In his 30-year career at Brooklyn Brewery, brewmaster Garrett Oliver is not aware of a single Black person who’s applied for a brewing job there. He’s seen Black employees work on the packaging line and in other positions, like human resources and sales and marketing, but none have applied to the brewing team. Oliver, who is Black, realized within the last few years that, while he was eager to hire other Black brewers, something about the process was severely flawed.
“I could sit in this chair for possibly another 20 years and not see an African-American candidate, which means something is wrong,” Oliver says.
Recognizing that his passive approach to hiring Black brewers wasn’t working, Oliver announced July 6 he’d established the Michael Jackson Foundation for Brewing and Distilling (MJF). The organization’s mission is to fund educational and professional development scholarships in the brewing and distilling industries, primarily for people of color. The MJF is the latest and most high-profile effort to diversify the brewing industry through educational scholarships. It joins Craft x EDU, a nonprofit that champions inclusion, equity, and justice in craft brewing through professional development, scholarships, and microgrants.
[Disclosure: GBH’s studio team in Chicago is a creative brand partner to Craft x EDU.]
MJF will roll over $30,000 from an existing scholarship fund—previously administered by the American Institute of Wine & Food—to the new MJF fund within the Partridge-Invitation Scholarship Foundation. It will also solicit donations from businesses and individuals. Oliver serves as the chairman of the MJF, but is in the process of establishing a board of directors, bylaws, and funding infrastructure for the organization. He hopes to announce the criteria and application process for these scholarships this week.
MJF and Craft x EDU represent a purposeful change for the beer industry, addressing a lack of minority representation from a systemic perspective and aiming to increase the percentage of underrepresented demographic groups in beer. Data from the Brewers Association’s 2019 Diversity Benchmarking Survey found just 1% of brewery owners and 0.6% of brewers are Black. Brewers are the category of brewery employees most likely to be white.
The goal of both groups is to fix the broken pipeline that creates a mostly white and mostly male workforce, an imperative that’s especially urgent as the beer industry struggles to respond to the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement. The leaders of Craft x EDU and the MJF say scholarships are just one tool to do so—and they’re a tool with limitations and challenges.
One of the most common refrains heard by Craft x EDU’s executive director, Dr. J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham, is that breweries would like to hire more women, LGBTQ individuals, and people of color, but that those people don’t apply for open jobs.
“I would like this to stop being the excuse,” she says. “The natural next question is, ‘Why is that?’”
She sees a myriad of reasons why underrepresented groups don’t apply for beer jobs:
Lack of awareness about the industry.
Disconnect between brands and minorities generally.
Perception that technical brewing jobs are the only jobs within beer.
Beer businesses that often require “a love of craft beer” as a qualification for employment.
“If an employee can show up every day and do the job very well, why do they have to love [craft beer]? They could learn to love it by doing the job,” Jackson-Beckham says of this last point. “We put such strange gatekeeping around the industry without realizing that’s what it is.”
These barriers create a systemic lack of diversity within beer, one that nonprofits have stepped in to correct. As Jackson-Beckham pushes the industry to rethink some of its practices, Craft x EDU also offers microgrants and scholarships to minority recipients in order to help them gain experience and credentials.
Last year, Craft x EDU partnered with New Belgium Brewing Company to give away 20 Great American Beer Festival tickets, mostly to women and people of color. Earlier this year, the organization donated “Business of Beer bundles,” including books on finance and beer quality, to minority-led breweries in development. Noting that many breweries founded by women and people of color are undercapitalized, Jackson-Beckham would like Craft x EDU to award scholarships for those owners to attend Craft Brewers Conference and other costly industry events.
The goal is to both invite more minority participation in the industry—as brewers, but also as professionals in brewery finance, HR, and front-of-house—and to help those minorities with professional development.
The MJF will focus on providing technical brewing scholarships to people of color already within the industry, with the aim of helping those brewers advance careers through accredited brewing classes and continuing education programs. Mentorship will also be a crucial part of the MJF’s work: each scholarship applicant will be paired with a mentor who is also a person of color in the industry who can help guide them once their education is complete. As with Craft x EDU, the goal is to help people of color gain relevant credentials to make them more attractive candidates for hiring and career advancement. That will hopefully remove the excuse Jackson-Beckham has continuously heard about a lack of non-white male applicants.
Skeptics have asked in recent years why the craft beer industry specifically needs to recruit and retain Black people and other underrepresented groups. In fact, Jackson-Beckham says, the industry historically hasn’t needed to—most open brewery jobs get enough qualified applicants willing to work for low wages thanks to beer’s cultural cachet. So what’s the problem?
She and Oliver say a more diverse pool of workers within craft beer has three primary benefits:
It economically benefits the industry.
