When I was 10 years old and thought I was a girl, I used to draw pictures of scantily clad, voluptuous women. Then I would remember the lake of fire.
My family’s church promised I would burn for such sapphic appetites, so I begged God for forgiveness and crumpled up the pictures. When I was 13, I scripted home movies in which I always played the male lead. At 16, I fell in love with one of my friends, and I think she loved me back, but neither of us could find the words. All the while, the United States was legislating gay and lesbian people’s fundamental human rights. When I was 34, I finally realized I was queer, and I wondered why it had taken me so long.
Along the way, I discovered craft beer. More than just a beverage, craft beer felt approachable and complex, equal parts art and science, familiar and revolutionary all at once. The industry struck me as punk-rock and progressive, and it seemed like it might provide the openness I longed for. I dove into the scene while living in Austin and back home in Seattle. As I went, I connected with female-identified and queer people who shared my passion, and I began writing about food and beer.
In doing so, I found that many brewery owners shared a similar origin story: one of leaving it all behind, sacrificing security to follow the voice that called them forward and said, I may not know what the future holds, but I know it’s not this. They created communities they called “families,” proclaiming all outsiders welcome in their living rooms.
This tale of starting over and claiming chosen family is a familiar and inviting one to most queer people, too. So you would think craft beer would feel like coming home—that LGBTQIA+ people would be welcomed in with open arms.
You would be wrong.
The industry’s diversity problems made national news in 2019, when the Brewers Association (BA)’s Brewery Operations Benchmarking Survey revealed abysmally disproportionate white-male representation. While researching another beer story, I downloaded that original data, looking for similar information on LGBTQIA+ people. What I found startled me. Not only were there no answers, the survey didn’t even ask the questions. In fact, I couldn’t find comprehensive data on queer craft beer workers or customers anywhere.
This is what’s known as “queer erasure”: when LGBTQIA+ people, or at least their identities, are removed from the national dialogue. And it happens all the time.
The BA didn’t collect this data, as Chief Economist Bart Watson wrote in an email, because owners were asked to field the survey on behalf of the brewery. At the time, he says, “I was worried we wouldn’t be able to capture accurate data. Based on the fact that our survey was designed to be filled out by a single point of contact at breweries, we weren’t confident they could know or correctly answer about sexual orientation, so we chose to leave it off.” In additional conversations with people close to the matter, including Julie Verratti—a cis gay woman who served as chair of the BA’s Diversity Committee at the time, and who is now a co-founder of the Maryland-based Denizens Brewing Co.—another concern played a role: It was still legal, until the June 2020 Supreme Court ruling, for employers to fire someone “merely for being gay or transgender,” and the organization didn’t want to put owners or workers on the spot.
This legal and social complexity highlights an important aspect of the dangers and intentions of data-gathering around targeted and oppressed communities—attempts to even learn about these communities can put them at risk, which inevitably results in more erasure.
[Editor’s note: This passage has been updated for clarity following additional comments from the quoted sources.]
I was determined to find out more, so I conducted my own survey, collecting nearly 400 responses from craft beer workers in 39 states and across all backgrounds: from brewers, owners, and taproom staff to salespeople and beer journalists. In addition to the original demographic questions from the BA survey, I included questions about sexual orientation and gender identification, as well as free-answer questions about whether respondents perceived the industry as diverse and inclusive.
To gather this data, I emailed the survey to all 57 state guilds; shared to every industry-specific social media group I could access; posted the survey in the BA forum, ProBrewer, and the Pink Boots Society forum; and tapped my own networks of local brewery owners, friends in the industry, and interviewees to distribute to their staff and colleagues. I also shared the survey link, along with preliminary data, in a presentation for the Craft Beer Professionals Fall Virtual Conference in October 2020.
Through this work, I have confronted some painful truths about the industry I still love. First, craft beer is inescapably plagued by toxic masculinity. Second, it turns out that craft beer isn’t for everybody, counter to what the industry’s marketing and even many of its workers claim. Not only are there not enough LGBTQIA+ people in craft beer’s living room—our “family” doesn’t even realize we’re missing.
“Harvey told me, ‘Gays drink Coors, too.’”
In 1976, in the historically queer Castro neighborhood of San Francisco, the beer truck drivers of Teamsters Local 888 boycotted the Coors Brewing Company, the sole brewery to refuse to sign onto a better union contract. Then-leader Allan Baird recalls that anecdote from his cohort in that fight: Harvey Milk.
