Biography

TERI FAHRENDORF
Brewmaster, Road Brewer, Founder of Pink Boots Society

In 1989, Teri became the second woman brewmaster at a craft brewery in the USA. She was the first woman brewmaster at a California craft brewery, and the first at an Oregon craft brewery.

Teri brewed professionally 1988-2007. Her brewing career included Sieben's River North Brewpub in Chicago; Golden Gate Brewing Company in Berkeley, California; Triple Rock Brewing Company in Berkeley, California; and Steelhead Brewing Company's five locations in Oregon and California.

In 2007, after 17 years with Steelhead, Teri departed on a five-month road trip across the USA and back, visiting 70 breweries and three distilleries along the way. During this epic adventure of beery discovery, Teri participated in 38 brews and two distillations.

The most amazing part of her journey was the hospitality extended by the brewers who invited her to visit them. Many had never met Teri, yet they invited her into their breweries and their homes, generously sharing food, beer, their families and their personal lives.

Many packaging breweries along the way gifted Teri with cases of bottled beer to take with her. Due to their generous contributions (and space under her trailer's kitchen table), Teri was able to extend the beer giving, by exposing rare beers to brewers down the road who lived outside of those beers' normal distribution regions. Teri documented her adventure live from the road on her blog, www.roadbrewer.com.

Many times during her journey Teri was asked, "How many women brewers are there?" Not knowing the answer, Teri founded the Pink Boots Society and was determined to collect the names and contact information for all women brewers worldwide. This list of women brewers can be found at www.pinkbootssociety.com.

Teri continues her career in the beer industry as President of the Pink Boots Society, an international charitable trade organization created to inspire, encourage, and empower women to become professionals in the Beer Industry. She is currently underemployed as a beer store clerk, by choice, in order to get this ground-breaking organization up and running.

Over the 19 years of her active brewing career, Teri was involved in the hiring and/or training of 44 new brewers. She affectionately refers to these talented brewers as graduates of "Triple Rock Brewing School" or the "Steelhead School of Practical Brewing."

Teri has been a technical speaker at many beer industry conferences, and has written technical articles for brewing trade magazines and books. Many of her articles can be found on this website. (See links in left column.)

She is a 1988 Diploma graduate of the Siebel Institute of Brewing Technology in Chicago, where she was voted Class President; the first woman class president in Siebel's history.

Born in New York, but raised in Wisconsin, Teri believes her brewing career is a natural outgrowth of her childhood fascination with yeast. She made her first loaf of homemade bread at ten, and began fermenting fruit wines and meads while attending the University of Wisconsin. In 1985, Teri switched to brewing beer and never looked back.

Previous to her brewing career, Teri was a systems analyst for Unisys Corporation in San Francisco, a Fortune 100 company at the time.

She enjoys spending time with her husband (former Brewmaster Jon Graber), playing German boardgames, cooking, writing, scootering on her Yamaha Vino 125, and hiking to Oregon's many magnificent waterfalls.

For more information, please see Teri's Resume.

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