Let’s name the thing before we argue about it. When people say craft beer has a diversity problem, they usually mean one of three overlapping things: the people who own and run breweries are disproportionately white and male; the people who drink and buy craft beer skew whiter and more affluent than the general population; and the culture around craft beer — its language, its spaces, its festivals, its gatekeeping — can feel unwelcoming to people who are not already inside it. For a former brewer and festival organizer in Brooklyn, this is not an abstract sociology question. It is a question about who shows up at the bar, who gets hired on the brew deck, who gets a distributor meeting, and who feels safe enough to say they like beer without being quizzed on IBUs.
I have been wrong about parts of this before, and I want to be clear about that up front. For years I treated diversity in craft beer as a pipeline problem: if we could just get more people of color and more women into homebrewing clubs and production assistant jobs, the rest would follow. That was too simple. The pipeline matters, but it is not the whole story. The story is also about money, geography, hiring networks, festival design, marketing imagery, and the quiet ways a taproom can tell you whether you belong.
This article is not a scolding. It is an attempt to look at the evidence, name what has changed and what has not, and offer some practical ways for brewery owners, festival organizers, and drinkers to think about the problem without pretending it will fix itself.
What the Numbers Do and Don’t Show
The most cited data point comes from the Brewers Association’s 2021 diversity benchmarking survey, which found that 93.5% of brewery owners identified as white, and 76.9% of owners identified as male. That is a stark number, but it is also a lagging indicator. Ownership reflects who had access to capital and commercial leases ten or twenty years ago, not necessarily who is entering the industry today. The same survey showed a slightly more diverse workforce among production staff, though still far from representative of the U.S. population.
What the numbers do not capture is the texture of exclusion. A brewery can hire a diverse staff and still run a taproom where the music, the beer names, the bathroom signage, and the way regulars stare at newcomers all signal a narrow idea of who craft beer is for. I have stood in taprooms in Brooklyn where the staff was more diverse than the crowd, and the crowd was more diverse than the ownership, and none of that made the space feel welcoming to a Black woman walking in alone. Numbers are a starting point, not a verdict.
There is also a geographic split that national averages hide. In New York City, the craft beer scene is more racially and ethnically mixed than in many parts of the country, partly because the city itself is more mixed. But that does not mean the industry is equitable. It means the baseline population is different. A brewery in Crown Heights and a brewery in a mostly white upstate town are facing different versions of the same question: who is this place for, and who decided that?
The Economics of Who Gets to Open a Brewery
Opening a brewery is expensive. A small production brewery with a taproom in Brooklyn can easily cost half a million dollars before the first batch is sold. That money comes from personal savings, family loans, bank loans, investors, or some combination. Each of those sources has its own biases. Banks want collateral and credit history. Investors want warm introductions and a founder story they recognize. Family wealth is unevenly distributed across racial lines in America, a fact that is well documented and uncomfortable to say out loud.
This is not a craft beer problem alone. Small business ownership in general skews white and male, and the reasons are structural. But craft beer adds a few extra barriers. The industry’s social networks are tight. Homebrew clubs, beer festivals, and industry conferences are where you meet the people who can help you find a space, a lawyer, a distributor, or a mentor. If those spaces are not welcoming, the network does not expand. I have watched a young Black brewer get talked over at a festival by a white homebrewer who had never worked a commercial brew day. That is not a pipeline problem. That is a culture problem.
There are organizations trying to change the economics directly. The Michael James Jackson Foundation for Brewing and Distilling, for example, awards scholarships to people of color for technical brewing education. The National Black Brewers Association has been building a network of Black-owned breweries and advocating for industry accountability. These are not charity projects. They are attempts to correct a market failure: good brewers and good business ideas are being left out because the entry costs are too high and the networks are too closed.
What I Got Wrong as a Festival Organizer
For several years I helped run a beer festival in Brooklyn. We thought we were doing fine on diversity because our attendee base was younger and more mixed than the average craft beer event. We had a few women-owned breweries pouring. We had a DJ who played music that was not just classic rock. We patted ourselves on the back.
Then a friend who is a Black woman and a serious beer drinker told me she had stopped coming to our festival. Not because anything bad happened, she said. Because nothing felt like it was for her. The beer list was dominated by IPAs and barrel-aged stouts, which is fine, but the descriptions leaned on insider language. The food vendors were mostly barbecue and pretzels. The crowd was friendly but cliquey. She said it felt like a party she had been invited to but not actually welcomed at.
That conversation changed how I thought about festival design. We started asking different questions. Who is on the planning committee? Who chooses the breweries? What does the ticket price assume about disposable income? Is there a quiet space for people who do not want to stand in a loud room for four hours? Do the beer descriptions explain what a grisette is, or do they assume everyone already knows? None of these changes were expensive. Most of them were just decisions.
I am not claiming we solved anything. But we stopped confusing attendance numbers with belonging. That distinction matters more than most festival organizers want to admit.
The Language and Imagery of Craft Beer
Craft beer has a language problem. The vocabulary of the industry — words like “crushable,” “dank,” “hazy,” “pastry,” “adjunct,” “spontaneous fermentation” — is not inherently exclusionary, but it is often used as a shibboleth. People who know the words are inside; people who do not are outside. I have been guilty of this. I have written tasting notes that assumed a reader knew what diacetyl was. I have used the word “sessionable” without explaining it. That is not clever writing. That is lazy writing.
The imagery is also narrow. For years, craft beer marketing leaned on bearded white men, flannel, mountains, and a vague idea of rugged individualism. That imagery has softened somewhat, but it has not disappeared. Walk through a beer aisle and count the labels that feature people at all. Then count the ones that feature people who are not white men. The visual language of craft beer still tells a story about who the default drinker is.
