Nine months after Marcus Baskerville launched a collaboration beer project called “Black Is Beautiful,” the fundraiser continues to gain steam. Baskerville, head brewer at San Antonio’s Weathered Souls Brewing Company, launched Black Is Beautiful in June 2020 in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. The Stout recipe and its label art were made available to breweries that pledged to donate all proceeds from their sale of the beer to “local foundations that support police brutality reform and legal defenses for those who have been wronged.”
The campaign’s influence has since swelled beyond the beer itself. Nearly 1,200 breweries globally have already participated, and more plan to do so in 2021. Even Walmart is selling the beer. According to estimates based on the number of participating breweries, Black Is Beautiful continues to raise millions of dollars, but more difficult to assess is the success of the project’s long-term goal: “to bridge the gap that’s been around for ages and provide a platform to show that the brewing community is an inclusive place for everyone of any color.”
“Hopefully we can continue to push Black Is Beautiful to other entities besides beer,” Baskerville says. “The ‘Black Is Beautiful’ name itself has such a great message; the beer was just the vessel to share it.”
GBH contacted 51 U.S. breweries—one from each state, plus Washington, D.C.—that had publicly acknowledged plans to brew a Black Is Beautiful beer. To understand the reach and impact of the collaboration effort, reporters requested:
The size of their batch or batches
The price per serving or package
The amount donated from sales and which organizations received it
Twenty-three breweries responded to GBH’s requests, with an average donation of $4,183—a sizable check for a small nonprofit organization to receive. (For comparison, American households claimed an average of $5,508 in total charitable donations on their 2017 tax filings, the last year for which such data is available.) Twenty-one of the 23 responding breweries donated 100% of sales or the net revenue after recouping expenses to make and package the beer. Weathered Souls didn’t ask breweries to submit receipts for their donations and didn’t conduct an overall tally of funds raised. The monetary donations went to organizations that support racial equity, an end to police brutality, and civil rights.
In February, Walmart announced that 300 of its stores nationwide will carry the Black Is Beautiful beer through March 2021, and 55 of its Texas stores will do so year-round. To keep up with demand, Weathered Souls partnered with eight other breweries—located in the South, Southwest, and Midwest—to brew Black Is Beautiful for Walmart. Those breweries have pledged to donate at least 10% of those proceeds to racial justice organizations, a lower percentage than the original 100% Weathered Souls asked participating breweries to donate. BIB is also expanding beyond beer: Coffee roasters, distilleries, and chocolatiers have signed on to support Black Is Beautiful, too. Baskerville even collaborated with Humanize My Hoodie, a fashion activism project that seeks to destigmatize clothing trends associated with people of color.
The 23 breweries that responded to GBH’s survey came from all corners of the map: Six are located in Southern states; seven represent Western states; five hail from the Midwest; and five are located in the Northeast. Most breweries produced one batch of Black Is Beautiful of up to 10 barrels (310 gallons), and 77% of respondents packaged their beer in bottles or cans.
Their donations tallied in many different ways:
All but two respondents said their brewery donated, or plans to donate, 100% of beer sales (or 100% of net revenue) to the organization of their choice. For most breweries that responded, the donation figure totalled between $1,000 and $5,000.
Four said they didn’t know how much they would donate when sales ended, and two breweries donated 20% of the proceeds for very different amounts: Michigan’s Brew Detroit ($2,000) and Illinois’ Empirical Brewery ($300), although Empirical gave back beyond the BIB collab beer. After their Black Is Beautiful brew, which benefited Brave Space Alliance, Empirical released a different charitable beer in July 2020, donating 100% of proceeds to the same organization as well as another local group: My Block, My Hood, My City. This beer was relaunched in October as an exclusive partnership with Brave Space Alliance.
Seven breweries donated over $5,000—some substantially more. The owners of D.C.’s Port City Brewing Co., for example, matched employee contributions to three organizations in addition to donating the proceeds from their Black Is Beautiful beer, for a total of more than $7,000 raised. Colorado’s Avery Brewing Co. donated more than $15,000 total.
Most of the responding breweries contributed to organizations that have a mission to foster empowerment for non-white communities, such as their state NAACP branches, the national Movement for Black Lives, the Wilmington Green Box in Delaware, or the Know Your Rights Camp in Colorado. Pivot Brewing Company in Kentucky says it plans to release its Black Is Beautiful beer annually during Black History Month.
While her brewery’s BIB beer is still in production, Sarah Perez of Bleeding Heart Brewery in Palmer, Alaska says participating in the collaboration “is an honor and something that is near to me, being the only Black woman who brews, educates, and leads the first Pink Boots Chapter here in Alaska.” She adds that the brewery plans to donate 100% of proceeds.
