turning Point and Brew York - and to our loyal Patreon crew and those who have made one-off donations this year. They are supporting us in the HARDEST of times to date, and they are the reason we have a seventh year. We’re very grateful.
As I write this, I feel more passionate about this endeavour than ever. It feels like my purpose in life is to help a craft and an industry I love to thrive, and to help make the world a better place for our next generations of women who will probably, let’s be honest, save the world. We just need to pave the way for them.
So onwards I go into the week ahead. Head held high, Berocca at the ready and one thing on my mind - WOMEN BELONG IN BEER.
Cheers!
Browse the full WOTFEST SEVEN programme here.