Milk led the local queer community to become some of the boycott’s strongest supporters, and gay bars all over town refused to sell Coors. As a Teamster, Baird had a bullhorn, and he gave it to Milk, who would go on to win a seat on the San Francisco city council, become mayor, and ascend as an icon in the gay rights movement—both before and after his assasination in 1978.
It turns out that when gay bars stop selling your beer, people listen. In 1976, Coors’ market share in the city plummeted as the labor movement fought the company. To this day, Baird says, Coors is still not served in Castro bars. Ironically, Coors now sponsors the annual Pride parade in Denver, but blocks other breweries from participating, including Mountain Toad Brewing in Golden, Colorado. Co-owners Thad Briggs and Brian Vialpando are gay, and if it weren’t for Coors, “We’d have a float [in the parade],” says Vialpando. Even today, it seems Coors is trying to erase us. (The company did not respond to my requests for comment.)
Coors is not alone, unfortunately: Powerful interests have long effaced queer people from American food and drink culture. Evidence of this can be found in media coverage of food icon James Beard, as author and biographer John Birdsall notes. Editors tidily removed the winks and flourishes from Beard’s work, content to know that there was nothing straight about all this decadence, so long as nobody spoke its name. (Recently, James Beard Award-winning writer Mayukh Sen has worked to unearth more of these long-buried stories.)
There is some significant overlap in 20th-century beer and queer histories. From speakeasies that dodged the law to bars and apartment parties where LGBTQIA+ people quietly congregated, both cultures represented a rebellion against puritanical strictures in the 1920s and ’30s. While Prohibition agents gutted bootleg brewing operations, queer people—particularly gay men—were hunted down: arrested, publicly shamed, and forced to undergo sterilization, or worse. Many fled their towns and changed their names; many more took their own lives, according to Birdsall.
Beer may have joined queerness underground, but queerphobia didn’t end with Prohibition. While brewing re-emerged, many LGBTQIA+ people continued to lead double lives. We can do this because gender expression and sexual orientation are often not immediately determinable from our physical appearance. Not only have history and the law erased us, we have learned to erase ourselves—and this trauma is embedded in our DNA.
To this day, when compared to the cisgendered (those who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth) and heterosexual, or “cis-het” population, all LGBTQIA+ people disproportionately face barriers. These include discrimination-based health risks and access to social services. Yet anyone who doesn’t adhere to the gender binary suffers the worst—especially Black trans people, who also confront violent transphobia and white supremacy. These trends are reflected in the craft beer industry, where queer erasure reigns and trans brewers are regularly forced out of jobs for spurious reasons. Rachael Engel, head brewster at Bosk Beer Works in the Seattle suburb of Woodinville, Washington, and Julia Astrid Davis, a brewer and queer trans woman, have borne witness to this phenomenon within the national industry.
One survey respondent agrees, saying: “LGBTQ representation is nonexistent unless you are cis gay. Clientele are not respectful of LGBTQ matters unless the establishment is expressly catered to our crowd. Transphobia every day.” Adds another: “I am [...] spoken down to and disregarded due to my perceived gender, as well as the one I identify with. I am constantly left out of conversations, black-balled, and my opinion is disregarded.”
As a queer, two-spirit Indigenous respondent reports, “I have been made to work for free thinking I would get a brewing contract, and was denied the deal,” adding that customers “think I am the cleaning lady.” And despite being in relatively liberal San Diego, a lesbian respondent notes: “I’ve worked at five breweries, and have never worked with another openly gay person.”
All of this manifests as the very definition of “in the closet.” It’s when a hidden place is the only one where we can remove the costume we present to the world—the one we wear with our families in the living room, with our colleagues at work, and in taprooms across America.
“[It] reminds me of how often oppression is an act of omission rather than commission: not letting people give voice and vent to much of what moves them and to all of what defines them; not recognizing and honoring that ourselves,” writes openly gay former food critic and New York Times columnist Frank Bruni.
Several respondents say passion and skill are all that matter in craft beer, and “nobody cares” about orientation or identity. “As long as you can brew, I don’t care who or what you are,” one owner says. But this sounds an awful lot like “don’t ask, don’t tell”—and while it may be well-intentioned, it is a latent devaluing of the queer experience that masquerades as meritocracy. There are systemic imbalances that keep many queer people from discovering the passion or acquiring the necessary skills in the first place, including a lack of that oft-touted term, “community.”
