Photo by Jamaal Lemon
Black Lives Matter demonstrations continue around the world, and they’ve now arrived at beer’s doorstep. The industry is largely unprepared. For years, breweries and the organizations that represent them have made varied attempts at diversity and inclusion, but for so many, their stated goals remain unmet.
The protests taking place this week across the world are forcing a reckoning. That’s their purpose: to confront us with the police brutality and militarization, prosecutorial apathy, and economic and health injustices that steal Black lives.
Beer is uniquely positioned at the intersection of commerce and community. It is a business, but one that small breweries especially have built thanks to support from, and service to, their neighborhoods and communities. Brewery websites feature a near-uniform use of “community,” but rarely include a definition of which people comprise it.
Community can be powerful, or community can be hollow.
So breweries, who is your community? How do you serve them? The Black Lives Matter protests have asked individuals, businesses, and governments to answer these questions, and silence has become a poor answer.
On June 2, social media feeds flooded with black squares representing #blackouttuesday, a call to mute regularly scheduled programming in favor of amplifying Black voices. Whether you consider the gesture a show of solidarity or a bare-minimum, performative signal, it sent breweries scrambling. To post or not to post? And what to post?
Some posted a black square, the universal imagery of the effort, or offered excruciatingly diplomatic assurances that didn’t mention Black people or police brutality. Steam Hollow Brewing Co’s response—asserting, among other lies, a conspiracy theory that George Floyd is not dead—was so unhinged the brewery has since deleted its social media accounts or set them to private. The Damascus Brewery posted—then deleted and apologized for—an Instagram caption that read in part “black beers matter.” Many prominent breweries, including Lagunitas Brewing Company, Widmer Brothers Brewery, and SweetWater Brewery, haven’t acknowledged the crisis publicly as of this article’s publication. A few breweries have responded forcefully (Black-owned Crowns & Hops) and explicitly (Lamplighter Brewing Co.).
If individual breweries look to trade groups for leadership, they won’t find much guidance. The Brewers Association (BA), which represents small and independent craft breweries, on June 2 tweeted a two-part thread that began: “The Brewers Association stands in solidarity against racial injustice. We don’t have all the answers and we know as an industry, we have a lot of work to do.” The BA did not explicitly mention Black people in its statement.
Many on social media were unsatisfied, noting that the BA has been slow to take action against its member breweries—most visibly Founders Brewing Company, which has engaged in racist and discriminatory behavior in the past. (The BA’s Marketing and Advertising Code includes a process for evaluating allegedly offensive marketing—such as sexist or racist beer labels—but not corporate human resources issues.)
“If you’re claiming to stand in solidarity, your statement and actions should be written for and communicated to Black folks,” Toni Boyce, one of the leaders of lifestyle brand and consultancy Beer Kulture, responded on Twitter. “You can start by addressing Black people specifically,” she wrote in another tweet.
The Beer Institute, which lobbies on behalf of breweries, made no public statement regarding the demonstrations this week. When asked for comment, Beer Institute CEO Jim McGreevy said the group had no specific comment and directed GBH to tweets from Budweiser and Molson Coors.
In the absence of guidance, small breweries can especially feel adrift. This problem has long existed, with the BA saying new ideas and policies need to be member-driven, despite members saying they seek leadership from the BA. According to the BA:
88.4% of member brewery owners are White.
77.4% are men.
Black employees make up just .6% of brewers, with non-brewing production roles having the highest percentage of Black employees at 4.7%.
This creates a situation where owners may feel inadequate to address such profound social trauma—or afraid of alienating customers.
But that’s precisely what the Black Lives Matter movement is calling for: difficult grappling, a willingness to lose customers, and above all, discomfort with privilege. If you’ve built a business on community, you must be prepared to say just who that community includes—and then economically support it. American craft beer’s typical community is overwhelmingly White, and typically male between the ages of 21 and 44, with an annual income between $75,000-$99,000.
“Part of what drove this [brewery] was to create a space where I and others did not feel like we stood out, to provide a space where I see people who share my values, and who share how I might look,” says Rodney Hines, CEO and co-founder of Métier Brewing Company in Woodinville, Washington. (Hines is Black.)
Hines says he has been on the verge of tears much of this week as his emotions change by the minute. The brewery is in the delicate process of planning to reopen its taproom after its COVID-related closure. Simultaneously, Hines is thinking about how Métier can better advance “civic dialogue in action” as a business, and get others to do so, too.
“Interrogate your business. If these are societal issues, ask: ‘How am I complicit in this? And how do I pause and stop that? How do I become more active?’” he says. A good place for breweries to begin, he suggests, is to look at their patrons and staff, and ask: Who’s missing? Is there a type of person who isn’t represented? Why?
