‘A Black Woman Made This Beer’ — How Historically Black Colleges and Universities Shaped a Generation of Black Women Brewers

It was February 2019 when I stepped out of the historic St. Joseph’s Performance Hall in Durham, North Carolina to explore the concession stand, only to be met with an unexpected encounter.

I was attending the Hayti Heritage Film Festival, one of the longest-running Black, Southern film festivals in the United States, and a cultural institution unto itself. A modern, meta-maroon space, the event centers work by Black artists, whose work in turn is rooted in the Black and African diasporic experience. It takes its name from Hayti: the historic African-American community that predates the modern city of Durham, North Carolina. It’s the kind of event where you can start the day exploring ancestral reverence during “Black Feminist Film School,” spend the afternoon line-dancing next to a city councilor or county commissioner, and end the evening rubbing shoulders with Oscar-nominated directors and cinematographers who just happen to be from around the way. 

I’d just finished watching a screening of “While I Breathe I Hope,” a documentary film that followed CNN political commentator and South Carolina politician Bakari Sellers during his historic 2014 campaign for lieutenant governor, in which he attempted to become the first African-American candidate elected in the state in over a century. After a talkback with the film’s producers, I stepped out to the concession area, transformed into a village of Black vendors selling everything from African black soap to African print dresses; waist beads to wire-wrapped rings; centering candles to chakra crystals. I noticed a table with a few bottles of wine displayed in stiletto-shaped holders and wandered over. I’d intended to get a glass of wine, but the server on the other side of the table seemed a lot more excited about the beer.

“A Black woman made this beer,” he said.

“Oh wow. Really? That’s what’s up,” I replied.

“Which would you like to try? We’re pouring the Harlem Sugar Hill Ale and the Renaissance Wit Beer.”

“Honestly,” I thought to myself, “Neither, because I don’t drink beer.”

At the time, I could probably count the number of beers I’d tasted in my entire life on one hand. My go-to technique for cloaking my ignorance was intense focus on the label and packaging rather than the beer itself. I picked up a bottle of each of the two beers showcased in their respective cardboard six-packs, and categorized them in my mind with the corresponding colors of their labels: “the yellow beer” and “the blue beer.” As I turned the bottles around in my hand, I thought to myself: “What the hell is a Wit?”  

What I did know was that, in the seven years between leaving North Carolina after college and returning in 2015, I’d seen breweries taking up more and more space, both physically and culturally. And what I later learned was that the quest that made it possible for me to hold beers made by a Black woman was just as Sisyphean as the one facing a young, Black progressive attempting to win statewide office in the South. 

I grew up with an Afro-centric orientation to brewing culture, inclusive of kingdoms in present-day Egypt and Ethiopia. The first brewer I ever met was a Black, African man. My grandmother brewed, bottled and sold Burukutu in her village in Nigeria. But when I looked across the modern beer industry in North Carolina, I often saw breweries located close to historically Black and Brown communities that drew a customer base that looked very different from those neighbors, or from people who looked like me or my grandma. 

I did not fancy myself a beer enthusiast, but what did grab my attention were experiences like the one I was holding. Harlem. Sugar Hill. Renaissance. It wasn’t the IBU, or tasting notes like “hints of spicy deviled eggs and quince paste” that drew me in. It was an immediate connection to a beer that told a story: Whoever the Black woman was who brewed this beer, she cared about Black people and Black communities enough to see us worthy of being represented everywhere. Suddenly, in my head, I started hearing music: A piano and bass rift, congas and a cowbell, and the sample from Chic’s “Good Times” that kicks off “Rapper’s Delight.”

“I’ll try the yellow one. The Sugar Hill Ale,” I replied.  

MIRRORS, WINDOWS, AND SLIDING GLASS DOORS

In the summer of 1990, Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop—then a professor at Ohio State University—published the article “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” in the publication “Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom.” A scholar and expert on multicultural children’s literature, Dr. Bishop invoked those titular metaphors to expound on the ways that books teach children about their place in society from an early age. Books can serve as a self-affirming reflection (mirror); offer different views of the world (window); and provide portals to new and different worlds (sliding doors). 

