Black-owned California breweries celebrate history, hazy IPAs

All hail Frederick McKinley Jones, the inventor of mobile refrigeration for trucks and boxcars. Without his pioneering efforts, how would anyone ever get ice-cold beer efficiently delivered to their neighborhood?

Jones was the first Black man in America to win the National Medal of Technology and Innovation (posthumously, in 1991). This month, he and other Black innovators are getting more recognition with four limited-release beers made by Black-owned California breweries, including Hunters Point in San Francisco and Hella Coastal in Oakland.

The beers feature label artwork from Milton Bowens and celebrate several “unsung heroes” of Black history: Jones; Bessie Coleman, the nation’s first female African-American pilot; Mary Ellen Pleasant, a self-made millionaire in Gold Rush San Francisco who helped expand the Underground Railroad; and Robert Abbott, founder of the Chicago Defender, at its time the most widely distributed Black newspaper in the U.S.

“I’m constantly thinking about stuff, so I was throwing it on the table: Let’s do something for Black History Month. This was two years ago,” says Rodg Little, coowner of Oak Park Brewing in Sacramento. “We reached out to three other Black-owned breweries – we wanted to be Black-brewery focused or forward – and we just wanted to do something different. I don’t think anybody had done that before at the time. It was just like, ‘Let’s share the love.’”

Black brewers and brewery staff could certainly use the love. “Across the nation, we’re less than 1 percent, and that’s including brewers, brewery owners, distributors and people of color in the industry altogether,” says Little. “For Sacramento, it’s definitely a rarity – we only have two Black-owned breweries, so that’s iconic in itself.”

Last year’s release featured various IPAs highlighting the colors of the Pan-African flag, like a red IPA and a black IPA. “The impact we had was so huge that people started placing orders for (2022) last year. They were like ‘Hey, we want first dibs,’” says Little. This year’s 4-pack celebrates hazy IPAs made with different formulas of yeast and hops, with each can bearing facts about the historical Black changemaker it celebrates.