The overwhelmingly White image of beer culture erases a much longer, far-reaching narrative of Black brewing

And why do you think there isn't as much interest (or ability to pursue said interest)? The article specifically talks about that, at length. And it also goes over the long and rather complicated history the black community in America has had with alcohol consumption, alcohol crafting, and the perception of those activities (both internally and externally), due to the effects of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in the brewing industry, systemic racism, and the temperance/prohibition/abolitionist movements.

And while at no point does the author seem to suggest "brewers" specifically "stole" anything from them, he does talk about what was stolen from blacks in America, which has also likely contributed to the current disparity in the industry.

Some examples of the many things he touches on that I mentioned above:

Beer, in other words, occupied a central role in pre-colonial West African religion and social life — and still does. From Africa to Colonial America to The Birth of a Nation, Black folk were no strangers to beer. But something had to happen to explain where we’re at now: a largely monochrome craft brew economy, macrobreweries that have historically neglected to market their core products to a Black demographic, and — in the instances when beer is around in Black homes — a fridge full of Heineken.

To understand why, it helps to begin in Africa: The more you learn about the role beer played there, and the practices and social norms around it, the easier it becomes to draw parallels to the lived experience of Black America.

“The ancestors of African Americans, they were fermenters. They were really good at making their own liquor and making their own beers and also making wine from fruit,” says the culinary historian and writer Michael W. Twitty. “One of our Africanisms, in fact, was producing all these things, and one of the reasons why we did that was because it was related to our traditional spirituality.”

Libation, Twitty adds, “is the heart of African spiritual worship.” He recounts seeing this firsthand on a trip to a Tikar village in Cameroon. “They pull out a big ceramic vessel full of their traditional beer,” he says. “And even though a lot of Tikar are Muslim, this is one of the traditional religious practices they kept alongside Islam.” While beer drinking may be nonexistent on Friday, Twitty notes, you better believe that at social functions to honor youth, celebrate a marriage, or put the deceased in the ground, alcohol is poured out and passed among the elders.

“We know that enslaved Africans and African Caribbeans were brewing beer or were cultivating hops or other grains that would have been used in the brewing process,” says Theresa McCulla of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Black brewing skill was no secret, she adds. Advertisements for enslaved people who were skilled brewers? Absolutely. Wanted posters that identified fugitives as skilled brewers or otherwise involved in the brewing industry? As American as apple pie. Peter Hemings, enslaved at Monticello, was a master brewer.

I’m loath to call this knowledge “revelatory,” yet I’m having a hard time thinking of a more fitting word. Erasure is deliberate. Black folks’ labor and participation in the production of a craft product should be tied to that product itself. It’s a bizarre occurrence, really, that a niche economy obsessed with craft conveniently ignores the forced, unpaid labor that made those goods. Beer hardly stands alone in this conversation — think of the aesthetic and consumer culture surrounding barbecue or whiskey. Or, as Lauren Michele Jackson puts it, the “character of craft culture, a special blend of bohemianism and capitalism, is not merely overwhelmingly white — a function of who generally has the wealth to start those microbreweries and old-school butcher shops, and to patronize them — it consistently engages in the erasure or exploitation of people of color whose intellectual and manual labor are often the foundation of the practices that transform so many of these small pleasures into something artful.”

“Black people’s attitude toward alcohol in the 1800s was not ideological. It was strictly pragmatic,” Thompson says. Black America wasn’t anti-drink, we just stuck with what we knew. Alcohol only came around at Christmas? Cool. The only non-Blacks that are friendly to us are these Northern folks that say alcohol is bad? Got it. And then there are the implications of emancipation and the Thirteenth Amendment, too.

“The last thing [Black people] were were drunkards under slavery,” Thompson explains. “So when they get free it’s not like, ‘Oh, now we’re free to drink.’” At the top of the agenda were things like getting an education or a job or legally married, property ownership, and generally not being treated like garbage in a society where “all men are created equal.” Throw poverty in the mix? It’s counterintuitive to keep booze around when there are groceries to be had. Still, that doesn’t come close to explaining how beer culture grew in America among different ethnic enclaves. The chronicles of immigration are tightly woven into the country’s fabric, and of course they have something to say about the history of brew here.

For much of American history, beer and cider were produced in small batches for consumption at home, but as the 19th century chugged along, so did German immigration. Those immigrants both populated the beer trade and brought with them a bonafide beer culture that dramatically changed the way beer was made and consumed. Professional breweries were set up, and brewing became an increasingly profitable business with its own insular social and financial networks. “And so African Americans began to be shut out of the process of employment and breweries,” says the Smithsonian’s McCulla, “whether that was by the brewers themselves or eventually by unions who, because of discriminatory practices, would not hire African Americans into unions.” All to say: if you were a Black brewer trying to find work in the latter 1800s, good luck.

And yet despite all the historical context and nuanced arguments the author provides on this subject in this rather lengthy article... your issues with it, as far as I can tell, seem to mostly stem from just the headline.

Why does it make sense to point out that an industry is dominated by one demographic if there is no push to exclude others?