Four Black-owned craft beverage-alcohol brands are uniting in California to create a strategic alliance greater than the sum of its parts.
The Circle of Crowns Beverage Group (CCBG) includes Inglewood-based Crowns and Hops, Fresno-based Full Circle Brewing and its sister brands Speakeasy Ales and Lagers and Sonoma Cider.
“This alliance is a monumental opportunity to unite four exceptional Black brands that have individually made significant waves in the industry,” Crowns and Hops CEO and co-founder Beny Ashburn told Brewbound. “By banding together, we’re not just shaking up the industry, but we’re almost rewriting the DNA when you think about it, because an opportunity like this has never existed before for BIPOC brands in the market.”
No equity will change hands under the strategic alliance, but all four brands will share resources and a combined sales force to cross the necessary hurdles for placement in chain retailers – all but a requirement to succeed in distributed sales in California.
Ashburn and Crowns and Hops co-founder and head of brewing operations Teo Hunter began discussing a partnership in 2021 with Arthur Moye, CEO and owner of Full Circle. Moye acquired Speakeasy in April 2023 in a deal that made his company the country’s largest Black-owned craft brewery by volume.
An impetus behind the chats was the fact that national chain retailers had pledged to support Black-owned brands in 2020 after the Black Lives Matter movement swelled in response to the murder of George Floyd. Often, those retailers required distribution and volume commitments beyond what many Black-owned craft brewers could achieve.
“There is no majority Black-owned brewery at this point that can produce enough to answer the call, even within the state of California, of a Safeway or a Walmart,” Moye said.
“If a chain or a larger group was interested, we have reduced those barriers,” Hunter said. “Let’s be frank, it’s been more than just retailers that have launched these incentives and these concepts for how to be supportive to BIPOC brands.
“Our belief is that they have been sitting on the sidelines because there hasn’t been a structure or an alliance or an organization like we’re presenting today to get behind in terms of being able to capitalize on whatever opportunity or resources that we’re looking to make available,” he continued. “We have an opportunity to answer all calls and investigate those opportunities.”
Moye acquired Full Circle in 2016 after selling his accounting practice. The brewery has recorded impressive growth in recent years, increasing production more than 1,600% since 2018, to 6,000 barrels in 2022, according to the most recent data available from the Brewers Association (BA). The road there has at times involved requests from trade partners
“What I’ve seen in the journey to become a bigger player in the craft beer space is there’s a lot of times where you have to put the chicken before the egg, especially when it comes to reaching the mass consumer,” he said.
“With our respective brands, we’re awesome at being able to get the consumer excited,” Moye continued. “The consumer goes and seeks our stuff out, historically in independent stores where we can find a space on the shelf. And the bigger retailers, they noticed this and they start to create and open up doors for BIPOC businesses.
“But then you get to the table and they ask for the chicken before the egg,” he continued. “They said ‘OK, do you have a distribution network among the distributors that we respect?’ And the answer for 99.9% of all other BIPOC beer brands is no. And then you go to the distributor and say ‘Hey, I have interest in getting in these retailers,’ and they ask ‘Well, have the retailers signed on yet? Oh, and by the way, can you produce at the levels that you can actually sustain those shelves?’ And 99.9%[of the time] the answer is no.”
Under the CCBG alliance, Full Circle has begun contract production of some of Crowns and Hops’ beers and the companies have invested in a fleet for intrastate shipments.
Although all four brands share very little overlap in distributor networks, the founders are hoping dedicated wholesalers will allow each brand to shine independently. Each brand will also receive special attention in its home market – Crowns and Hops in Southern California, Speakeasy in the Bay Area and Full Circle in the central part of the state.
“Being able to lean into all of those different facets of who our brands are truly speaks to the scope that we are even in the Black community,” Hunter said. “A lot of people expect us to be this one monolithic concept or idea, but we’re not. We’re a scope and being able to approach this in the largest craft beer state in the country, and still being able to accommodate that sense of supporting local, supporting BIPOC and supporting many of our special classes.
“We have literally tripled down on Black-owned,” he continued. “We are woman-owned, we are veteran-owned. That really speaks to us making it as simple as possible to do what the world is saying that they want to do, which is to support Black-owned. We are literally providing the platform to allow people to actually take action if in fact that is what they’d like to do.”
Collectively, the alliance can produce up to 25,000 barrels using Full Circle’s excess capacity. CCBG has its sights on becoming a top regional producer, with output greater than 15,000 barrels and eventually 100,000 barrels, Moye said.
Because they entered the industry after financial institutions began to cool on investing in craft beer and they don’t resemble the archetypal craft brewery founders, Moye, Ashburn and Hunter have all turned to non-traditional funding methods to build their companies.
“The way that we’ve had to overcome a lot of these hurdles mutually has been bypassing those traditional markets and going straight to our consumer fans,” Moye said. “We both had successful crowd equity campaigns. Without the consumers having the opportunity to invest directly in what we are, we wouldn’t be here because there’s no traditional means – the chicken and the egg. We’re not going to a bank and saying, ‘Give us $5 million to start.’ This doesn’t happen generally, let alone to a historically underrepresented group.
“‘Hell, you want me to give you $5 million for what?’ Well, we’ve got to build stuff and create a brand that we can produce in high volume that we could put on all these shelves that we don’t know if it’s going to succeed or not,” he continued. “But a lot of these OG breweries started in that environment, that excited new craft environment. They’re like, ‘Here’s $5 million, here it is.’ And we didn’t get to start with that.”
Global brewing companies have announced initiatives to invest in diversifying the industry. Molson Coors has launched scholarship programs to send people from underrepresented backgrounds to brewing school. Constellation Brands established its Focus on Minority Founders investment fund in 2020, but the fund’s most recent investment appears to have been in a Black-owned wine brand in 2021.
The CCBG allows all four brands to punch above their weight by combining Full Circle’s distribution strength and “that Beny and Teo audacity and reach and brand relationships,” Ashburn said.
“If you combine those two superpowers from both of our brands, we do create this monster of a business that no one’s ever seen in the BIPOC space and in general,” she said. “We are now competitors against some of the larger brands that exist on the market.”
To hear more from Ashburn and Hunter, watch their keynote conversation with National Black Brewers Association executive director Kevin Asato during the Brewbound Live business conference in December 2023.
To hear more from Moye, listen to his conversation on the Brewbound Podcast during the California Craft Beer Summit.