Eastern Market Brewing Co. in Detroit took that advice to heart. On June 3, the brewery announced it would close its two locations temporarily—likely reopening mid-next week—as its staff plan a response to the Black Lives Matter protests. This includes meeting with the brewery’s Black neighbors to develop a plan “to become better allies in the Black Lives Matter movement.” Employees will be paid as the brewery is closed. Eastern Market estimates the decision will cost the business between $30,000-$50,000, depending on how long the two taprooms remain closed.
Eastern Market was vocal last year during the Founders scandal, which arose when a former employee sued for racial discrimination. It publicly pulled out of the Detroit Fall Beer Festival taking place just a block from its brewery because Founders would be attending. That was the most important moment in the brewery’s three-year history, says managing partner Dayne Bartscht, who is White.
“Collectively, as a brewery, we decided we were about more than beer. Since then it’s driven who we are. It forced me to reevaluate what we mean by community.”
Detroit is a majority-Black city, and the brewery owners realized “if we use the term ‘community,’ we have to mean our entire community.” The Founders scandal was a wake-up call, and prompted its owners and staff to pursue more active outreach to Detroit’s Black residents.
Eastern Market has already altered the terms of its Phoenix Fund grants—two $5,000 low-interest loans the brewery will make to local hospitality-based businesses negatively impacted by COVID-19—making them available only to minority-owned businesses in Detroit and Ferndale, Michigan.
Despite the costs of remaining closed for a weekend, the brewery heeded a call to act in this moment—and, more importantly, develop plans for the future.
On June 2, True Anomaly Brewing Company opened for business as usual, a week and a half after reopening from its COVID-mandated closure. The Houston brewery’s taproom is near where demonstrators had been gathering to protest the killing of George Floyd, who is from Houston. That day, crowds surged to the street just in front of the brewery; flash-bangs followed.
The crowd was tense, angry, and scared. It included brewery CEO Michael Duckworth, who is White and wanted to show his support of the Black Lives Matter protest. Demonstrators fleeing the flash-bangs sought refuge in the taproom; a protestor who’d been sprayed with pepper spray rushed in seeking help. The brewery kept its doors open, providing water and bathrooms. True Anomaly donated all beer sales for the day, about $2,000, to the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
“Our brewery is founded by four White guys so we’re doing our best to listen and understand and respond in kind to the community around us,” Duckworth says. “Yesterday we found ourselves in a position where the fight kind of came to our door.”
Listening represents another tool to identify a brewery’s community. Asking who would like to use the physical taproom space, and how, can provide direction for programming and events.
The brewery didn’t have a plan in place to deal with the day’s events, but Duckworth and his staff acted instinctively. The business has learned a lot in its three years of operation, he says, by listening to what its neighbors say they need. When local skaters drinking at the bar a couple years ago mentioned they needed donations to upgrade the nearby skate park, the brewery chipped in. When demonstrators wanted to use the taproom as a safe space, the brewery welcomed them.
Vocal support is critical, but breweries need to back it up with dollars. Whether that’s donating all the proceeds from a nationwide collaboration beer called Black Is Beautiful to protestors’ bail funds or local Black Lives Matter chapters, or giving to Black people another way, that financial support is a necessary step.
In a beer industry worth $114 billion annually, just a small fraction goes to people of color, says Alisa Bowens-Mercado, owner of Rhythm Brewing Co. in New Haven, Connecticut.
She’d like to see support from established, nationally distributed breweries in the form of collaborations with Rhythm and other Black-owned breweries. Larger breweries have name recognition and distribution channels that Rhythm doesn’t. Their partnership could introduce Rhythm to the “established” beer-drinking community, and help her brewery tap into new markets.
“Anybody can post anything [online], but it comes back to economies,” she says. “You can tell me ‘solidarity’ and ‘everybody hates what’s going on,’ but at the end of the day, if we’re not creating wealth and job opportunities for people that are disenfranchised, then…” She trails off.
Bowens-Mercado says she has been inundated with support from customers this week, tripling her social media following in 72 hours and fielding questions about how out-of-state supporters can buy her beer. In response, she set up a donation program by which people can buy Rhythm beer to be donated to front-line healthcare workers at nearby Yale New Haven Hospital.
“As a business owner, I’m grateful for all this outpouring. But how did we get here?” she says. “If you have any amount of soul and compassion in your body, you will try to reach out and help us and say you’re standing with us. We hope those are not empty words.”
Many breweries and small businesses feel paralyzed during this time because they either can’t say who their community is, or they’re ashamed to realize it doesn’t include Black people. Both are problems that demand intentional solutions.
While no one expects the beer industry to solve systemic racism or police impunity, it can clean its own house. Breweries are economic drivers, social gathering spaces, and community anchors. The Black Lives Matter movement demands all people, businesses, and institutions show up for the communities they say they’re a part of.
“People of color consume a lot of beer but we don’t own a lot of beer,” Bowens-Mercado says. “If it takes these ugly circumstances to bring light to your brothers and sisters in the same industry that are not getting that same level playing field, then these are the conversations we need to have.”
Words by Kate Bernot