Written by Chadd Balbi, co-owner of Breweries In PA. Any anger towards this article can be directed to him at [email protected]
Writing about craft beer so frequently allows us to keep a pulse on the industry. And not very long ago we began pushing the Black Is Beautiful collab by Weathered Souls Brewing.
In the past, we also published articles on other beer collaborations as well. Such as “All Together“, “Resilience IPA” and more locally Locust Lane wo put together a beer for hospitality workers. We ourselves even coordinated a collaboration for Pennsylvania military veterans as well.
What’s the difference here? During the aforementioned collabs in the paragraph above, we never received any hate for the beer. In fact, to my knowledge, I cannot recall even one person who had a problem with those collabs.
Yet, we post about Black Is Beautiful, and at least once a day we have to hear from someone who is against the beer.
When it comes down to it there is a lack of diversity in craft beer. There are people well more educated than we are to explain this. So instead of going through stats and figures, here is a well-researched piece that breaks it down.
For those who don’t want to go through the piece above, I’ll make it simpler for you. I don’t think anything quite sums up the lack of diversity in craft beer then the tweet below
Everything wrong with the brewing industry in one single photo. JFC. pic.twitter.com/UohO3llceV
— Andy Kwiatkowski (@jagoffbrewer) July 10, 2020
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So if we understand (through facts and data) there is a lack of diversity in this industry, why the hell would you take the time to argue against a beer collaboration that shines a light on an (obvious) issue facing this industry?
When we produced a craft beer for Veterans, we never once heard how we weren’t focusing enough on the police, firefighters, etc. Yet Black Is Beautiful is released and we have to sort through so many comments on how the beer is wrong.
So if you are one of those who cannot support this beer, even after reading the facts and data, then you also cannot support us. And we are totally fine with that.