When I picked up Ezra Jack Keats’ “A Snowy Day” at my local public library as a little girl, it was one of the first times I saw a Black child mirrored back to me on a book cover. As an adult, seeing my name in print for the first time in Teju Cole’s “Open City” made me realize that after enduring 20 years of having my name mispronounced, misspelled, disregarded, and changed by the people entrusted to educate me, I needed a salve to counteract the attempts of stripping my name of its power, dignity, and love. I understood then that our dreams are shaped by the possibilities we can see and imagine, the places we’ve been, and the people who surround us.

After my introduction to Harlem Brewing Company on that fateful day in 2019, I made a research trip to the Fresh Fest Beer Fest in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania six months later. I went with the question, “Black people and beer. Is that, like … a thing?” Three days later I returned home to North Carolina with my answer: There is beer culture, and then there is Black beer culture. 

“I never had a beer before I started working in a brewery. If they hadn’t built a brewery 30 miles from where I lived, I would have never been in it. In our world, and the minority, African-American world, you don’t even think about it. Even though you drink beer, it’s just not in your mind that that’s something you could do.”

When Fresh Fest launched a year earlier, in 2018, it became the first and only national Black beer festival. It was also the first beer festival I’d ever attended. I arrived at Nova Place in Pittsburgh’s historic North Side, went through a security checkpoint, saw a table full of Black Lives Matter wristbands, and thought, “Well, this is gonna be different.” That difference wasn’t just about the beer—it was about the recognition and unapologetic centering of Black people in relation to beer, which created a sense of fellowship capacious enough to welcome us all.

As Inglewood brewery Crowns & Hops often reminds us, #BlackPeopleLoveBeer. And in the spirit of Sankofa, a word in the Ghanaian Twi language which means “to retrieve” or “go back and fetch,” today’s Black brewers are looking to the past to chart their future. No part of American history, including beer history, is immune from the violence of white supremacy and colonialism, which not only separates people from each other, but separates people from themselves. In the face of comments like, “Black people don’t drink beer,” or “We [white people] need to get Black people in here [our brewery] so we can teach them [Black people] about beer,” are very clear corrections like the one shared by Brooklyn Brewery’s brewmaster, Garrett Oliver: “We’ve [Black people] been doing this for 5,000 years. Every single society, up and down Africa, East to West…” 

Historically, it has specifically been women who have been doing this for all these years. As part of my research, I was particularly interested in delving deeper into the contributions made by Black women brewers to American beer history and brewing traditions. As I learned more, one interesting connection began to emerge: Many of the brewers in question had links to Black institutions, Black communities, and specifically, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). 

Natalie Johnson, the first Black female brewing director at Anheuser-Busch, is a graduate of Fisk University. Beny Ashburn, CEO and co-founder of Crowns & Hops, is a graduate of Spelman College. Kim Harris and Stacy Lee, both of Harlem Hops, are graduates of Clark Atlanta University. And so are the three Black women brewers from North Carolina I recently spoke with: Ida Patrica Henry, Celeste Beatty, and Briana Brake.

YOU MAKE YOUR OWN WORLD

“You ready for this? I tell people this and they don’t believe it: I had no idea I was going to end up running a brewery or anything like that. So my first beer was the first beer I had when I got hired as a brewing supervisor at Miller. As a brewing supervisor, we had to taste test every tank of beer we made. So I was a part of the tasting panel and that was the first time I ever had beer in my life. And the funny thing about it is, it was the first time I ever tasted it but I grew to love beer.”

Ms. Ida Patricia Henry made history in 1977 when the Miller Brewing Company hired her to lead production at its plant in Eden, North Carolina. The plant opened the following year in 1978 and during her tenure, Henry became both the first woman and first African-American brewer for a major American brewery. She is a native of Reidsville, North Carolina and is also a graduate of Bennett College, a historically Black liberal arts college for women in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Earlier this year, Henry and I spoke by phone about the impact of Bennett on her personal formation and her journey as a brewer. “I absolutely love Bennett,” said Henry. “Going to an HBCU kind of helps you catch up on how to be in the world, educationally and culturally. I think going to an HBCU sometimes enables students to realize their full potential because that’s what they were about.” 

