The Balance of Things
“That’s it exactly!” exclaims Pip Young, when early in our conversation I explain my understanding of The Coven. “It’s an overarching project with different arms with me at the head, like The Supreme in American Horror Story.”
Some online research later and I see that this is, in fact, the perfect analogy for both Pip and the Coven. The multi-skilled, multi-faceted nature of the way that Pip works and the goals and functions of the Coven are indeed reminiscent of the seven-pronged Supreme skillset, as is the focus on female agency and power, combined with flexibility and change.
Pip doesn’t just want to do something to combat sexism and gender-based discrimination and violence in beer, she has a strategy that utilises her own diverse skillset and simultaneously folds in her aims to make the industry more environmentally friendly. If this all sounds pretty ambitious, that’s because it is. But Pip has already hit the ground running, with several successful Coven-based projects on the go and more in the pipeline. The Coven now includes two collaboration brews, a stand at Leeds Beer Festival showcasing women in beer, a line of gorgeous merch and funding for its Wellness Officer programme to make beer events safer. Which is a huge amount to achieve in less than a year.
So, what exactly is the Coven and how does it work?
Pip launched the Coven as an umbrella activist-collective hybrid in summer 2021, inspired by the beer industry’s well-documented ‘#MeToo moment’, but also based on her own experiences of working in the industry. After working in retail for 16 years, Pip decided to make her interest in beer professional, putting herself through the Beer and Cider Academy while her daughters were small.
Yet despite her qualifications, she found it difficult to be taken seriously.
“Men often wouldn’t listen and spoke down to me” she explains, “I felt humiliated and made to feel small and stupid, and sometimes they stole my ideas without giving me credit, so I thought I can bloody well do this on my own!”
Pip began planning to launch her own brewery, 30Six, of which the Coven was to be an extension, but when the pandemic hit she had to shelve her business plan and took on the role of Brewery Manager at Salt Beer Factory. After last May’s industry unmasking, she felt compelled to bring the Coven to life.
“It seemed a no brainer to get the Coven started so I can make a difference and stop simply moaning about the issues” she says. Seeing the urgent need for advocacy, practical protections and support structures, Pip conceived the Coven as a way to support and promote other women in beer while simultaneously raising awareness about the issues women face in the industry and showcasing female brewing and beer industry talent.
Pip sees the Coven as an organic evolving space, adapting to meet the needs of its members, whom she believes should be anyone who identifies with the Coven’s overarching aims – that of a democratic, egalitarian, female-led, environmentally-focused and positive space to develop ideas and initiatives to make the beer industry safer and more equitable. “Men aren’t making room at the table” says Pip, “So I’m creating our own banquet hall.”
“You can’t have sustainability without diversity – the concept of the Coven is tied into the need for biodiversity as well as diversity in thought and space”
Promote, Platform and Partner
After a cryptic Instagram lead-in featuring her own artwork, Pip launched the Coven at last year’s Leeds Beer Festival by hosting a stand featuring beers from seven breweries that are women owned or have female head brewers. Having lived in Leeds since she was 18, the festival felt like the perfect place for Pip to launch the Coven and her pitch to the organisers was successful.
“It can be difficult for women to get a place at the table – I wanted to be the wedge to get them into the room” she says. Offering 2-3 beers per brewery, the stand proved one of the highlights of the festival and was successful in introducing many of the 3-4,000 festival visitors to new women-created breweries and beers.
“I offered the breweries a presence at the festival with minimal risk and maximum return, where they could benefit from the festival’s substantial footfall” explains Pip, “There was something to suit every drinker and it was great to educate attendees about the fantastic women-led breweries.”
Creating and Collaborating
Fresh from her success at Leeds, Pip launched her next venture – her first Coven collaboration brew, the Alpha Queen IPA, brewed with her colleagues at Salt but featuring Coven branding and a collaborative recipe. A keen forager with a love of nature, Pip was inspired by local pineapple weed to brew a dank, herbaceous and aromatic West Coast IPA. More recently, she has collaborated with Macclesfield’s Red Willow Brewing on an Elderflower Pale, brewed with real flowers. With an aim to eventually brew her collaboration beers with as many foraged ingredients as possible, Pip’s focus on environmental brewing, using locally sourced ingredients and minimizing waste are another strong feature of the Coven’s identity. Having made forays into finding ways for breweries to create useable spent grain flour and into growing mushrooms using spent grain, online as Flour 2 the PPL and Shortcut 2 Mushrooms respectively, these are long-term goals that Pip wants to pursue as a part of the Coven’s mission to make beer more equitable.
“You can’t have sustainability without diversity – the concept of the Coven is tied into the need for biodiversity as well as diversity in thought and space” she says. While these projects are currently on the back burner, Pip’s commitment to waste reduction and community support remain very much at the forefront of the Coven’s current initiatives, encouraging breweries she works with to reuse and recycle as much as possible, and ensuring a portion of all collaboration profits go towards a local charity.
Building Safe Spaces
The Coven’s latest project is also arguably the most radical. Pip came up with the idea of trained wellness officers at beer events during a chat with the Salt managing director about the possibility of hazard pay for beer event staff. “I didn’t like the idea of compensating for trauma with money” she says, “It feels violating that it's acceptable to pay people’s pain away.” Instead, she came up with a positive solution, which she considers a stop-gap until such a time when inappropriate behaviour is successfully phased out. “What we need immediately is to have people on the ground who are trained and knowledgeable and able to step in and deal with situations - to be witnesses, statement takers first aiders, conflict resolvers, mental health counsellors.” Thus the concept of wellness officers was born.
Pip is currently in the process of making her wellness officer scheme a reality, having successfully received funding from Merakai Brewing’s Brave Noise release to take the project forward. If her pilot is successful, the Coven Wellness Officer Programme could prove a game-changer for beer festival safety. “Festival organisers should be putting money into prevention rather than compensation – making their spaces safe” she says, emphasising that this is an urgent contemporary need that ideally will eventually become obsolete. The scheme will be piloted this summer.
A Magical Multi-Tasker
So how in the world does Pip manage to keep all the Coven’s plates spinning on top of her day job and raising two young daughters? Pip attributes a lot of her energy to her relatively recently diagnosed ADHD. “It makes me get hyper-focused and organised,” she explains, “I find it difficult to not do anything!” That doesn’t mean it’s always easy though. “It can get overwhelming with so many projects, but it also feels good being really productive and channelling that energy positively.”
Pip also decompresses through painting. As well as creating all her own fantastic designs and branding for the Coven, she also paints larger canvases incorporating themes of gender, identity, sexuality and nature at Pips and Seeds. “Painting was a real life-saver during lockdown” she says, “I’ve painted since I was a child but suddenly I had the chance to do it every day.”
Her output has been so prolific that she’s planning her first exhibition later this year.
Her daughters, Pip says, are fascinated and supportive. “They think I’m a witch!” she quips, describing the dried herbs and flowers, jars of fruits and other rewards of her foraging adventures that reside in her kitchen. Clearly Pip’s commitment to diversity, equality, creativity and environmentalism is rubbing off on the next generation. “They think diversity is normal” Pip explains proudly.
You can keep up with Pip’s Coven initiatives on Instagram, and support her Coven initiatives by purchasing awesome Coven merch and or/offering sponsorship for any of the Coven’s projects.
