Women enjoying beer

A Kansas City marketing firm has launched an initiative, and website, called Women Enjoying Beer.

One of their first events was a private tasting/focus group with the well-regarded Boulevard Brewing Co. in Kansas City.

Props to those ladies. It would be cooler if it were a more organic initiative, rather than a marketing drive, but it seems to be some of both.

Soggy Coaster has always wondered why more women don't drink craft beer. Many seem to prefer drinking wine, a fact backed up by a recent Gallup poll that the Beervana blog discussed. Only 21 percent of women named beer as their preferred alcoholic beverage.

What's wrong?

Maybe it is a lack of marketing targeted toward women or, alternately, saturation marketing targeted at men.

Women I know who have been introduced to good craft beer have developed a taste for it. There are great, approachable beers out there and beers that taste remarkably like wine. Not that the ladies can't handle something like an imperial stout or double IPA.

I suspect that beer has just been marketed to men for so long that women don't think it's for them. If Women Enjoying Beer can help change that perception, we'll all be the better for it.