While queer people are underrepresented in the industry, there are still more than meets the eye. Despite the fact that over one-third of respondents across 39 states reportedly identify along the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, almost all of them echo a refrain of erasure: They know others are out there, but they don’t know how to find each other. Between the passive discrimination of “nobody cares”; a loss of queer bars and social opportunities that predates and was accelerated by the pandemic; and the fact that LGBTQIA+ people either live in liberal areas where they melt into the mainstream or places where they are forced to hide, the queer community in craft beer remains fractured.
“[Discrimination] hasn’t been an issue for me in the beer industry; I think that’s why there’s not a push to be more visible,” says Robyn Schumacher, a cis gay woman who is a co-owner and brewer at Seattle’s Stoup Brewing. However, she adds, “I may not even notice at this point if people are treating me differently, because this is who I’ve been for so long.”
As a result, LGBTQIA+ people have yet to build a presence that welcomes new family members into the living room, as the nonprofit professional association the Pink Boots Society (PBS) has done for women.
“We don’t find a lot of discrimination, but I wouldn’t know how to go out and find any of the other [gay] male brewery owners,” Briggs says. “Are we really unicorns?”
“I think [the craft beer industry] really wants to be inclusive,” says Kathleen Culhane, a brewer and cellarer at Castle Danger Brewery in Two Harbors, Minnesota, who is a trans woman. “But they’re not doing the work yet.” Indeed, “the number-one barrier I face is feeling like I don’t belong in my work ‘family,’” says a lesbian survey respondent.
The truth is that the history of beer is primarily female. In almost every major civilization, dating back to ancient times, the sacred practice of brewing was entrusted to female guardians. That is, until the Industrial Revolution, when beer was increasingly manufactured, not made, in factories run by men. The small-scale, female-driven, farmhouse production that marked the early days of craft in America was co-opted by a male-dominated beer-industrial complex—in the process, eliminating many of the interesting elements that defined the early styles of beer. In large part, the pursuit of replicability and technical “perfection” replaced the embrace of character, nuance, depth, and even taste.
All that queerness, erased.
By the late 20th century, craft beer was growing in response to decades of mass-manufactured consumerism. But this new class of brewers, like their big-beer counterparts, was largely straight, white, and male, and their aggressively anti-corporate movement became its own hegemony. For all its talk, craft beer ended up looking a lot like every other industry in America. By 2019, only 7.5% of breweries in the BA survey had female brewers; 23% had a female owner, but most of these were male/female (and often husband-and-wife) teams. Just 2% of breweries reported solo female owners.
Today, the craft beer creator or consumer is typically thought of as a “cis-het, bearded white guy wearing cargo shorts,” says Engel. She pushes back on this prototyping, making a point to be visible for other trans and queer people in craft, which she says is often an uphill battle.
“The beer industry, for decades, has advertised itself as a very ‘bro’ and anti-woman culture. I perceive the craft culture to be much better, but it still has [...] its roots in domestic beer,” says a cis-het male survey respondent.
A female owner puts it more bluntly: “The craft beer industry feels at times like a frat party gone wrong.”
My research, while it’s more of a view into general trends than an exact science, reflects this perception in both sentiment and in numbers. Respondents are overwhelmingly cisgendered (94%), heterosexual (65%), and white (82%). While half are women, this is likely impacted by the fact that the survey was distributed to Pink Boots Society members—and still, the majority of owners are male.
It’s important to note that, despite the fact that I reached out to both LGBTQIA+ and female owners and workers for their help distributing the survey to staff and colleagues, my data shows that both LGBTQIA+ people and women remain underrepresented at the industry’s highest levels. Majorities of both the overall and LGBTQIA+ populations work in production (35% and 37%, respectively), primarily as brewers. For the general population, owners make up the second-largest category (22%), but for LGBTQIA+ people, the next most common position isn’t ownership (13%)—it’s service (24%).
But perhaps the most surprising finding is that while almost nobody sees the industry as diverse, many think it is inclusive. In reality, you can’t have one without the other, and these results represent the disconnect between perception and reality. The counterfactual to the industry’s claims of inclusivity is the homogeneity of its ranks. In the words of one respondent: “People who fit the dominant group are welcomed openly, but anyone who does not fit that group may not be treated equally. The lack of diversity itself perpetuates the exclusivity of the industry.” Adds another respondent: “I can name a handful of women in production. I don’t know if I can name a handful of BIPOC or queer people. This is the Twin Cities Metro area. It’s pathetic.”
