[Disclosure: Threes Brewing has partnered with GBH’s brand studio, a separate team based in Chicago, to provide design assistance to breweries taking part in its People Power collaboration.]
The first half of this year has seen America confront a confluence of crises new and long in place: the COVID-19 pandemic, police brutality, systemic racism, and threats to civil liberties. The beer industry, like most industries, has struggled to find its role in responding to them.
Amid the confusion, a balm emerged: cause-based collaboration beers. They invite participating breweries to release a beer in support of a specific cause, then donate some portion of proceeds to an organization benefiting that cause. They’ve existed in the past—Sierra Nevada’s Resilience beer, a fundraiser for victims of the devastating 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California, was a highly visible and effective example. But given the challenges facing the world in 2020, cause-based collaborations have multiplied.
In April, Brooklyn’s Other Half Brewing launched All Together, a “worldwide collaboration brewed to support hospitality professionals” who had lost wages due to COVID-19. In early June, San Antonio, Texas’ Weathered Souls Brewing Co. announced Black Is Beautiful, “a collaborative effort to raise awareness for the injustices people of color face daily and raise funds for police brutality reform and legal defenses for those who have been wronged.” This summer, Brooklyn’s Threes Brewing will expand its People Power initiative, “a partnership of craft brewers for the ACLU” launched in 2018. Hundreds of breweries have signed on to participate in each.
Critics have pointed out that these collaboration beers represent a relatively low bar for engagement with urgent social movements. Even to some of the breweries who designed them, these beers are admittedly a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. How can a collaboration beer stand up to hundreds of years of entrenched racism, or the devastation of a global pandemic?
But participating breweries say a collaboration’s decentralized, easily accessible nature is its strength: When anyone can get on board, everyone can get on board. And once people are involved, it’s easier to keep them there.
The appeal for individual breweries is clear: These collaboration beers are a tangible way to show support for a social cause. When customers ask what a brewery is doing for its community, a company can point to these beers.
And recent cause-based collaborations are designed to be easy for breweries to execute. Resilience, All Together, Black Is Beautiful, and People Power all have open-source recipes, or allow breweries to devise their own recipes. Much of the branding and design work is also provided free of charge. Breweries are asked to donate the proceeds, though no one is auditing their books to make sure they do so.
In the cases of All Together and Black Is Beautiful, there’s not a designated charity partner. Black Is Beautiful encourages donations to “local foundations that support police brutality reform and legal defenses for those who have been wronged.” All Together suggests breweries donate a portion of proceeds to support hospitality professionals; “the rest should go to keeping you in business to weather this storm.”
These beers have raised significant cash in the past. As people watched helplessly while entire towns burned in California, Sierra Nevada’s Resilience beer was an actionable way to provide relief. By early 2019, the effort had reportedly raised a pledged $15 million from 1,500 participating businesses, representing almost 20% of all American breweries at the time.
But it was not without obstacles. In May 2019, Sierra Nevada vice president Sierra Grossman sent an email to all participating breweries reminding them to send in their donations: By that point, her email said, half of the pledged money had not been turned over. (Sierra Nevada did not respond to GBH’s requests for comment on whether the full amount had since been collected.) When Australian brewers received Sierra Nevada’s permission to use the Resilience name for a collaboration beer in response to the country’s deadly bushfires this past January, participating breweries were asked to provide donation receipts. Ultimately though, as Luke Robertson reported for GBH, “the community is expected to police itself.”
The finances are murkier when there’s not a central brewery collecting and tallying donations. In the case of Black Is Beautiful, People Power, and All Together, breweries are trusted to make those donations in good faith. As Resilience demonstrated, this can prove challenging—and that was before a pandemic and recession.
While this model obscures the total amount of money raised, organizers say decentralization is crucial. When breweries can choose their charity partners and how much to give, they can keep money in their own economies and communities.
“We tried to set it up in a way that breweries could be self-sufficient,” Sam Richardson, co-founder of Other Half, says of All Together. “Breweries are all different sizes and they have their own individual needs. One of the goals of All Together was to give them a boost because they’re struggling, too.”
Threes’ People Power project asks breweries to donate 10% of proceeds to the ACLU, an amount that Threes’ CEO and co-founder Josh Stylman says makes the collaboration easy for breweries who may be financially struggling as a result of the pandemic. (His brewery’s People Power donation will be about $5,000 this year.) The more breweries that participate, the more money is raised. And, crucially, the more breweries that participate, the more consumers hear about the ACLU and its mission. Stylman says Threes acts as the “community organizer,” connecting breweries with their local chapters and hopefully creating enduring connections between the two.