It creates a more dynamic, fun, creative industry for employees and consumers.
It delivers on beer’s long-standing promise that the industry is a force for social good.
In terms of economics, Jackson-Beckham sees a more diverse workforce and consumer base as crucial to the industry’s survival in the next decade. To sustain growth, the industry will need to draw in new drinkers. That includes hiring the people who know how to attract them and who look like them.
“We are an industry that is outgrowing its growth—more firms are being added than the growth of the sector,” she says. According to Brewers Association data, BA-defined craft beer volume grew by just under 4% in 2019, while the number of breweries grew by 9%. “If everyone’s going to survive, the pie needs to get bigger. It has to.”
Beyond the financial imperative to widen minority participation in the craft beer industry, Oliver sees scholarships as proof that small breweries stand for social good. There’s long been a moral component to craft beer’s appeal—now the industry needs to financially support the social causes it says it’s championed.
“As an industry, I’d like us to become the industry we think we are in our own minds and egos,” he says. “Because we’re not.”
While scholarships are useful in addressing systemic inequalities in who enters and advances within the industry, they’re not an instant solution. Both Oliver and Jackson-Beckham are candid about the limitations of their respective programs.
The primary challenge both identify is that scholarships tend to benefit people of color who are already aware of, and to some extent participating in, the industry. The MJF funds will be awarded to brewers currently working in beer; Craft x EDU is primarily reaching minorities with an existing connection to beer. They’re not necessarily recruiting people completely outside of beer’s bubble.
Jackson-Beckham says that overall, scholarships and internship programs have to be careful not to favor minorities who are “socially adaptable, who travel well in what we might call predominantly white space, and who maybe already have the benefit of financial stability or educational privilege.” Favoring those people creates “a system of tokenism” and gives advantages to minorities who “are already good at assimilating.”
Another hurdle: people who could most benefit from scholarships are, paradoxically, those who might not apply. That was true of Michelle Turner, one of the recipients of Craft x EDU’s GABF sponsorship last year. Turner has a day job in insurance but is also a cofounder of Craft Women Connect, a group for Black women interested in beer. She says she’d like to become more involved in the industry, especially in the world of beer-and-food pairing and beer education. (She’s currently pursuing a Certified Cicerone certification.) Turner was an ideal candidate for that GABF sponsorship—but she didn’t see it that way.
“When I saw the grant opportunity come out, I didn’t apply for it. It was the whole thing of, ‘Am I doing enough to qualify for this?’ instead of thinking, ‘What can I do with this if I get it?’” Turner says.
Ultimately, TrimTab Brewing Company bartender and Brewed Black Girl founder Ashley Monroe nominated her. Turner says she’s grateful she was chosen and attended GABF, not just for what she learned, but for what the presence of Black beer enthusiasts brought to the event—and can continue to do for the industry. Turner says what Black women can do is what other, better-represented demographics have already had the opportunity to do: share their passion for beer with their friends, and invite people to discover beer. Turner says she’s stayed in touch with contacts she made at the event and hopes to continue promoting craft beer education through Craft Women Connect.
“The importance to me is to show that we’re here and we’re not just casual beer drinkers but this is important to us. We want to be seen,” she says. “It’s like, ‘Here we are. We are here.’”
Oliver admits the MJF scholarships will initially benefit people of color who already have a foot in the door. He says that’s just step one, though, and that the longer-term goal is to do outreach to communities that aren’t even aware of jobs within the beer industry.
He says the scholarships need to demonstrate success from the start, so they’ll begin by offering assistance to those “most likely to win.” That might sound cold, he acknowledges, but he maintains it’s only practical to first offer funding to existing minority brewers first.
“It’s a triage of sorts. Who’s got the tools already and just needs a helping hand up to the middle to make it?” he says.
It’s so early in the process of creating systemic reform, Oliver says, that he needs to first prove the scholarships will work. Given the limited amount of money and time that brewery owners have, Oliver wants the MJF to first demonstrate proof of concept before it expands its outreach. But he’s confident that with enough funding—and with enough energy from the industry—the MJF will make measurable change.
“It’s #50 on the list of the things on any brewer’s to-do list every day: Increase diversity in the industry. But you never get to the #50 thing on the list,” he says. “I’m trying to move this, for a few minutes, from #50 to #3.”
His strategy: convince breweries to put their money where their mouth is in service of a more diverse industry. (Once its fundraising page is created, the MJF will accept small donations from individuals, but it’s major donations from breweries that will likely sustain it.) Oliver thinks they’ll see a return on that investment.
“When we go out in the world and say we’re a great industry and we want your support, now we’ll be more deserving of your support,” he says. “If you want people to buy your whiskey or beer, people want to know there's meaning behind your company and industry. Being inclusive creates that meaning.”
Words by Kate Bernot