Mashing in
This month, Charlotte Cook examines an often neglected aspect of diversity in the brewing industry, and asks whether we have an ableism problem
Charlotte Cook
This article is from
Spain
issue 88
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When you think about prominent brewers, who springs to mind? It’s likely to be a man, usually fairly swole from launching sacks of malt and kegs around the brewery, often tall and—almost certainly—able bodied.
Disability and brewing aren’t often talked about within the same breath. How many of us have been in a brewery and looked around and thought, “how accessible is that?” Unless you live with a disability that forces you to ask that question in almost every environment, probably not many of us. I have a disability, and it impacts my work and life quite extensively, and it affects what I can do on a day-to-day basis. Looking at me, you wouldn’t think there was anything wrong with me, but inside my tissues are being attacked by my immune system and the resulting joint pain, debilitating fatigue, and turmoil of organs being slowly disintegrated can make my work hard. I can manage to stick out the workday, only to get home and feel so exhausted I can’t face cooking dinner or even brushing my teeth. That’s just me, and with adaptations, I still have a fairly full physical ability, though often the joint pain is debilitating.
Never have I once worked in a brewery that was easily adaptable. One former employer took close to twelve months to get some steps to access the grist case that was 7ft above the ground. Up until then I had to stand on a rickety pile of pallets to simply do my job, and when I asked about it was told I needed to lay out exactly what the outcome I wanted was, despite having found a suitable set of stairs to purchase. To safely and effectively do my job was all I wanted, and yet there were still many hoops to jump through.
Designing for disability is not a new concept, eyeglasses to correct eyesight have been in use for at least 700 years, and pioneering surgery was developed to create protheses for soldiers disfigured during World War One. No one would question the need for adaptations for those with sight issues, and glasses and contact lenses are ubiquitous, yet simple adaptations within the workplace can often be torturous to procure or unacceptably othering to use.
I spoke to Dr. Andrew Cook, an Academic at the University of Dundee, who has researched the field of design for disability for sixteen years, specialising in fashion, stigma, and choice. He believes a factor which influences the lack of accessibility and difficulty in sourcing adaptations for disabled workers is a lack of creativity on the part of employers to adapt their own practices and make the most of their employee’s talents and abilities.
To explain this, he highlights two models that help us make sense of it. The first being the social model of disability, which the World Health Organisation now follows, which holds that the cause of disability is the societal and environmental barriers that prevent inclusion. This is in opposition to the medical model of disability which claims that disabilities are intrinsic to the person and are therefore problems that can be fixed. This attitude, Cook believes, needs to get in the bin.
Disability and brewing aren’t often talked about within the same breath
Rather than the condition or impairment being the problem, the true disability is the inability to adapt to or include people with disabilities. Cook uses the example of a person with a hearing impairment: they are disabled because the world isn’t designed for their abilities, and if BSL was taught in schools, with audible information also communicated visually, then d/Deaf people wouldn’t be disabled by social structures.
This leads us neatly on to ableism, which assumes that everyone is “normal” and free of impairment, and if your baseline for design doesn’t acknowledge these impairments, everything you design will inherently exclude and disable them. This is seen frequently in job postings for brewery jobs. “The ability to stand for long hours”. “The ability to lift 50kg”. “The ability to lift weights up ladders”. These posts reek of a pernicious and universal ableism that has not been challenged or addressed in my years in the industry.
Even when adaptations are made in spaces, people with disabilities are often not consulted on the full gamut of what is needed, and this does directly impact their ability to interact with the alcohol industry. To cite the example of serious cultural venues, Cook told me that in previous weeks he had attended a literary festival, with ramps giving access to the venue space, but not to the bar. The assumption that no one in a wheelchair would have any need to get to the bar or to make that bar space accessible to them again infantilises people with disabilities and places a wider social assumption upon them that they cannot or should not drink. Even beyond alcohol, people with disabilities require access to spaces in order to independently make choices about what they consume.
When adaptations are made in workplaces the medical model dominates the aesthetic and design choices, with objects like hearing aids being described by author Bela Bathurst as “hernia gusset beige”. This anonymises and stigmatises users, as if that disability is something to be hidden, and that discretion fosters stigma. Even the glasses I spoke about earlier in the article used to be designed to be invisible, to hide the fact that the user required a medical device. Now we can go into an optician and see thousands of choices of frames, and glasses can be used to tell the world who you are as an expression of personality, not something to be hidden, yet within the workplace adaptations are expected to be discrete and not impact upon the environment for others.
The true disability is the inability to adapt to or include people with disabilities
Cook is currently designing a lab coat that is wheelchair friendly. A lab coat is something that every brewer requires as handling corrosive and irritating chemicals necessitates it. He explained that in the course of his research alongside fellow designer Graham Pullin one of their most striking discoveries was how othering it was to be unable to wear a lab coat, or to have to wear something that does not fit or looks different to the other workers in the lab. This necessitates that they design something that looks like a lab coat but does not hide its adaptations that mean it can function with a wheelchair. Equally as othering in breweries is the assumption that women or people with disabilities will wear the standard issue PPE. These are almost always designed for men and can be intensely uncomfortable if they do not fit correctly, and this has a direct impact on people’s ability to work. If you’re uncomfortable and constantly adjusting your clothing you cannot focus as well, making the job harder and accidents more likely. My hips are covered in scars from chemical burns when I’ve had to adjust my ill-fitting PPE after handling chemicals, only to realise when the burning starts, and the damage has been done.
Further to this, adaptations are often designed without contributions from the people whose disability they’re supposed to accommodate. Cook describes the people that he works with as “mentors” as they genuinely lead him and Pullin as they are designing, and he laments the astonishing act of ego that exists when people think they can design for disability without designing with people with disabilities in a meaningful way. Within the brewing industry people are expected to make do, find their own solutions and are often not empowered by their employer to ask for adaptations. There still exists an attitude of earning ones' brewing boots through the same process the higher up brewers did, including doing all the heavy lifting jobs. Whilst brewing will always be a physical job, there exists an attitude that forgoes PPE and where dominance in their hierarchy is achieved through demonstrating brute strength. Who is the fastest to clear the mash tun, who can stack a pallet of casks alone. This excludes a lot of people, and in conjunction with the job adverts that promote physical characteristics above technical ability, actively exclude people with disabilities from exploring a career in the industry. Whilst direct discrimination is illegal, this ableism is an immediate and devastating barrier to people, and breweries show little interest in addressing this.
Although many breweries have grown organically, and their expansion has been piecemeal, leading to fragmentary workspaces, with equipment sourced from multiple suppliers and placed into a space through necessity rather than with workflow or accessibility in mind, this is not conducive to developing brewing as an inclusive and open industry. When thinking about this, Cook says “Fashion is my thing, so that’s what I talk about most, but the principles are the same for every piece of inclusive design. For example, if you were designing a visual information system in a brewery for d/Deaf people, there would certainly be a lot of complex functional stuff to consider, but why shouldn’t it also be beautiful and considered, and unashamed. And importantly, why can’t it be a great addition to the brewery for people that aren’t d/Deaf too? Inclusive design done well can make things better for everyone. It’s not a matter of them and us, it should just be us, all of us”.
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