Craft Beer For All
J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham, a.k.a. Dr. J., leads an initiative for bringing inclusivity to the beer industry
J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham has two main passions in life: working as an inclusion strategist after many years in academia, and craft beer.
As Diversity Ambassador for the Brewers Association, a role she’s had since 2018, “Dr. J,” as most folks call her, recently made a full-time commitment to both after creating the Craft Beer For All initiative and helping form Craft x EDU, a nonprofit that champions inclusion, equity and justice in the craft brewing industry through education and professional development. Her main goal, as stated on the Craft Beer For All website, is to bring the diversity of craft beer to people and the diversity of people to craft beer.
In a similar vein in July, Garrett Oliver, master brewer at Brooklyn Brewery, announced the formation of the Michael Jackson Foundation for Brewing and Distilling. This foundation is named after the late beer and whiskey writer, a.k.a. “The Beer Hunter”, Michael Jackson (obviously not the pop singer, although he did once jokingly pose with a sequined glove), and aims to offer BIPOC scholarship opportunities for educational advancement in the brewing and distilling industries.
Before the pandemic, Dr. J would travel around the country to various breweries and associations as a consultant and speaker. She continues to write on the topic and publishes regularly on her blog and in national journals and magazines.
She’s also taking this time to regroup and figure out the best means to bring her consulting to breweries without having to physically be on site. The latest push has been to take Craft Beer For All and create a membership-based community on the Patreon website. Memberships start at an affordable $1 per month and provide access not only to Dr. J, but also other craft brewers of all sizes and backgrounds.
In January, Dr. J was named the 2020 Beer Person of the Year by Imbibe Magazine, and you can be certain that a global pandemic hasn’t slowed her down a bit.
I caught up with her to discuss her love of craft beer and homebrewing, her passion to make the industry more accessible, and a silver lining, if any, in the COVID-19 economic halt.
Sara Havens: There’s no doubt the pandemic has affected your game plan with Craft Beer For All and Craft x EDU. Is there a silver lining to any of this?
Dr. J: I can’t travel or do events right now, so I’m spending a lot of time pivoting to a different business model.
It probably was the worst possible timing to leave a full-time job and walk into the world without insurance or a paycheck and realize all your work is gone. So it was pretty devastating.
But if there was something positive, it was having to come up with new ways to deliver services, having to innovate a new business model on the side. I guess you can call that a silver lining.
SH: What made you decide to create a Craft Beer For All community on Patreon?
Dr. J: A lot of this was sparked by COVID. Prior to that, I was doing a lot of onsite speaking and seminars. Obviously the two big problems there are, one, it’s travel-dependent, and two, some of the smaller craft brewers can’t afford to bring me in.
This is a way to get people the information, resources and tools they’re looking for at an affordable price, and in a way that allows people to get in contact with me but also make contact with others who are going through the same thing. They can form a community of their own.
SH: What first got you interested in craft beer?
Dr. J: I’ve been a huge craft beer fan since the late ’90s/early 2000s and was, just like a lot of people, an avid consumer and home brewer. Around 2009, I started working at a home-brew shop while I was in graduate school, and it just kind of became the core of my social life at the time.
At some point, I was like, “Well, I have this big academic life and this big beer life, and I don’t see why they should be different.” I started doing my academic work about the brewing industry. I wrote my dissertation about the beer industry and have been publishing articles about the cultural aspects of the brewing industry for quite a long time.
I think my interest in the industry in terms of diversity is not terribly difficult to understand — I’m a queer black woman and didn’t see a lot of people who looked like me. One of the first questions you ask yourself is, “Why?” And the second question is, “How do I change this?”
SH: Do you happen to know the statistics on minority-owned breweries?
Dr. J: The Brewers Association has all that information to date, but the trends are not surprising. Women and people of color are concentrated in the front-of-the-house roles other than technical brewing or management.
There are probably about 50 black-owned breweries in the U.S., or less than 1%. What we see pretty universal in all markets — whether you’re talking about people working in this industry or the consumers — is that certain groups are, across the board, underrepresented.
SH: How can we make craft beer more inclusive?
Dr. J: It’s kind of one of the drums that I’ve beat for the last two years. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. If there were things everybody could do or could be communicated in an article, then we would already have done that.
One of the important things to remember is that both the industry and a particular brewery don’t exist in a vacuum. They are part of their community, and the industry is part of the U.S. economy and political structure. So they’re not immune to what’s going on in the country more broadly.
Just one example: If you look back to the origins of craft beer in the 1960s and 1970s, this is when the country is in the grips of the Civil Rights movement. Schools are not really totally desegregated yet. Women’s rights are not even that far along. In 1970, a black person or a woman aren’t walking into a bank and saying they need a loan to start a brewery.
That just didn’t happen. This unacknowledged history is just embedded in the industry.
SH: OK, last question, and it’s a simple one. What’s your favorite beer?
Dr. J: I can tell you a style. I’m not so much into the trendy stuff. I like Helles Lager, I think it’s delicious. I like a well-balanced West Coast IPA. I’m like a cranky, old-fashioned drinker. But weirdly, I brew more styles than I drink, because I like taking on the challenge.