Fresh Fest Celebrates The Nation’s Black Brewers

“Craft beer is the perfect platform to find common ground and bring communities together” – Celeste Beatty, Founder Harlem Brewing Company

Fresh Fest, a festival for Black brewers debuting in Pittsburgh next month is one of the first of its kind in the nation. And this craft beer event that celebrates the men and women of this emergingsector and is long overdue.

Presented by beer podcasters Day Bracey and Ed Baily from The Drinking Partners and Mike Potter from Black Brew Culture Magazine, Fresh Fest 2018 is not only Pittsburgh’s first Black beer festival, it’s also the nation’s newest.

And like Harlem Hops which opened earlier this year in one of NYC’s most celebrated enclaves, this new festival is yet another sign that that craft is coming into its own in the black community and attracting new enthusiasts everywhere to what they are brewing.

Launching on August 11^th, Fresh Fest 2018 will showcase the country’s most talented Black brewers along with top local breweries collaborating with artists and entrepreneurs from around Western Pennsylvania and across the nation.

And although there are currently no black or minority owned breweries in Pittsburgh, Potter and Bracey understand that “craft breweries can be seen as a gentrifying force in black communities and historically disinvested neighborhoods” and feel the city’s vital craft beer scene would benefit greatly from further divarication…

“One goal that I believe many brewers are invested in is seeing their labor force and consumers become more representative of the communities they are embedded in,” J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham, a Fresh Fest collaborator and the Brewers Association’s first diversity ambassador, told The Incline. “Festivals like Fresh Fest can be instrumental in this process, allowing the community to articulate its voice, its needs, and opening the door for future partnerships and collaborations.

Harlem Brewing’s Celeste Beatty, a 20-year veteran of the industry who helped launch Harlem Brew Fest last year, will also be coming to Pittsburgh for Fresh Fest 2018.

And she shared with The Incline that “she believes that Fresh Fest has the potential to be a historic moment for the small but growing number of black brewers nationally, as well as a way to promote unity in a society increasingly divided by race and culture.”