The traumatic, racist events of the recent past have rendered time equal parts slippery and sticky. These events have roots reaching back generations, but the last two years feel particularly painful against the backdrop of the pandemic. Have we lived in this new reality for a decade, or the blink of an eye? For Marcus Baskerville, co-founder and head brewer of Weathered Souls Brewing Co. in San Antonio, Texas, two years have passed in a blur of work, travel, and ambitious plans to increase leadership roles in beer for professionals from underrepresented groups.
Baskerville launched Black Is Beautiful in June 2020 as a global collaboration beer to raise awareness of injustices facing Black people and people of color, and to raise money for causes related to the fight for racial justice and ending police brutality. Its purpose extended far beyond any brewhouse:
Black Is Beautiful has so far raised more than $4 million.
The effort has elevated Baskerville and Weathered Souls to leadership roles within the Brewers Association and the San Antonio Restaurant Association.
It spurred the forthcoming Harriet Baskerville Incubation Program, a professional development opportunity for brewers from underrepresented groups. The program, named for Baskerville’s grandmother, educates and supports Black and Indigenous people, people of color, and women who are in the process of opening a brewery.
The idea has also acted as a catalyst for a larger racial justice conversation within beer.
But two years on, fewer breweries are brewing Black Is Beautiful. Within nine months of the collaboration beer’s launch—after the murder of a Black man named George Floyd by police in Minneapolis made international news—1,200 breweries worldwide had signed on to brew it. Now, in 2022, Baskerville says about four or five breweries per month reach out to him about brewing the beer. Black Lives Matter demonstrators aren’t making front-page headlines in major U.S. cities. It would be easy to assume the news cycle and industry peers have moved on, and that the brewing industry’s commitment to racial justice has similarly waned. But Baskerville says the reality is just the opposite: Black Is Beautiful and other beer-industry initiatives have become organized, ambitious, and unified in their plans over these two years. Black Is Beautiful continues to improve opportunities for Black people and other people of color within beer through the scholarships, mentorships, programs, and discussions it has sparked.
“You did this amazing thing and you don’t want it to dwindle. You don’t want it to die down; you want the momentum to stay. That’s why we’re working on the next steps,” Baskerville says.
He points to several national projects that have launched since Black Is Beautiful:
The Michael James Jackson Foundation for Brewing & Distilling, which funds scholarship awards to underrepresented racial and ethnic groups within the brewing and distilling trades.
The #MeToo outpouring that brewer Brienne Allan sparked in May 2021, which led to the launch of an anti-discrimination collaboration beer called Brave Noise. “You look at what Brienne did and continues to do … Black Is Beautiful raised up an ability for individuals to call out certain things that shouldn’t be done within this industry,” Baskerville says.
A robust slate of diversity, equity, and inclusion programming offered during this year’s Craft Brewers Conference, including a dedicated, daylong workshop called THRIVE.
Earlier this year, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library added a can of Black Is Beautiful beer to its exhibit titled “Up From the People: Protest & Change in D.C.” Just this week, Baskerville was able to see the exhibit for the first time, calling it a “monumental moment for myself and for the entire craft beer industry.”
“We look at what Black Is Beautiful did and the shining light that it put on the industry … I think it was one of the catalyst points to get a lot of things driving and moving,” Baskerville says. “It’s created a place for individuals to want to further build on what Black Is Beautiful initially started.”
Baskerville launched Black Is Beautiful as what he calls an emotional response to the horror of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s killings. Because he didn’t originally envision the beer becoming a global project or appearing on shelves at 623 Walmart stores in the U.S. during Black History Month in February 2022, he says he understands the criticism he’s received calling the initial launch disorganized; for example, there was no formal infrastructure at Weathered Souls to monitor breweries who pledged donations to ensure they followed through.
The next phase of Black Is Beautiful’s legacy, he vows, will be more deliberate. When Weathered Souls opens a second location in Charlotte, North Carolina, this fall, it will house the Harriet Baskerville Incubator Program. So far, the incubator has commitments from Yakima Chief Hops, Cask Global Canning Solutions, White Labs, and Deutsche Beverage Technology to offer support and mentorship; Rahr Malting Co. recently donated $100,000 to the effort. Profits from the sale of Black Is Beautiful at Walmart this year will also go toward funding the program.
“We support inclusion and support having new brewers learning to make good beer,” says Pablo Gomez, technical account manager for White Labs, explaining why the company has committed to hosting educational opportunities for the incubator’s participants at its nearby Asheville, North Carolina, facility. “We believe in education a lot and we couldn’t pass this opportunity up.”