The disconnect, says Dr. J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham—who is the principal of non-profit Crafted For All, and executive director of non-profit Craft x EDU—comes from the fact that inclusion is not the end goal, but is only the beginning. What comes next, she says, is “equity, [which] is about everybody being able to have the same quality of experience once they are in the room,” and justice, which “asks us to consider, can we remove the barriers to access that made it difficult for people to come into the room in the first place or [that] is inspiring them to leave once they’ve arrived?”
“Saying ‘welcome’ to everyone doesn’t mean that they feel welcome, included, or even safe in all spaces,” says one respondent. “The work of fostering inclusivity requires attention, comfort with reality checks, and a willingness to ask for feedback.” And queer workers, says Jen Jordan—who is vice president of the Pink Boots Society, a brewer at Laughing Monk Brewing in San Francisco, and a cis lesbian woman—may not feel comfortable expressing opinions and driving agendas. “Everyone in the beer industry will tell you time and time again that beer is about bringing people together, sharing ideas in a safe space, [and] listening to each other. But in a work environment, those power dynamics vary,” she explains.
Indeed, as a queer person, you “need to work twice as hard to prove yourself,” says Kai Villegas, director of operations at Oakland’s Temescal Brewing, who is a cis gay man. “You see straight males getting away with more.”
But the worst treatment, respondents agree, comes from customers. Several say that they don’t experience discrimination because they can hold their own against abusive patrons. This, in itself, demonstrates erasure: Just because you can deflect it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
Several respondents also describe colleagues who turn a blind eye to discrimination. There are many queer and especially trans people “who have been driven entirely out of the industry, in part because many people who call themselves allies don’t speak up when somebody is actually being mistreated,” says Davis.
It’s a fine line between a frat party gone wrong and outright misogyny. Unfortunately, craft beer often crosses it. This tension is even behind a trend in my survey that would seem contradictory: Among respondents, LGBTQIA+ women vastly outnumber men.
Nearly half of all female respondents are also on the queer spectrum: Only 56% of women describe themselves as straight, versus 84% of men. Most LGBTQIA+ women are lesbian or gay (37%, combined). Meanwhile, only 17% of male LGBTQIA+ respondents are gay. (The largest number are bisexual.)
My survey also finds that trans, non-binary, genderqueer, two-spirit, intersex, and gender-non-conforming people are nearly absent from the industry: Only 6% of all respondents describe themselves this way, while just 1% specifically mention being transfemme or transmasculine. The numbers are higher among LGBTQIA+ respondents—12% are not cisgendered, and 3% are trans—but not high enough.
So, why are there so many more cis lesbian and gay women represented than both cis gay men and those on the trans and gender-non-conforming spectrum? One theory is that, in craft beer, anyone who presents as more masculine gets treated better than anyone who presents as more feminine, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation. My research and personal experience bear this out, with many cis gay women—those who tend toward masculine-presenting—saying they feel more welcomed than many cis gay men, trans women, and even some cis-het women (those who are more feminine-presenting).
“My gender is very masculine-presenting,” says Verratti, who founded Denizens Brewing Co. with wife Emily Bruno and (straight) brother-in-law Jeff Ramirez. (It’s the only brewery in the state that’s both majority queer- and woman-owned). Verratti says she is frequently misgendered, and “I think I have a little bit of privilege from that. Emily gets actually a lot more discrimination.”
In fact, every single LGBTQIA+ woman I spoke with said that of all the challenges they face, being a woman is the hardest one. Engel, who transitioned after being perceived as male for nearly two decades in the industry, found her female gender was more of a roadblock than being trans (GBH contributor Lily Waite has previously addressed this topic in the context of the U.K. craft beer scene).
What’s more, nearly every woman who completed the survey, regardless of orientation, reported blocked opportunities, “mansplaining,” gaslighting, and even, in some cases, harassment and physical abuse at the hands of colleagues and customers.
Throughout American history, LGBTQIA+ people and women have faced similar injustices. Whether in history or beer culture, this discrimination has its “roots [in] homophobia and enforced masculinity,” says Zan McColloch-Lussier, a queer trans man who spent over five years in beer marketing, most recently at Seattle’s Fremont Brewing.
