Certainly, the image of brewing being a male-dominated profession would be inaccurate for most of the Middle Ages, certainly in the case of England. Except for monastic breweries, the brewing of ale in England up until c.1350 was a cottage industry in which women "brewsters" dominated, both in towns and the countryside. Since most ale brewing was thus essentially home-brewing, women faced little institutional barriers than they would have if it was a larger scale industry under the control of guilds, which tended to be male-dominated and to exclude women, like weaving. However, from the late 14th century England began importing hops from modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands to brew beer as we would recognise it today, and this emerged as a male dominated, guild-managed professionalised industry which by the turn of the 17th century had driven women brewers off the market. The key study of this is Judith Bennett's "Ale, Beer and Brewsters" (1999), already a classic of gender history.

As for drinking, there was no taboo against women drinking - though its a myth that safe drinking water didn't exist in Medieval Europe everyone, male and female, drank alcohol from childhood and, unless they were fasting for religious reasons, on a daily basis. There also doesn't seem to have been much of a taboo around female drunkeness, at least for lay women. Nuns were different i.e. an episcopal visitation to the Abbey of Romsey in Hampshire in the late 15th century complained that under Abbess Elizabeth Broke, who was herself suspected of having an inappropriate relationship with her chaplain, the nuns were regular visitors to the local pub. But nuns and other religious women were obviously governed by different rules from from lay women, and their lifestyle was for a large part defined by denying their femininity i.e. nuns were not expected to ever be mothers like most women were.

Instead, it was with masculinity that drunkenness could be problematic. On the one hand, heavy-drinking was definitely an important part of masculine culture in most medieval societies, as like hunting and feasting it provided a valuable form of male-bonding, especially between kings/ great lords and their warriors as anyone who has read "Beowulf" will know. Male heavy-drinking could also get quite chaotic and violent - to show that the stereotype of university students being wild and out-of-control goes back a very long way indeed, I'd suggest looking up the St Scholastica's Day Massacre that took place in Oxford in 1351. However, there was a very strong idea, going back to classical antiquity but further reinforced by Christianity, that men should practice temperance and control their passions by abstaining from drunkenness as well as gluttony, wrath and extra-marital sex, and that by failing to do so they temporarily forfeited their manliness. This idea doesn't seem to have had much influence on the masculinity of men who weren't saints or monks in the early Middle Ages except for a few very exceptionally classically educated lay people i.e. Einhard, a courtier and biographer versed in the Roman authors Cicero and Suetonius, praises the emperor Charlemagne for not liking heavy-drinking - quite unlikely to have actually been true. But by the 13th century, as lay aristocratic men, who by that point were universally literate, began to be interested in the Greek and Roman classics and more intensive and inward-looking forms of religious devotion, we can see a growing aversion towards drunkenness among some of them. For example, Jean de Joinville (1224 - 1317), a knight from Champagne, recounts in his "Life of St Louis" when praising Louis IX's lifestyle that the king once told him that he should always dilute his wine with water because "drunkenness is most unseemly in a distinguished man." Jean de Joinville's grandson, Geoffroi de Charny, a knight who wrote the "Book of Chivalry" in the 1350s, similarly remarks that "men of worth" should never drink to the point that they are drunk, and despises drunkards along with gluttons, fops and playboys as lacking in good self-control and not true knights. At the beginning of the 15th century, Boucicaut, another French knight, is praised by his biographer (most likely a knight in his circle, though I have a theory that Boucicaut wrote it himself) for abhorring drunkenness and always drinking his wine with water, and for that is likened favourably to classical Roman heroes like Scipio Africanus. In short, its important to remember that for a very long time self-control was seen as a virtue associated with manliness - the whole idea of temperance as a feminine virtue and vices like drunkenness and lust being gendered male is largely a product of 19th century evangelicalism and the temperance movement, which women led, see Callum Brown "The Death of Christian Britain" (2001).