I've always wanted to be the kind of girl who knows something about beer - a girl who can knock back a few with the guys or order an expensive import with confidence at Eulogy or Monks. I like a good cosmo as much as the next Penn girl, don't get me wrong. But I wanted to be a connoisseur of drinks both "girly" and non, to go where few women had gone before. I wanted to break into the boys-only beer club.
And that's where Suzanne Woods came to my rescue. A self-professed beer snob and professional beer seller, Woods is on a mission to help the women of Philadelphia: you don't have to depend on your boyfriend to order beer for you!
Woods is the president and founder of In Pursuit of Ale, a beer-tasting group for Philadelphia-area women. There are truly no boys allowed: women leave their boyfriends and husbands behind every two weeks to meet at local bars and talk - what else? - beer.
"I can't sew for shit," Woods says, "But I can sit here and talk about Belgian brewing mechanisms. my whole world is beer."
I attended my first meeting of In Pursuit of Ale last month at Dock Street Brewery, a microbrewery just a few blocks from campus with great pizza and $4 craft beers. I was nervous - I knew nothing compared to Suzanne and the other club members, who huddled around the table filling out beer scorecards.
Suzanne ordered me a citrusy Curacao Double. Maybe it was the beer's higher-than-average alcohol content, but I was starting to relax. The club members were friendly and knowledgeable, and I liked Suzanne's philosophy: everyone has to start somewhere.
As the night went on and the club members made it to their third or fourth pints, Suzanne started opening up about her college days at Penn State, where she drank her share of mediocre, frat party beer. "I do have pictures of me with the occasional Miller Light in hand," she confesses.
But as craft beer became a passion, Suzanne was determined to never let her gender get in the way of being taken seriously.
"I never felt weird about it," she says. "But people tried to make me feel weird about it."
Her advice to Penn students looking to learn more about good beer? Take advantage of what Philadelphia has to offer. She says the city is the nation's capitol for Belgian beers, and a number of local bars have surprisingly extensive collections.
"It's so funny that women can think that beer is still Miller Light," she says. "I still learn something new every day. how can you get sick of beer"