Working for Fremont, McColloch-Lussier spent a lot of time at beer events, he says, and “very rarely [ran] into other queer men who were out, whereas there were a lot more lesbian and bi women who were visible and active. If I [were] a cis gay man, I would probably make some assumptions that this was not an industry that was open to me.”
Courtney Luppino, sales rep for Bombshell Beer Company in Greensboro, North Carolina, laments what she sees as a near-total lack of out, gay men in the industry in the South, adding that “it’s really sad. As a [more] butch lesbian, it’s easier for me to be accepted in this industry, because [...] all the ‘bro things’ […] are already things I enjoy.”
“I don’t know a single feminine-presenting male person in this industry, and I’ve been in it for 10 years,” says Ari Sanders, a queer woman and director of taproom operations at Fullsteam Brewery in Durham, North Carolina. “I definitely feel like less feminine women who are gay are embraced [… because] of that ‘bro’ behavior, and I imagine that being very exclusive of gay men.”
Villegas, as a cis gay man, affirms this. “The deeper I got into [the industry], the more I realized how unique [...] I was,” he says. He quickly learned that straight-passing was the way to get ahead; a lifetime of “not feeling comfortable in my own skin [from] living a straight life” served as job training.
While 30% of LGBTQIA+ male survey respondents are bisexual, few make themselves known. Steven Fuller, owner of Wackadoo Brewing in Fountain, Colorado, describes a welcoming reception, but Dillon Galloway, a brewer at Fremont, has had a different experience, particularly on the East Coast: “I try to make things more inclusive, […] and raise awareness, but have been pushed down by coworkers and owners,” he says. He describes being engaged to a male coworker at a previous brewery where both of them hid their sexuality, harassed for what colleagues perceived as “a bromance.”
They both eventually quit.
The good news is that craft beer, deep down, wants to change. You can almost taste it. It’s just that it’s made, owned, and patronized by people who are invariably fallible.
Despite craft beer’s current problems, there are those among the old guard who recognize their privilege and want to do things differently. What’s more, doing the right thing will help the industry survive the tough times of the pandemic by attracting customers and workers it currently ignores. Many of the cis-het, older-generation, white male owners who took the survey express the desire to hire a more diverse staff and make everyone feel welcome, but fail to grasp the broader role of the brewery in society: not just as a watering hole, but as a center of civic life, proactively engaging with and supporting underserved communities.
The strong response to the Black Is Beautiful initiative is evidence of this desire, but one-off gestures, better marketing, and even hiring aren’t enough to truly make craft beer inclusive. This requires, as Engel says, “breaking the cultural paradigm”—from management philosophy to how workers and customers are treated, and involving proactive community outreach.
Danielle Snowden, a cis queer woman and brewer at Earthbound Beer in St. Louis, Missouri, demonstrates the radical inclusivity needed to bring craft beer into the next era, using the brewery’s social media account to have important conversations about race and the queer community. “You can’t just be a brewery anymore,” she says. “It’s more than that now.”
Within my survey data, while the vast majority are white, more LGBTQIA+ respondents are more racially diverse than the overall population of respondents. For example, 15% are Latinx/Hispanic and 5% are Black/African-American, compared to just 10% and 2%, respectively, of all respondents.
“I have been the [first and] only Black queer woman in the production facility of every brewery I’ve ever worked in,” says Marquita Reese, a cis queer woman, brewer, and chairwoman of the diversity and inclusion committee at Sloop Brewing Co. in East Fishkill, New York. “I don’t want to always have to be the first or the only.”
Some breweries may be well-positioned to change their strategies and welcome wider audiences. Many beer businesses are already located in left-leaning, urban areas where queer respondents say they feel at home. Respondents report feeling greater comfort in these geographic “bubbles,” most notably in Seattle, San Francisco, and Denver. Galloway says “the East Coast industry felt much less [inclusive]” than Seattle does, and Jackson-Beckham affirms that “a lot of experiences have more to do with where the brewery is located” than anything else.
Some say urbanity is more impactful than the geographic area; still others say inclusivity varies by brewery. Snowden finds St. Louis to be a blue island in Missouri’s red sea—especially when compared to the tiny town she came from, where she is “much more defensive, and always very cautious” in breweries and bars.
“Every urban area attracts more people who feel like they can find their people,” Jordan says. “But even in a place like San Francisco, I think there are barriers for queer people to feel like they will belong.” Despite being in liberal Durham, Fullsteam “got a little backlash” for adding inclusive bathroom signage and offering Pride merchandise, Sanders says—“but that’s us doing a better job of shaping our target market. If you have a problem with us being welcoming of other people, you're the one who isn’t welcome.”
