[Women in Beer week continues today with another guest writer/interviewe,r Jamie Floyd, co-owner and brewer at Ninkasi Brewing. Jamie interviews one of the main subjects of "The Love of Beer", Tonya Cornett, the Brewmaster at Bend Brewing and role model for brewers everywhere. - Samurai Artist]
By Jamie Floyd
I want to start by saying thanks to Ezra for asking me to be a part of this. I am interviewed a lot and it has been not only enjoyable for me to get to ask a friend of mine questions I might not ever ask when we get moments to hang out, but it has also given me a new perspective on the questions asked of me. This entire series is very inspiring to me and I think it is a great exercise for our industry. I also want to again say thanks to Ezra for allowing others to do this when those of us that know him know he wants to be the one to do it. Hats off to you. Good form! All right now, let’s get to the nitty gritty, shall we?
When Tonya moved to Oregon, a mutual friend , Jim Parker, told me that she was moving to Bend to take the helm at Bend Brewing Company and that she was an incredible person and someone who would make a mark. She took on the job and dug right in. For the first couple of years Tonya hid under the radar, as she says, to a lot of folks and I tried to help her meet people in the industry. She came across as shy, but I always felt she was still just getting her feet wet, so to speak, in the industry. From the start her beers were great. Not just good, or first batch good, as we say sometimes, but really good beer. I was not the only one to notice or to encourage her, and soon Bend embraced her beers and BBC became the go-to place for locals and beer geeks when they weren’t just down the road at Deschutes. Having a brewery of the caliber of Deschutes in the hood would be very intimidating for almost anyone. Well, Tonya may have been intimidated, but she pursued her dream and, though she might not have felt that way at the time, she handled it like great brewers do, with passion, dedication, and a belief in oneself. All of us have to tackle insecurities as brewers. One of the first lessons I was taught by my peers was we are only as good as our worst beers. We wear our passion on our sleeves and we are our own worst critics.
Fast forward a few years later and we see the fully realized Tonya. She is making great beer in a town that is quickly popping up breweries left and right. Medals have blessed her shoulders and plaques awarded the brewery walls. Breweries everywhere want to brew collaboration beers with her. All of the rock stars in the industry know her by name and want to associate themselves with her, and rightly so, because she is full of “Knowledge Nuggets” as you will see from this interview. She is one of many role models to brewers female and male, and yet Tonya remains the Tonya I met years ago. She gets up and works hard, can out beer geek most people on the spot, has a great sense of humor, and can even be found at a Dead show at the Gorge (as I did a couple of summers ago) dancing off all that responsibility. She is perfectly positioned to do whatever her passions lead her to do.
But Tonya has also found her voice. She is the embodiment of a brewer in a Post-Male Dominated Industry worldview. As you will see in this interview and in the documentary, Tonya transcends gender in brewing and is a perfect example of what I have felt for a long time. Brewers are a rare ilk. Hang out in a room of us for a few hours and you will get the drift. We are passionate, creative, social, introverted, and nerdy with a Type A attitude toward neatness. We love what we do and will work hard to give the best we've got. At times we are a bit loud as a crowd. But all of this is more important to us as brewers than gender, and Tonya is a great brewer, simple and as human as it sounds. Because we as humans are brewers. For millennia women and men have brewed beer and we will for millennia more. So stop asking Tonya what it’s like to brew in a male dominated industry and ask yourself why it matters!
