Female brewers hope their pink ale encourages more Hong Kong women to create, and drink, beer
- Pink Boots Society’s Hong Kong chapter teamed up with a craft brewery to create a beer, Resting Bitch Face, to encourage more women to drink and brew the stuff
- ‘The idea was to make something that looks like a stereotypically female drink, but is actually strong, pungent, dry and sour,’ co-chair Stella Lo explains
Stella Lo Yin-ting pries the top off an amber bottle, pours a carmine-coloured drink into her beer glass and takes a sip. She examines the label, gazing at her own likeness rendered in cartoon form alongside those of the beer’s other creators.
“I’m happy with how this turned out,” she says. Her smile contrasts with the drink’s name: Resting Bitch Face, or RBF, a phrase used to describe someone (most commonly a woman) with a neutral facial expression which others interpret as angry or unfriendly.
A beer enthusiast and brand ambassador for Hong Kong-based Young Master Brewery, Lo is one of the leaders of the Hong Kong chapter of the Pink Boots Society, an all-woman brewing collective founded in the United States to promote women’s participation in the brewing industry.
The society teamed up with Yardley Brothers Beer, another Hong Kong brewer, to produce the limited-edition Imperial sour ale; raspberries give it its distinctive hue. The Hong Kong public can try the beer for themselves this weekend at its launch party at The Globe pub in Central.
The Pink Boots Society’s goal is to dispel sexism around women’s drinking habits and bring greater equality to the brewing industry, and creating a pink beer might seem to run counter to those aims. However, in the same way that the name of the beer subverts a sexist phrase, the colour is a bit of a Trojan horse too.