Henry entered Bennett in 1965 with the goal of attending medical school and becoming a pediatrician. Her time at Bennett—and a summer intensive studies program at Harvard University—revealed a love of biochemistry that combined with her computer skills. That in turn led her to roles at DuPont, Northwestern Railroad, Ethyl Corporation, and, eventually, Miller. 

Her time at Bennett instilled a “go-getting spirit” that kept her focused and moving forward in the face of adversity and resistance. And by virtue of remaining on her journey at Miller, Henry blazed a trail that also meant clearing a path for the Black women who might also choose to follow in her direction. 

“I never had a beer before I started working in a brewery,” she said. “If they hadn’t built a brewery 30 miles from where I lived, I would have never been in it. In our world, and the minority, African-American world, you don’t even think about it. Even though you drink beer, it’s just not in your mind that that’s something you could do.”

The brewing landscape looked very different during the early days of her career. “[W]hen I grew up, there wasn’t craft breweries on every corner,” she said. “And I think with the way the beer industry evolved where, you know, you have these little breweries now in addition to the big breweries, now you see it more, and you got more African-Americans going into it, because it’s right there in front of you.”

IT TAKES A VILLAGE

“Mom was on the Human Relations Board. I remember one day, she described a conversation on the other end of the call where the grand dragon of the KKK called her […] complaining about how, ‘Black people had too much,’ and, ‘Why isn’t it white people.’ So these moments and little things that happened throughout my life gave me a very kind of broad understanding of the world around me.”

Celeste Beatty, owner of Harlem Brewing Company, is widely recognized as the first Black woman to own a brewery in the United States. Beatty takes her history seriously, however, and resists the designation—as we continue to gain a more fulsome understanding of the contributions of Black women (including the contributions from enslaved and formerly enslaved women) to American brewing traditions, she has been more inclined to use a historical qualifier: “that we know of.”

A native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Beatty attended Shaw University, an HBCU in Raleigh, North Carolina and the oldest HBCU in the Southeast. Later, she founded Harlem Brewing in New York; this year, the company announced it would be launching a new location in North Carolina. Following a keynote address at the 2022 Pink Boots Conference, Beatty and I met at Harlem Brew South Brewery & Taproom at the Tobacco Warehouse in Rocky Mount. And it’s not just any tobacco warehouse.

“I speak to other brewers, you know, they’re doing their thing. They’re opening up their breweries: second location, the third location, the fourth location. When we step out to do things like this, it just represents so much more.”

“This building is a historic building in that more than 10,000 African-Americans—tobacco workers, women—were fighting for better work and better pay in the 1940s, which is a precursor to civil rights,” Beatty said. “This is the place they gathered to try to get better pay and better work … Like I love the feeling of being in this space. And knowing that my grandmother who picked tobacco and all these great Black women, who picked tobacco, who had other dreams that they dreamed and wanted to explore and were denied—they were here. And this was what they were able to do to create more purpose and opportunity for their families.”

At Shaw, Beatty studied international relations, influenced in part by her mom’s experience on the Human Relations Board. “[She] would often gather people from their neighborhood, local leaders, advocates, people from India, Africa, Spanish-speaking countries from all over the world—she felt, and I understood, that they felt that they were all in this together.”

Beatty was drawn to Shaw University in part because of its role in civil rights, including serving as the birthplace of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. SNCC’s legacy as a student-led, grassroots organization included the growing sit-in movement across the South, the freedom rides, the 1963 March on Washington, and the Mississippi Freedom Summer. “I was very involved with community activism and student activism [at Shaw]. I remember sleeping on the campus of Duke University during apartheid with Reverend Barber—he was in one of the tents near me—reflecting on our time as students, trying to get an education, trying to do something that was going to uplift us, but also deeply embedded in the idea of getting an education, getting a job making money, but how are we going to make a difference.”

After graduating from Shaw, Beatty began putting those lessons into practice through her work with a Ben and Jerry’s ice cream shop, where men coming out of incarceration gained hands-on skills while reentering the workforce and society. And her plans for Harlem Brew South include a Brewers Village as a space for connection—between community members and the craft of brewing and to each other. 

THE REAL WORLD

“Wait, you’re in Rocky Mount?”