On a nationwide level, the Brewers Association needs to do a better job. Many say the BA pays lip service to diversity and inclusion, but its actions often fail to back up its position. President and CEO Bob Pease has repeatedly failed to address complaints of discrimination by ousting members or taking a public stance on controversies (the Founders Brewing Company lawsuit comes to mind). As GBH contributor Beth Demmon recently reported for VinePair, recipients of the most recent BA diversity grants have thus far received no funds, with no explanation. And beer educator Julie Rhodes noted on the Craft Beer Professionals forum that the September/October issue of the BA’s New Brewer led with a message about promoting diversity and inclusion—followed by a “blatant lack of diversity throughout the magazine.”
The Craft Brewers Conference (CBC), too, reflects attitudes of resistance to change. Several respondents report that in previous years, panels on diversity and inclusion were not only poorly attended, but almost exclusively attracted attendees who were members of underrepresented groups—meaning the cis-het, white-male majorities who most needed to hear the message were missing it. For CBC 2021, I was part of a proposed panel on making breweries more inclusive for underrepresented groups, including queer people and people of color. The proposal was rejected (it is unclear whether another panel on the same topic will be presented).
Many LGBTQIA+ owners and workers cite associations, particularly the Pink Boots Society, as crucial in their ability to access funds and much-needed resources—but joining these organizations can be a barrier in itself. “Professional association resources [are available], if I can save the additional cash to join. Most funds went toward the light bill,” says a queer two-spirit Indigenous respondent.
And outside help is vital when owners don’t promote from within. “I have suggested [to managers], ‘I have a trans friend who would love to learn to brew—why don’t we fast-track them to have a better brewery for everyone?’ and I haven’t gotten much of a response,” Galloway says.
Davis adds that “it’s important for any organization that wants to focus on […] diversity and inclusion [...] to always make it as big a tent as possible for other marginalized groups.”
But to effectively demand change, queer people themselves must unite. “I think that’s where the trade groups come in, like the BA or the guild, to help us find each other,” says Briggs. And “if the guild won’t work for us, we will make our own guild,” says a queer female respondent.
The answer to erasure is visibility, and there is strength in numbers. The Pink Boots Society is considered the gold standard for raising the profile of underrepresented people in craft beer. Thanks to its success connecting female workers with resources and with each other, the group has skyrocketed from about 16 members at its 2007 founding to over 2,400 members today. After the organization got 501(c)(3) status and adopted a paid membership model, membership doubled, Jordan says.
This underscores the importance of both funding and centralized organization in empowerment. Given the non-profit’s powerful platform, some have called for the Pink Boots Society to help foster a fledgling LGBTQIA+-focused group until it can fly on its own.
“It’s great that we have the Pink Boots [Society], but it’s targeted to a very specific part of our community,” says John Yarno, a cis gay man and brewer at Seattle’s Urban Family Brewing Co. He notes that the organization has helped bring “queer community in [while] also bringing women into what is perceived as a male-dominated environment.”
Multiple respondents note that both online and virtual communities, such as brewers’ forums, are often judgmental, exclusive spaces for those new to craft beer, while Pink Boots Society groups offer a safe haven where new members can ask questions and build connections. Villegas adds that “it can be totally intimidating” to daily face the “machismo” culture of the craft beer industry without a support system.
Davis has been wanting to start just such a group—which she calls the “Queer Beer Alliance”—for years, but says that a national platform is needed to “[help us] find each other, make those connections, and weave that tapestry that can unite all of us.”
“We could call it ‘Rainbow Boots,’” Luppino says, adding that many would want to be a member of both groups. Snowden also wants to see a version of the Pink Boots Collaboration Brew Day for queer people.
The irony is that “we’re having a conversation about how resistant the craft beer movement has been to progress, in terms of inclusivity, [yet] the entire [...] movement has been built on questioning: ‘What is beer, [and] what can it be?’” Davis says. “We’re learning that another question is, ‘Who can beer be?’ [...] If it is to grow and continue to be a part of our culture, craft beer has to be everyone.”
In Part Two of this series, we’ll cover the importance of queer space, as well as the steps owners and industry leaders can take to proactively create more inclusive environments.
Words by Holly ReganIllustrations by Colette Holston
