CRAFT BEERS TAP THE LGBTQ CROWD
Rebecca Sandidge, co-founder of the 3-yearold home-brew group Queers Makin’ Beers, says perception alone may be the biggest exclusionary force. “When you show up at a place and nobody looks like you, most people don’t really want to spend their spare time trying to get into a group of people who aren’t necessarily similar to them or have the same interests.”
On a recent sunny Saturday afternoon, a dozen queer women gathered in Sandidge’s Berkeley backyard, grilling hotdogs, pulling pints from four 5-gallon kegs in a cooler and boiling 10 gallons of wort for a black IPA. The conversation ranged from the pros and cons of electric brewing systems to carbonation methods.
In 2015, Sandidge, a surfer and UC Berkeley grad student, decided with a friend that they wanted to make beer together, so they started a Meetup, inviting other queer home-brewers to come over. Fifteen people showed up.
“We were a little rattled, because we didn’t know how to make beer,” Sandidge says. “But we picked out a recipe and then we had to brew.” The first batch: pretty awful. But they quickly got better. So did their equipment.
Queers Makin’ Beers now has 750 people on its mailing list, and during peak season, the group meets twice a month to brew 20 gallons of beer at a time. The group has raised so much money through two crowdfunding campaigns that it offered $500 in startup grants to other chapters last fall, and a group in Florida took them up on it.
The mission expanded beyond teaching LGBTQ people how to make beer. Queers Makin’ Beers began entering home-brew competitions, too. “It was intriguing, because at all these contests it was all us and all straight white men,” Sandidge says. “There are a lot of people of color in our group, and we’re 90 percent women.” Dudes would timidly taste their beer, ask a few technical questions, and bond over their shared geekdom. Queers Makin’ Beers doesn’t just show up at the competitions now. It wins.
Craft beer has never really marketed itself to LGBTQ drinkers. In 2011, a Mexican brewery named Minerva introduced Purple Hand, which the international press called the “world’s first gay beer,” though it’s no longer mentioned on the company’s website. A few North American brewers have introduced limited-edition beers to raise funds for LGBTQ causes. But by and large, LGBTQ outreach is the domain of big beer.
Many of the big beer companies have offered sponsorship and advertising to LGBTQ bars for years now — Budweiser’s “Pour on the Pride” campaign being the most eye-rollingly famous. Distributors also offer good discounts to loyal bars, says Shawn Vergara, who has worked in bars and clubs in San Francisco for 30 years.
Vergara respects the LGBTQ businesses that stick to the big companies. Bottom line counts, he says. But eight years ago, when he and his sister, Tiffny Vergara-Chung, opened Blackbird at the northern edge of the Castro, they wanted to do something different. “I was at that point in my early 40s, and I basically said to myself, I want a good glass of wine now. I want a delicious beer. I don’t want a Stella.”
Blackbird was one of the first restaurants in the neighborhood to offer craft cocktails and curated wine and beer lists. “We got a lot of pushback at first,” he says. “It was kind of sad.” Why should they be like all the other gay bars clustered on Castro and 18th streets?
At some point, though, a few years ago, he says, some switch flipped. Customers began telling him that they were thrilled to have a gay bar where they could bring non-LGBTQ friends. When the siblings opened a second Castro bar, Brewcade, a few years ago, they installed dozens of arcade games and almost as many taps. The crowd is queer and straight alike.
In an era when LGBTQ bars in San Francisco seem to be closing left and right, and when gay men rely on apps more than bars for their sexual and romantic outlet, Vergara says craft beer’s universal appeal is part of his bars’ success.
Regan Long, brewmaster and owner of Local Brewing Co. in SoMa, has the same goal. Customers don’t come to her brewery specifically because it’s women-owned or lesbian-owned.
“What we try to do is create a very inclusive environment,” she says. She pays attention to all the little details that welcome more than just the
brew dudes: A brightly hued, stylish interior. A soundtrack that shuffles from reggae to house to hip-hop. And a diverse tap list. “Everything from lagers to IPAs, to nitros to fruit and coffee beers,” is how she describes her menu.
Events like Queer First Fridays and Queers Makin’ Beers brews, Long adds, are a natural consequence as a more diverse group of brewers and business owners enter the craft beer world. “There’s a queer event at a brewery because there’s someone queer at the brewery,” she says.
Long calls craft brewing is a “show-me game.” “In order to be successful in the craft beer world, you have to make really high-quality beer,” she says. “If you can’t do that, the rest of it doesn’t matter.”