But the goal of the Black Is Beautiful campaign isn’t just to raise money—it’s to lay the groundwork for systemic change. Some breweries are going beyond the collaboration beer to build tangible pathways for underrepresented people in the industry.
“We were hesitant to do BIB initially because it seemed like it’d be too easy for the industry to do the ‘quick and easy’ beer, then move on,” says CEO and brewmaster Jason Pellett of Georgia’s Orpheus Brewing. So, before jumping in, Pellett and his team created the brewery’s Leadership Diversity Program, which offers a $1,500-a-month training fellowship that also includes health insurance. The job walks participants through every aspect of the beer industry—preparing them to step into high-level leadership roles.
Pellett launched the fellowship, which is open to applicants from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds, as a six-month program, but has already extended the timeline to an indeterminate length for its first recipient: Jade Briggs, a Black woman, who calls the program “one of the most challenging, rewarding, overwhelming, [and] gratifying experiences of my life,” and describes the team as “thoughtful and caring.”
“Six months isn’t really time to accomplish the kind of across-the-board, intensive training I envisioned,” Pellett says, but that period will instead become the assessment point for a potential year-long extension.
Participants will divide their time between warehouse and packaging operations and a rotating assignment of cross-sector tasks, as well as working with brewery leadership. Briggs describes how prior brewery work made her the most knowledgeable in her own circles, “but after starting [the program] I quickly realized that my knowledge and experience is in its infancy. I am so grateful to be developing my training and understanding [in] production, sales, marketing, and the business side from a brewery that holds and shares similar morals and values.”
When the fellowship was announced, Orpheus promoted it on its website and social media channels, receiving about 25 applications, Pellett says. He expects the fellowship will receive a bigger response when the second opportunity is announced.
Initial public response has been mostly positive, he says, but the brewery received some social media backlash from customers complaining that the program was discriminatory against white people (a phenomenon other breweries have encountered). One post read: “Just based on race other[s] can leap frog [sic] me with zero knowledge or love for the craft ... Talk about equality. I’m pretty sure I have at least 1/1024th of some minority. Can I know [sic] be considered for a program?”
After establishing the fellowship, Orpheus brewed its barrel-aged BIB blend, bottled on Feb. 17. Pellett says it will sell 225 bottles for a total of $7,200, donating 100% of proceeds to an advocacy organization, the Georgia Justice Project, and the Michael Jackson Foundation for Brewing and Distilling.
Meanwhile, Connecticut’s New England Brewing Co. (NEBCO) is donating 100% of its proceeds—the beer is currently aging in bourbon barrels and hasn’t been sent to market yet. Jamal Robinson, director of sales and marketing for the brewery, estimates that total will be $15,000-$20,000. Beyond that, Robinson says that the business is going to find additional ways to “help diversify the industry, bring awareness to racial injustice and help better the Black communities in New Haven.”
Chief among those efforts is the NEBCO African American Brewers Scholarship, created in partnership with Sacred Heart University (SHU), and which Robinson discussed on the Good Beer Hunting podcast in December 2020. “We need to find a way to equitably give Black people an opportunity in the industry as a whole. We need to bring beer to Black culture in a different way to make sure it’s something Black people know they can be part of,” he said in the interview. [Disclosure: Good Beer Hunting donated $500 to this cause.]
The annual scholarship will fund the full $15,000 tuition for a Black student to complete the one-year SHU Brewing Science program, Robinson says. NEBCO also joined with SHU and the Connecticut Brewers Guild to create an endowed scholarship, aiming to raise $250,000 over the next five years to fully cover the annual tuition of one student a year for perpetuity. The brewery’s Equality Committee also launched a quarterly Equality IPA series to benefit local Black-led community organizations.
After putting its Black Is Beautiful beer on draft at all six of its currently open taprooms, raising $7,575 for the NAACP and Hear Us Here, San Diego’s Ballast Point Brewing Company took its diversity and inclusion initiatives a step further. On Feb. 8, the brewery launched its own annual scholarship, the “Brewing for Diversity” initiative, in partnership with UC San Diego Extension. The program provides “full tuition and employment opportunities for underrepresented students,” according to a press release. (The BIB brew was a collaboration with Kilowatt Brewing and Mujeres Beer House, the latter of which is the first Latina-founded and -led brewery in the region; all breweries donated 100% of the proceeds.)
When the national racial equity movement gathered steam in 2020, then-beertender Misha Collins approached CEO Brendan Watters with suggestions for improving diversity, equity, and inclusion at Ballast Point. The company created a full-time position, the community engagement manager, and appointed Collins, a Black woman, to lead initiatives such as the scholarship.
Applications are being accepted until May 16 for a May 31 award date. Collins says the selection committee includes representatives from Ballast Point, UC San Diego Extension, and the San Diego Brewers Guild Inclusion Committee whose backgrounds “reflect the many faces and diverse experiences that make up the brewing industry of the future.”
