While craft finished 2023 in decline, Black-owned craft breweries were able to grow, according to National Black Brewers Association (NB2A) executive director Kevin Asato in a press conference Wednesday during the Craft Brewers Conference in Las Vegas.
More specific numbers on Black-owned breweries’ sales and impact will be released next month, but Asato gave a preview of what to expect from that report, including that Black-owned craft breweries are consistently outperforming both the overall craft segment and total beer.
“What is the secret sauce that these individuals hold?” Asato asked. “Very simple: It’s their authentic self. It’s the culture. It is very simple that in the beer industry, what these individuals are doing, and the association that we’re trying to bring together, we are bringing culture to the cup, and it’s exactly the same recipe that actually had craft beer grow before.
“When you think about how craft beer grew, it was an iconic piece of community property,” he continued. “Craft beer was that local place within a community that people would come to, and that people would have a desire to congregate together, share a pint, talk about life, talk about what’s going on in the community. Craft beer exploded with that, because it had a community that supported it.”
That “authentic” connection to community is happening now with Black-owned businesses. Yet they are still an incredibly small portion of the overall craft pie.
Of the 9,683 craft breweries that operated in the U.S. in 2023, only 85 breweries were Black-owned – less than 1%, Asato said.
“There are 13% Black Americans in the United States,” Asato said. “There are 8% of the [Americans] who drink that are Black. How do we get away and allow this industry that we love to only have less than 1% of Black ownership in these breweries? How do we let that happen?”
There is also a major disparity between Black consumers who drink bev-alc, and Black consumers who drink beer – more than any other demographic group, Asato said. About 88% of Black Americans who drink bev-alc drink spirits, while only 46% of the same population drink beer. That’s equivalent to about 16 million consumers who drink alcohol, but don’t drink beer, according to Asato.
“I can assign a very simple consumption model to this: one beer a day, two times a week, all of a sudden that volume starts to really start to materialize into something significant,” he said. “The craft beer industry, the beer industry as a whole, actually has an avenue of new drinkers that could be introduced into this market, and they are Black.”
NB2A president and Weathered Souls co-founder Marcus Baskerville echoed these remarks and the potential impact Black consumers could have on craft beer if there were more breweries for them to connect with. Baskerville emphasized that supporting Black-owned craft breweries doesn’t just help those individual businesses, it helps all craft breweries, as Black-owned breweries help introduce craft beer to consumers that can then spread their dollars and support across the segment.
“Craft beer isn’t oversaturated at this point, craft beer is oversaturated with white males,” Baskerville said. “There’s a completely whole different demographic that we have not even been able to hit yet.”
Black-owned breweries cannot do it on their own and need the support of fellow industry members, NB2A first VP and Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster Garrett Oliver said.
“America propagates this toxic idea that there is such thing as a self-made man,” Oliver said. “This is always a lie.
“If you’re a self-made man, or a self-made woman, is that even a thing to aspire to?” he continued. “I’m gonna say that it isn’t, because if you’re self-made, you show up alone. Alone. By yourself. Is this really what beer is about? Is this what we want it to be? No.”