“To leave my house and my kids in the morning for work and not know if I’m coming back, just because of the color of my skin,” says Akil Zakariya, a brewer at Wren House Brewing Company in Phoenix, Arizona, while emptying a malt sack into the mash tun. He stops. “I pay my taxes, I follow the law. But all that gets thrown out the window because I’m Black.”
Since the death of George Floyd under a police officer’s knee on May 25 in Minneapolis, which has powered weeks of sprawling protests and unrest across the United States and around the world, breweries have expressed their support for the Black Lives Matter movement on social media, through donations, and via new initiatives altogether. Wren House is pledging its solidarity with a Stout designed and created by Zakariya, who, as the only Black commercial brewer in Arizona, is acutely aware of the beer industry’s lack of racial diversity. He says it motivates him to prioritize celebrating and involving people of color, especially on the drinking end. “It’s a gateway,” he says. “I like to help diversify palates, let them know there’s a lot out there and not to get overwhelmed.”
The Stout will feature ingredients sourced from African countries, like Madagascar vanilla beans and Ethiopian coffee, and all proceeds from its sale will be donated to the NAACP. As for its name, he points to a pin on his hat that reads: “BLACK EXCELLENCE.” Of that choice, he tells me, “It’s an opportunity to get my voice out there, to display my success that has been harder to come by, and say, ‘I am proud to be Black.’ To live my excellence.”
On the same day as Floyd’s death, some 1,300 miles away in Phoenix, a 28-year-old man named Dion Johnson was fatally shot by a trooper with the Arizona Department of Public Safety. The officer has not been named or charged. “There’s anger, there’s fear, there’s stress,” he says. “But there’s an energy right now in this movement that feels different than before. The country has reached a tipping point.”
Zakariya has joined the protests in Phoenix’s downtown, which, at the time of writing, have lasted 18 consecutive days. With his friends, and thousands more people, he has marched for racial justice, for all the deaths of Black Americans at the hands of police and vigilantes, chanting the names of Floyd and Johnson, the name of Breonna Taylor, the name of Ahmaud Arbery, the name of Tony McDade.
“We can’t let these people die in vain,” he says.
Words + Photoby Niko Krommydas