[dmurray]

> it isn’t surprising that brewing was women’s work along with cooking in general.

What's interesting here is precisely that brewing beer was a domestic job (and therefore women's work), in a way that baking bread, for example, was not.

> most villages depended on local bakers to prepare bread ... Most households alternated between making their own ale and buying from and selling to neighbors

[ecshafer]

From my understanding, ovens were often large communal or commercial ovens in the middle ages and renaissance periods. The poor wouldn't have had an oven in their home.

[Tanoc]

Very much so. Most homes would have had either a fire pit or a hearth. It was too resource intensive to design something just for cooking when you could also use it for heat, light, and warding off bugs.

[globular-toast]

> in a way that baking bread, for example, was not.

This probably just comes down to availability of equipment. Bread making in the home has been common in places like England and India for a long time. In places like Austria and France the preference is for bread that is best from special ovens that people don't have at home, but even there people would make things like brioche at home.

[Scaevolus]

Baking in large ovens has massive, obvious economies of scale in terms of fuel use per gram of bread. It's very natural to become centralized.

Brewing is more efficient in terms of labor as you scale up to larger containers, but it's less extreme.