Brad Paisley Buys Out Beer Store For Best Friends Whose Call To Diffuse Racial Tensions Went Viral

Feel good stories rule in this time of unrest…Like two best friends, one black, one white, whose call for racial harmony (over beer) went viral and a country music superstar who responded.

Here’s the deal

Benjamin Smith and Marcus Ellis are two best friends in Upstate New York who wanted to send a calming message following the death of George Floyd.

It was a simple call to calm down and enjoy a beer together and the photo of them doing just that caught fire via social media.

They set up chairs in Smith’s Rochester area driveway with signs inviting people, “Black or White” to “Relax and have a beer.”

And the national attention that the photo generated caught both Smith and Ellis, who bonded building cell phone towers together, off guard according to News 8 WROC.

But no one would have expected country music superstar Brad Paisley to virtually join them (is the whole world on Zoom?) to announce his support of their driveway “hang” and to let the two best friends know that he had bought out every single beer available at AJ’s Beer Warehouse in Henrietta, NY and was sending it their way.

“Man, I am so thrilled to meet you, face to face like this,” Paisley said. “I’m so inspired by you, and we thought we should deliver more beer than you could possibly drink… This is going to be a popular destination on this street.”

“Love and alcohol, those two things just go together,” the singer songwriter added.

Paisley’s no stranger to beer. He recently  updated  his most recent single No 1 In Beer “to praise first responders, nurses, farmers, truck drivers and other people working in essential businesses, such as supermarkets and pharmacies, during the coronavirus shutdown,” according to Syracuse.com

“I’m trying to hear out my friends in the black community, that’s what you guys are doing; together, the same thing,” three time Grammy winner, Paisley told Smith and Ellis.