Whether it’s women, pot or just boozing it up for breakfast, if you can wrap a beer fest around it, Hop Culture will find a way to do it. Now, the beer-lifestyle brand behind Beers With(out) Beards, 420 Craft Beer Festival and Juicy Brews Saturday Morning is hosting what appears to be the first significant queer beer fest in the United States, to celebrate breweries with LGBTQ+ leadership or proven commitment to the cause.
On June 5 (the beginning of Pride Month), the Hop Culture team will live-stream a day’s worth of programming on YouTube to showcase beers from ten selected breweries to pair with speakers and topics that highlight LGBTQ+ owners, brewers and issues. The fest is the brainchild of head of partnerships Grace Weitz, who identifies as queer and sees the fest as an evolution of her four-year-old Beers With(out) Beards women’s beer fest (where, in full transparency, I spoke on a women-in-beer panel in 2018).
“I really wanted to create an event that told the stories of a vibrant diverse community,” she says. “Within the LGBTQ+ community, you have all these different races, nationalities, ethnicities, religions, genders. These seemingly disparate ingredients form a lovely pint of liquid, and these stories haven’t been told.”
The day’s activities will include a cooking demonstration by a gay chef, a gay artists’ gallery, a panel about the intersectionality of people of color in the beer industry who identify as LGBTQ+ and a keynote by Patrice Palmer, New Belgium Brewing’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) specialist. Anyone can watch these events for free, however a “ticket” to have the package of ten beers shipped costs $109.99. Some of the ticket sales, which close May 5 or once they sell out, will benefit the Transgender Law Center.
Principally sponsored by Samuel Adams, Queer Beer Fest aims to shine a light on breweries like Lady Justice Brewing in Aurora, Colorado, a philanthropically focused company founded by a gay woman and two female partners, as well as Chicago’s Marz Community Brewing, whose Gay IPA raises money for a range of local LGBTQ+ organizations and boasts label art that features colorful phalluses designed by a gay artist. But the event also endeavors to make sure people hear about bigger breweries’ projects to foster a healthier, more accepting community for this community. Many drinkers don’t know, for example, that in 2019, Brooklyn Brewery commemorated the Stonewall Uprising by donating proceeds of a one-off offering called Stonewall IPA to the The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, or that New Belgium recently received a perfect 100 score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Best Places to Work for LGBTQ+ Equality scale and, at the urging of its black, queer, trans diversity and inclusion specialist, released Biere De Queer Belgian Strong Golden Ale last year to celebrate National Coming Out Day.
Sam Adams, for its part, formed an internal diversity and inclusion group last year, which led to a $100,000 donation to the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) along with a partnership to launch the Love Conquers All Pride campaign and the limited-release Love Conquers Ale blackberry basil lime gose.
The efforts of these larger breweries demonstrates what it truly means to be an ally.
“(Sam Adams founder) Jim Koch identifies as cis male but (Sam Adams parent company) Boston Beer has done all this amazing work because he believes in the values of inclusion,” Weitz says. “You’re not just slapping a rainbow on something but creating meaningful actions that have a tangible effect on the community.”
The number of craft beer spaces designated for the LGBTQ+ population are few. Richmond, Virginia’s Hardywood Park Craft Brewery has hosted the day-long Love on Tap festival for the Virginia Pride organization. A queer beer fest launched in Toronto in 2011 but seems to have since folded into Toronto’s mainstream Festival of Beer. The six-year-old Queers Makin’ Beers homebrew club has three chapters: Stuart, Florida; Bend, Oregon; Oakland, California. Also in Oakland, Temescal Brewing offered the monthly Queer First Fridays until the pandemic hit.
COVID has killed off a few of the few remaining lesbian bars in the US, leaving just over an estimated two dozen standing. But safe spaces are necessary spaces for the LGBTQ+ population. The gay community credits the Stonewall Inn for being the site where the gay-rights movement kicked off, and in the late 1970s the late San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk worked with the Teamsters Union to boycott Coors for its discriminatory hiring practices by blocking its sale in the city and beyond.
As Hop Culture’s event operations manager Brittany Burke writes in its sister publication, Beer Advocate, “Gay bars have also seen their fair share of tragedy, from memorials held in honor of lives cut short during the AIDS epidemic to one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history at the Pulse Nightclub. During the ’80s and ’90s and even today (well, except for the last year), bars have been a place for queer communities to organize, mourn, celebrate, and gather. It’s hard to deny the significance of the bar and, by extension, beer in queer history.”
Looking forward, Grace hopes that in-person renditions of Queer Beer Fest will serve as that “welcome open space for everyone, however you identify.”
Hop Culture is compiling a list of queer-owned and supporting breweries here.