Scholarships are one way Black Is Beautiful has created change that goes beyond financial donations. But Baskerville says the effort needs to reach all the way to the top levels of the industry.
“Ultimately, the real change is going to come when there’s a shift in decision-making,” he says. “Until we have Black ownership [of breweries], more Black head brewers, it’s only going to be minimal change.”
In 2019, the Brewers Association conducted its first benchmarking survey on the racial composition of owners and employees in the craft-beer industry. Just 1% of brewery owners identify as Black, and 0.6% of brewers do.
Baskerville notes a few initiatives, begun in the past year, that support a broader effort to improve Black representation in the beer industry:
The Michael J. Jackson Foundation scholarships in brewing and distilling, which fund technical education and career advancement for BIPOC people in the brewing and distilling industries. [Disclosure: Good Beer Hunting donated $2,000 to this cause.]
Eugenia Brown’s Road to 100 Cicerone scholarship and mentorship program, which pays for and coaches BIPOC women to take first- and second-level exams for Cicerone, a beer certification program.
Hop Culture and Beer Kulture’s paid editorial internship for a BIPOC writer.
Other scholarships and empowerment opportunities exist. But there remain real challenges to increasing representation of Black people in the brewing industry, even when there’s the desire to do so.
New Jersey’s Carton Brewing Company encountered such challenges firsthand. In tandem with its BIB beer, co-founder Augie Carton developed a six-month, paid internship at the brewery, intending that it be filled by someone who isn’t “a husky white dude with a red beard.”
Carton released its BIB beer in four-packs of 16oz cans (sold for $17) printed with a message that detailed the internship and read, in part: “If the free internship model has kept you from getting the experience you need for a foot in the door, send an email to info@cartonbrewing.com. We will pay you to learn what we know, and add your voice to our conversation.”
The brewery received only two applications. One candidate was chosen but never started the internship because he had another full-time job he didn’t want to quit. The can’s message didn’t specifically use the words non-white, Black, person of color, etc., and Carton’s Black Is Beautiful beer was available only from its taproom, which perhaps limited its reach to customers of the brewery rather than those less familiar with Carton or craft beer generally. Both could have contributed to the low number of applicants.
Carton is still dismayed by the experience, and it speaks to a very real dilemma for the brewing industry, and for mostly white industries more broadly: Messaging efforts may only reach existing pools of talent and customers.
Carton says the internship program might be more effective if it were instituted at a statewide level by a brewers guild, where someone with “more depth of focus” could organize and market it.
Alisa Bowens-Mercado is the owner of Rhythm Brewing Co. in New Haven, Connecticut: the only brewery in the state that’s both Black- and woman-owned. Changing the industry, she says, requires going beyond craft: a definition that applies to just about every business involved in the BIB project thus far. Industry-wide equality, she says—both in terms of opportunities for workers and owners as well as consumer choice—is impossible until Black- and female-owned brands sit next to six-packs of Bud Light and Heineken on grocery- and corner-store shelves.
“Anheuser-Busch has the ‘king of beers’—why can’t there be a ‘queen of beers?’ We have a voice, but we need a bigger platform,” Bowens-Mercado says. She patterned the brewery’s core lineup on the “Big Beer” model: one flagship Lager and its “light” counterpart. But her brand will never be able to compete without the high-dollar campaigns big brands throw behind their beer, she explains.
Nor is it enough to simply hire Black and female brewers at big brands, as AB InBev has done. Bowens-Mercado would like to see major distributors partner with Black-owned breweries like Rhythm to offer them the same marketing and sales support their largest brands enjoy. But the way most breweries achieve that support is by growing big enough to sell high volumes of beer—setting up a chicken-and-egg conundrum for small breweries that want that level of wholesaler attention.
“We have a whole demographic of people who want to support brands that are diverse, but there’s nothing being nationally marketed or distributed that is identifiable as our own,” Bowens-Mercado says. Black Is Beautiful’s expanding scale illustrates that brewers and customers are eager to make and buy a product that supports Black people’s inclusion in the beer industry, and “we really want to be the first Black-owned, female-owned, nationally distributed beer brand in the country.”
Bowens-Mercado is looking beyond the craft sector when she thinks about greater opportunities for Black people in the brewing industry. Making Black-owned beer brands broadly accessible would potentially inspire people who don’t see, or haven’t considered, a place for themselves in beer. This is where Black Is Beautiful’s widening reach—to Walmart shelves rather than just taproom draft lines—is most powerful.
“We can’t just just focus on craft when there’s a whole other piece of getting onto that bigger stage,” Bowens-Mercado says. “We should have those opportunities.”
Words by Kate Bernot and Holly Regan