“Not every brewery can donate a whole batch of beer,” he says. “10% from one brewery doesn’t make a huge difference but if you get a whole lot of them, it can. It's as much about the awareness as the actual money raised.”
There’s reason to be skeptical of gestures like social media posts and participation in cause-related collaboration beers. They can be read as disingenuous, virtue signaling, or caving to public pressure. But social psychology offers some evidence that such gestures can actually influence people’s behavior.
Social identity theory is the idea that humans form our self-conceptions based on the social groups we’re a part of (or opposed to). We choose groups to join, whether a church or a volunteer organization, and then membership in those groups becomes part of how we see ourselves. Over time, our desire to defend these allegiances grows stronger. Brewing a cause-based beer or putting a Black Lives Matter sign in the window is a relatively small gesture, but if it changes how brewery owners and staff identify with a movement, it could have real consequences. Cynics might point out the opposite possibility: that the small gesture becomes the end in itself. A brewery can release a beer or put up a sign, consider itself part of a movement, and call it a day.
Either way, once a person feels part of a group—even if the way they identify begins with small steps—they learn how to make their behavior conform to the group’s norms. Michael Kalin and Nicholas Sambanis, political scientists from Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, put it this way: “The utility associated with identity is the enjoyment that an individual gains when they do something that fits with the prototypical behavior of the group to which they belong."
As humans, it’s inherently pleasing to behave in a way that’s consistent with the groups in which we consider ourselves a member. Public gestures like brewing cause-related beers identify a brewery and its staff as part of a group, whether that group is in support of racial equity or civil liberties. Then, social identity theory posits, they’re more likely to behave in ways that reflect the group’s ideals.
There are limits to this idea, of course. Breweries are not people. Not every customer will be aware of—or care—which collaboration beer a brewery made. And not every brewery will identify strongly enough with such causes to continue the work going forward.
“How do you try to use your platform and do something good, and tell people you’re really proud of it, but then actually roll up your sleeves and do the work?” Threes’ Josh Stylman says. “Our community will be the judge of whether we’re doing it or not.”
Funding is crucial to a social movement, and donations prove that a business has skin in the game when it claims to support one. That’s partially why Four City Brewing Company in Orange, New Jersey, signed on to participate in both All Together and Black Is Beautiful. (All Together’s proceeds were given entirely to the brewery’s staff; Black Is Beautiful’s proceeds will benefit the Know Your Rights Camp, a campaign for youth founded by Colin Kaepernick.)
But these collaboration beers are also a public signal of a brewery’s values, says Four City co-founder Roger Apollon Jr. It’s important to him that the brewery’s neighbors and customers know the business’ stance on social issues because they’re part of the reason his brewery exists. Apollon, who is Haitian-American, says he and two co-founders opened the brewery adjacent to the city’s train station last August specifically to welcome a more diverse clientele to craft beer.
For Apollon, brewing Black Is Beautiful dovetailed completely with his brewery’s mission, but he’s aware that’s not as natural a connection for some breweries. He says a lack of diversity among brewery ownership, staff, and clientele hinders White brewery owners who don’t know what to do to help. He hopes the initiative makes participating companies ask themselves difficult questions about who their staff and customers are, and what they’re tangibly doing to create inclusion. Brewing a beer simply isn’t enough.
“There are a lot of well-meaning White people who live in all-White spaces and want to do something for the Black community,” he says. “It’s a much harder thing to say, ‘Oh I want to do something meaningful as a brewery owner’ if your life isn’t really about that.”
Black Is Beautiful opens that door and is useful in building awareness and raising money. But it can’t be the end of a brewery’s response to this moment, Apollon says. Anyone can brew a beer, slap a pre-designed label on it, and say they’re an ally. He wants to see more breweries partner with Black-owned small businesses to provide their taproom food or supply ingredients.
He also wants to see the Brewers Association (BA) or the U.S. government set up a grant program to offer minority-owned breweries the financing they need to open. Black-owned businesses are at a disadvantage when it comes to accessing traditional lending, so he says the brewing industry itself needs to finance the change it wants to see. (The BA has provided grants to breweries to finance diversity and inclusion events, but does not directly provide start-up capital to breweries.)
Apollon envisions a pledge from the BA to increase minority-owned breweries by a certain percentage, then commit the money to help them get established. If the brewing industry is serious about the movement to end racial inequity, it will put its money where its mouth is—beyond collaboration beers.
“It has to be rooted in capital because everything else in America, according to history, is a financial decision,” he says. “We’ve sung the songs; we’ve done the marches; we’ve worn the t-shirts; we posted the black square. Now it’s time to get this fucking money.”
Words by Kate Bernot