“Yeah, and I’m from Durham!”

Meeting Briana Brake—native of Durham, North Carolina and CEO of Spaceway Brewing in Rocky Mount, North Carolina—at the 2019 Fresh Fest was a kismetic, full-circle moment. It took me back to that first sip of Black-woman-made beer at the Hayti Film Festival. I heard that the Black woman who made my beer was apprenticing a young woman in eastern North Carolina. And on the first day of Fresh Fest in 2019, I met her.

“Typically when we go to PWIs [Predominantly White Institutions], we’re always the minority. So that kind of leads off the discussion. But at a HBCU, typically everybody looks like you or comes from a background where you can relate and you don’t have to give a disclaimer or explain certain things,” Brake says.

She was both working and enrolled at North Carolina Central University’s Law School when she began making the transition from homebrewing into brewing on a larger scale. Brake’s brewery name is an homage to Afrofuturism, a cultural aesthetic and philosophy which offers a way of looking towards the future through a Black diasporic lens. Beyond the brewery name, that influence is reflected in just about everything at Spaceway, from the label art to the beer names. 

During a Juneteenth celebration at the Hayti Center last year, Brake wasn’t just serving beer—she was converting the doubters, skeptics, and unbelievers. One at a time, self-professed bourbon drinkers approached her booth cautiously, confessing their enthusiasm to support a Black-woman-owned business but their reluctance to try her beer. Then Brake offered a sample of her Don Dada Cardamom Stout—a beer inspired by the song of the same name by reggae artist Super Cat, and a jerk chicken meal that was so good it made Brake start dancing. Reliably, the sample turned into a pint, then a second pint, and finally, a four-pack to take home.

Brake’s Durham upbringing, and the cultural formation that HBCUs offer, are strong influences on her work. “My mom graduated from North Carolina Central University. And she was in school when I was a kid,” Brake says. “So I remember going on campus with her, I remember going to her graduation. And that definitely impacted me, the stuff that she was studying—she was an art major—the stuff that she was reading, she brought that home and it influenced me.”

“Typically when we go to PWIs [Predominantly White Institutions], we’re always the minority. So that kind of leads off the discussion. But at a HBCU, typically everybody looks like you or comes from a background where you can relate and you don’t have to give a disclaimer or explain certain things.”

Brake and Beatty met at Shaw University, where Beatty served as a judge for a pitch competition in support of her alma mater. Brake’s friend, who was organizing the event, had invited Beatty to attend as a judge after hearing Brake talk about a woman she’d recently discovered who was also a Black woman brewing beer—a journey she wanted to begin for herself after questioning whether the dearth of Black women brewers meant her own dreams were beyond reach. “Representation, seeing yourself in spaces, it matters,” Brake says. “At Shaw, an HBCU, surrounded by Black kids in the space, you know, talking about business and talking about spaces that we’re not typically seen. Isn’t it nice to have a space where you can go and it’s still the real world, but you can breathe easier, you can smile easier? You’re more comfortable. You’re not thinking about everything you’re saying, and I’m just being myself.”

Recently, a 2019 North Carolina law allowing public universities the option of selling beer and wine at athletic events has opened new opportunities for partnerships between HBCUs and Black brewers. In 2021, Alabama A&M became the first HBCU to release its own beer. And partnerships like Harlem Hops’ and Brooklyn Brewery’s collaboration with HBCU Homecoming serve as a template for how “brewing for change” can directly support the next generation of Black women brewers who may come out of an HBCU.

As more Black women enter the field, and as more Black-owned breweries open, there’s a special significance to that growth and expansion.

“I speak to other brewers, you know, they’re doing their thing. They’re opening up their breweries: second location, the third location, the fourth location. When we step out to do things like this, it just represents so much more,” says Beatty. “You know, the expectations and the inspiration, and just represents something to our community. As you’re deciding and exploring to do these types of projects, or step out in business, you have a greater sense of purpose about what you’re doing. It’s not just, ‘I’m opening a business,’ ‘Got a business plan’ or my projections. So much of the time, it’s about the community. It’s about what difference you can make.”

Words by Atinuke Akintola Diver
Illustrations by Tyler Barnett