This matters because marketing shapes perception. If a Black woman or a Latino man or an Asian American teenager never sees themselves in the imagery of craft beer, they may still drink it, but they are less likely to think of it as theirs. And if they do not think of it as theirs, they are less likely to become homebrewers, festival volunteers, taproom regulars, or brewery owners. The cycle feeds itself.
What Breweries Can Actually Do
I am wary of checklists. Diversity is not a compliance exercise, and a brewery that hires one person of color and calls itself inclusive is not fooling anyone. But there are concrete steps that make a difference, and I have seen them work in Brooklyn and beyond.
Look at Your Hiring Network
If every production hire comes from the same homebrew club or the same two brewing schools, the applicant pool will stay narrow. Post jobs in more places. Reach out to community colleges with culinary or fermentation programs. Offer paid internships, not just unpaid ones. Unpaid internships filter for people who can afford to work for free, which is its own kind of exclusion.
Audit Your Taproom
Ask someone who is not a regular to visit your taproom and report back. What does the music say? What do the beer names say? Are there nonalcoholic options that are not an afterthought? Is the seating arranged for groups or for solo drinkers? Is the staff trained to talk to people who do not know what a hazy IPA is without condescension? These are small things, but they add up to a feeling.
Rethink Festival Lineups
If you organize a festival, look at the brewery list. How many are owned by women? By people of color? By LGBTQ+ people? If the answer is zero or close to it, that is a choice, not an accident. There are more diverse breweries than ever before. You may have to look harder to find them, but that is the job.
Support the Organizations Doing the Work
The Michael James Jackson Foundation and the National Black Brewers Association are two places to start. There are also local groups in many cities, including New York, that run mentorship programs, scholarships, and networking events for underrepresented brewers. Donate, sponsor, or just show up. The work is not mysterious. It is mostly showing up consistently.
The Counterargument, Taken Seriously
There is a common pushback to all of this, and I want to address it honestly. The pushback says: craft beer is a consumer product, not a social justice project. People drink what they like. If the demographics of craft beer skew white and male, that is a reflection of consumer preference, not discrimination. Forcing diversity into the industry is either pointless or harmful.
I think this argument is partly right and mostly wrong. It is right that consumer preference is real. People do drink what they like, and no amount of diversity programming will make a pastry stout drinker out of someone who hates sweet beer. But the argument ignores how preferences are formed. People do not choose beers in a vacuum. They choose from what is available, what is marketed to them, what their friends drink, and what spaces feel comfortable. If the industry has spent decades marketing itself to a narrow demographic, it is not surprising that the demographic is narrow. That is not a natural market outcome. That is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The argument also ignores the business case. Craft beer’s growth has slowed. The industry is fighting for shelf space and tap handles against hard seltzer, canned cocktails, and nonalcoholic options. A broader customer base is not a charity project. It is a survival strategy. The breweries that figure out how to welcome more people will have more people to sell to. That is not social justice. That is arithmetic.
What I Still Don’t Know
I want to be careful not to overstate my confidence. I have been in this industry long enough to know that good intentions do not always produce good outcomes. I have seen diversity initiatives that were mostly marketing. I have seen breweries hire a diverse staff and then ignore their ideas. I have seen festivals add a “women in beer” panel and call it a day. None of that is enough.
I also do not know how to measure belonging. Surveys can tell you who showed up, but they cannot tell you who felt welcome. That is a harder question, and I do not have a clean answer. What I have is a conviction that the question is worth asking, and that the people who run breweries and festivals should ask it more often than they do.
There is a follow-up question I want to explore in a future post: what does a genuinely inclusive taproom actually look like, and can it be designed without losing the character that makes a brewery feel like a specific place rather than a generic bar? That is a design question as much as a social one, and I think it deserves more attention than it gets.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is craft beer really less diverse than other industries?
Compared to the general U.S. population, yes. The Brewers Association’s own survey data shows brewery ownership is overwhelmingly white and male. But the comparison to other industries is less clear. Small business ownership in general skews white and male, and craft beer is a small business industry. The question is not whether craft beer is uniquely bad, but whether it is doing enough to change a pattern that is already well documented.
Does diversity in craft beer mean lowering quality standards?
No. This is a false choice. The skills required to brew good beer are technical and learnable. They are not distributed by race or gender. If anything, a broader pool of brewers and owners brings new ideas, new flavor traditions, and new customer perspectives. Quality and diversity are not in competition. The breweries that treat them as opposites are usually defending something other than quality.
What can a regular drinker do to help?
Spend money at breweries that are trying. Show up to events that feature underrepresented brewers. Ask your local bottle shop to stock beers from Black-owned and women-owned breweries. Be the person in the taproom who does not quiz a newcomer on beer styles. None of this is heroic. It is just the ordinary work of making a community wider.
Are there any New York-specific resources for diverse brewers?
Yes. The New York State Brewers Association has been working on diversity and inclusion programming, and there are local mentorship groups in New York City that connect aspiring brewers with production experience. The Michael James Jackson Foundation also funds scholarships for New York-based brewers of color. I will link to more specific resources in a follow-up post.
Where This Leaves Us
The question of whether craft beer has a diversity problem is not really a question. It has one. The more useful question is what the people who love this industry are willing to do about it. I do not expect every brewery to become a social justice organization. I do expect brewery owners and festival organizers to stop pretending the problem is someone else’s. It is ours. It is mine. I have been part of the problem, and I am trying to be part of the solution without pretending I have all the answers.
If you run a brewery or a festival and you are not sure where to start, start with a question: who is not in the room, and why? Then ask the people who are not in the room. Then listen. The listening is the hard part. The rest is just work.
