Alisa Bowens-Mercado, owner of Rhythm Brewing Co. in New Haven, Connecticut, has long maintained that building a more inclusive brewing industry is a mission that needs support from beer’s biggest players. She told Good Beer Hunting in February that real change will come when national breweries, the kind whose beers are sold in every grocery store and gas station, start business relationships with Black- and women-owned breweries like hers. This month, Bowens-Mercado’s vision took a step forward.
On June 17, Bowens-Mercado drove to Boston Beer Company’s Samuel Adams taproom in Boston for the launch of a collaboration sparkling Lager, Up Tempo, that she brewed with that taproom’s head brewer, Megan Parisi. As she stood on the brewery’s rooftop on a warm, cusp-of-summer day, she felt reflective.
“Just coming off of what we’ve all experienced in the last year, looking up at this beautiful sky, taking in my surroundings on the rooftop of Sam Adams Boston taproom, and just seeing them bring out the can for the first time, it signified that there is change,” Bowens-Mercado says. “There is conscious change coming.”
Up Tempo is the realization of what Bowens-Mercado has asked for, but the collaboration also has its limitations. Only about 7.5 barrels were brewed, and it’s being sold exclusively on draft and in crowlers through the Samuel Adams taproom in Boston. And because of Massachusetts’ alcohol laws, only the brewery selling the beer can profit from it, so Rhythm won’t earn any money from Up Tempo’s sales. There was no charitable component to the release, so revenue will go to Boston Beer Co. as it would with any other taproom beer.
Acknowledging these limits, Mercado says Up Tempo is still opening the door to future opportunities. She and Boston Beer are planning further collaborations, which a Boston Beer spokesperson says could be available at “more shared locations.” (Rhythm does not have its own taproom.) Mercado sees Up Tempo as a first step.
“Standing there with the can next to Megan [Parisi], we got to crack them open and cheers like, ‘What’s next? What’s to come?’”
Bowens-Mercado is clear about what she wants Rhythm to become.
“I will say this again: I’m on a mission to be the next Sam Adams of the world, to get out there and be nationally distributed,” she says.
While Up Tempo, like other Samuel Adams taproom collaborations, is sold in a much more narrow geography than most of Boston Beer’s products—which include the Samuel Adams line of beers, plus Truly Hard Seltzer, Twisted Tea, and Dogfish Head Brewery’s portfolio—Bowens-Mercado says the exposure she’ll get through the Samuel Adams collaboration is valuable. Seeing her brewery’s name on the draft menu and appearing on the taproom’s Instagram page represent progress toward her larger goal. She says Up Tempo put Rhythm’s name in front of people who perhaps hadn’t heard it before. Her hope is that those drinkers check out Rhythm’s social media or website and learn more about the mission of the brewery, then are compelled to seek it out on shelves.
“I’m heading in the direction that I absolutely want to head in and I’m picking up significant opportunities in the industry,” she says. She references the Boston Beer collaboration as well as upcoming partnerships with local arts festivals, the Connecticut Brewers Guild, and an as-yet-unannounced TV appearance that she can’t yet share. “It’s incredible, but at the end of the day, African-American, women-owned brands still have to keep hustling and keep our stories out there.”
She’s describing an in-between state for Rhythm: Her brand is gaining awareness, and she’s receiving emails and social media messages from drinkers nationwide asking why they can’t buy her beer in other states. But national distribution still eludes her. She hopes that consumer demand will be something she can show distributors or retail partners to convince them to carry her beer.
“We usually sell seven cases out the door of Total Wine when we do a tasting,” she says. “I’m already in the corporate system, so let’s expand it to the Northeast or the tri-state area [of Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey].”
But brand awareness without those retail opportunities doesn’t translate into money—at least not yet. And that’s where Bowens-Mercado is still pushing: Her passion, she says, is for economic opportunities and wealth generation for all people through beer. While Up Tempo didn’t put any money directly in Rhythm’s pocket, she’s willing to bet it could in the future.
“We’re making inroads. Sometimes financial benefit, you’re not going to see that. But it was the experience that was priceless,” she says. “It starts with conversations, which leads to collaboration, which leads to change.”
For Bowens-Mercado, Up Tempo encapsulates both positive change in the industry and how far it still has to go in creating opportunities for women, Black people, and other underrepresented individuals.
The story of how the collaboration came about is telling: Bowens-Mercado and Parisi had followed each other’s breweries on social media for months, and recognized one another as fellow women brewers. The very same day in November that Parisi and her Boston Beer Co. co-workers had decided they’d approach Rhythm about a collaboration beer, Bowens-Mercado messaged Boston Beer on Instagram. The two women call it something like fate.
“The conversation began when you had women talking about beer and getting excited for each other,” Bowens-Mercado says. “[Boston Beer] was like, ‘No way did you just reach out to us. We were just talking about you and what your brand is doing and how you’re growing and gaining momentum.’”
Parisi echoes this, saying Rhythm was on her radar as a great Lager brewery and a partner that could help Boston Beer “amplify lesser-heard voices.”
When women see each other in the industry, Bowens-Mercado says, they can offer each other support in the form of professional opportunities like Up Tempo. But for that to truly transform the industry, there need to be more women in decision-making roles at breweries.
“When there are more women in these positions, more change will happen,” she says.
Up Tempo was released in the midst of the industry’s grappling with an outpouring of stories of sexual harassment and discrimination that began in May. (Samuel Adams’ Boston taproom released a collaboration beer in April with Massachusetts’ Wormtown Brewery, a company that would later be at the center of harassment allegations resulting in owners stepping away from day-to-day roles.)
Neither Parisi nor Bowens-Mercado explicitly addressed beer’s #MeToo moment in talking about the collaboration, but perhaps that’s a vision of a more positive future: Women brewers collaborating on a project without it having to be about harassment or discrimination.
“We’re just continuing to work together as professionals and peers and colleagues,” Parisi says. “We enjoyed working together so much that we’re already talking about having part two next year.”
Words by Kate Bernot