The incubator aims to train 12 candidates per year, with the goal of having them open their breweries within a year of completing the program. It’s a national program, accepting brewers from all over the country who will spend one month in an intensive, hands-on training program that covers brewing, sanitizing, safety in the brewhouse, recipe development, ingredients procurement, packaging, marketing, finance, and more. Those trainees will then hopefully return to their communities to open the breweries they’ve dreamed of. This, Baskerville says, is what it will take to create tangible, lasting change within beer.
“Yeah, we can always hire all the [racially diverse] taproom employees, hire all the cellarmen, but is that going to make real change within the industry? No,” he says. “We know change is made by individuals that make decisions, by the individuals that have ownership, by the individuals that run things.”
Even if four out of 12 of the incubator’s first-year participants are Black and go on to open breweries, he says, that would increase the percentage of Black-owned breweries in the U.S. by 60%. (Survey results from the Brewers Association trade group, released in October 2021, indicate 0.4% of brewery owners identify as Black; that would equate to roughly 36 Black-owned breweries in the U.S. based on 2019 craft brewery totals. However, the BA notes that response bias may have skewed these figures.) Creating leadership and ownership opportunities for other Black brewers has become Baskerville’s purpose—something that’s distinct from his passion. Passion, he says, was the initial Black Is Beautiful beer, an emotional, from-the-heart response. Purpose, by contrast, is methodical, slow, and not always glamorous.
“Your purpose isn’t always your passion, and your passion isn’t always your purpose,” he says. “That’s what my purpose is in this industry: to help people like myself be able to get their start.”
Another legacy of Black Is Beautiful is less tangible than the Harriet Baskerville Incubator Program: the countless conversations that the collaboration sparked among the staff of breweries around the world. In Charlotte, North Carolina, where the incubator will be located, the murder of George Floyd has touched off efforts by beer enthusiasts, breweries, and the North Carolina Brewers Guild to welcome a more diverse group of beer professionals into the industry.
“I can say without a doubt that [Black Is Beautiful] was a definitive moment for many organizations in the industry,” says Jamaar Valentine, regional general manager at craft beverage collective Bevana. “Even the idea of just brewing the beer and taking one little step with it does help push that conversation forward.”
At his former workplace, NoDA Brewing Company in Charlotte, North Carolina, Valentine says that the launch of Black Is Beautiful and the question it raised—will your brewery participate?—forced a conversation with senior leadership.
NoDA did participate by brewing the beer four times over two years. The brewery also launched an internal diversity, equity, and inclusion committee, and committed to ongoing outreach with justice-, equity-, and inclusion-oriented community organizations.
“All because of the conversation of: Should we do Black Is Beautiful or not?” Valentine says.
A similar conversation occurred at MiddleCoast Brewing Company in Traverse City, Michigan, where owner Joel Mulder says Black Is Beautiful was an opportunity to discuss race internally among ownership and externally with customers.
“Where we are, up in northern Michigan, there are a lot of people that were against the whole [Black Lives Matter] movement, so we thought our voice is actually very good to have here,” he says. (The headline of an article in The Washington Post from July 2021 covering debates over critical race theory at schools in Traverse City described the issue as “tearing this small town apart.”)
This led to a back-and-forth about which organization the owners would select to receive the money that MiddleCoast’s Black Is Beautiful beer raised.
“Even in our own ownership group, who are a bunch of friends, we all don’t have the same political alignments,” he says. “Someone would say, ‘How about this organization?’ and someone else would say, ‘Oh jeez.’”
Ultimately, owners decided to donate to Life After Debt, a Grosse Pointe, Michigan-based nonprofit that buys and eliminates medical debt. Life After Debt describes itself as eliminating debt mostly for residents of Detroit and surrounding areas, which have a Black population of almost 80%. While not an organization explicitly focused on racial justice, Life After Debt works to help local residents. MiddleCoast donated $2,853 to the organization after twice brewing a Black Is Beautiful beer.
Valentine says even a small step like this represents progress—and should be a commitment to further action. It’s not clear if MiddleCoast would have made a statement like “Black Is Beautiful”—and given money to an organization that helps those in need—without the national collaboration beer paving the way.
“Something that comes up in a lot of my conversations about DEI and community culture is the idea that you can do something. There’s no reason to do nothing,” he says. “Not that there’s anything wrong with doing what little bit you can here and there, but it is not enough to simply do one thing and be done with it.”
Words by Kate Bernot