Representation Matters

Sarah with team members Heather and Andrea on what was supposed to be a Pink Boots collab brew day.

Because we chose to name our company “hot plate,” our origin story often starts at the moment when Sarah decided not to let a code violation and gas-less apartment prevent her from following her dreams. This was, in all honesty, a watershed moment in our life because of all the chaos that was going on at the time, but our journey into the world of craft beer started much earlier, and if Sarah had listened to me, we would have never ended up where we have.

We first met at our college job at Penn State and started dating a year later. This was back in the *cough cough* early aughts, when “craft beer” wasn’t even a term and “microbreweries” were starting to pop up to compete with both cheap domestic beers and imported beers, which were, at that time, considered “good” beer.

In State College, there was (and still is) a bar called Zeno’s, which at that time was a little bit more of a professor’s bar, and they had a “beer passport” where you could get a stamp for each beer you tried from one of the various countries they had listed. Once you collected 80 stamps, you got a T-shirt and your name on a plaque. Since Sarah is a very competitive person and I am a very pretentious person, she liked going to Zeno’s to work her way through her passport and I liked going there because it was a little fancier than some of the divier places in town. There was also a good blues band that used to play most Friday nights.

So as Sarah started expanding her palette with beers from England, Belgium, and beyond, I was starting to get more into microbrews, too. My roommate and I started cutting out one of the panels from each six pack we’d tried and taped them all up on the wall of our kitchen. (These were the days when most beers were still served in glass bottles.) Together, we were discovering the world of beer on both sides of the Atlantic.

Shortly after we graduated from Penn State (and Sarah completed her beer passport), we drove cross-country to California and made an extended stop in Colorado. At that point in time, microbrew culture was already booming in places like Colorado, California, and the Pacific Northwest, and one of our friends that was living outside of Boulder took us up to New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins.

New Belgium was not the first microbrewery that either of us had ever been to. We’d taken a tour of Red Hook (when they still had a presence in Portsmouth, NH), but because of the values, the customer experience, and the variety of beers that New Belgium offered, Sarah was excited and inspired in ways I hadn’t really seen before. At the time, I thought it was just the beer talking, but she tugged on my shirt and said, “I want to do this.”

 I, of course, had no idea what this meant.

“This,” she said with more emphasis. “All of this.”

We had just graduated from Penn State, were still looking for jobs, and our degrees had absolutely nothing to do with chemistry, brewing, or manufacturing. I didn’t understand how one got a career in beer, and at that point in time, neither did Sarah.

Weeks after our New Belgium visit, after we’d gotten settled in Southern California, Sarah was still researching brewer programs. There were a few schools that offered professional training, including Chico State in Northern California. I was opposed to the idea. She’d just completed two degrees in Telecommunications; I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t want to find a job in the media instead.

Anyone who knows Sarah knows that she’s stubborn enough to ignore my naysaying. Even though I was opposed to the idea, the reason she ended up backing away from this plan was that there was one thing she kept seeing over and over again at every brewery we visited or looked up online: male brewers.

Eventually, Sarah got a job in media research and she kept climbing the ranks over the years, so much so that this deferred dream faded into the background. We still drank a lot of craft beer and loved visiting new breweries whenever we traveled, but the idea of pursuing it as a job made no sense once she’d started specializing in generational research for Nickelodeon.

During her time at Nickelodeon, she was part of an international research team, which took her overseas for about one week out of a month. I started getting bored at home, and decided to try my hand at homebrewing—to mixed results. I liked the fact that I could make beer at home, and sometimes it came out pretty well, but that was about as far as I’d ever thought about taking it.

After switching roles and returning to a domestic-based team, Sarah decided to get more into brewing as well. And since she’s a more studious person, she decided to actually take classes and research how to make good beer. She caught the bug so hard, that she started revisiting that abandoned dream of brewing professionally.

Around this same time, the condo building we were living in got hit with a code violation from the NYC Department of Buildings and they eventually shut off our gas, which meant we not only didn’t have a functioning stove any more, but we also lost our heat and hot water. This came as a shock to us, and after lawyering up as a building and reaching a settlement with our building’s developer, the plan was that the faulty boilers and exhausts would be replaced, brought up to code, and the whole thing would be over in about six weeks.

That’s not what happened.

As this “six week” project turned into months, Sarah decided she wasn’t going to put off this dream for a second time and started homebrewing on a hot plate. For those of you who’ve heard some portion of this story, this is the part you know.

The part you don’t know is how she decided to keep going.

In 2018, there was a beer fest in Brooklyn called “Beer With(out) Beards.” It was organized by one of the editors of Hop Culture magazine, and it invited women-led breweries from all over the country to showcase their beers and promote their brands. In addition to tickets for the beer fest itself, you could also purchase tickets for different events, and that’s how Sarah found out about a network of professional women and non-binary individuals called the Pink Boots Society.

The Pink Boots Society’s mission is to assist, educate, and inspire folks to advance their careers in the craft beer industry. Since Sarah was working for Nickelodeon, she didn’t have a beer career to advance, but because she is quite persistent, she was able to get the New York City chapter of Pink Boots to allow her to be a provisional member so that she could attend meetings, participate in Pink Boots collabs, and start networking with other women in the industry.

From 2018 through the start of Covid, she was learning as much as she could about both the industry and commercial brewing itself. During the pandemic, we were able to sell that problematic condo, relocate to the Berkshires, and become an official brewery in planning. Sarah continued to stay active in Pink Boots, even as life was socially distanced, and she even earned a scholarship to do sensory training and join several farms in Yakima Valley, WA during hops harvesting season.

Eventually, we opened up our own brewery and Sarah was able to realize this almost-twenty-year dream, but once she made the jump into the commercial brewing world, she was once again confronted with the reality of who still dominates this industry. It came as less of a surprise this time around, obviously, but we knew from day one that we had to be a part of the change, and now that we almost have two years under our belts, Sarah’s in a position where she can start moving into a different kind of role within the Pink Boots organization.

On a national level, Sarah is an incoming board member, after serving on the DEIJ committee for the last year, and here at home, we’re starting to cross-train our mostly female staff to help with various back-of-house activities.

While DEI programs are currently being attacked, and some folks think that representation is mostly performative, we’ve been fortunate to see first-hand why seeing marginalized folks working in the brewhouse and/or holding leadership positions makes it feel a little more possible for folks who feel like they’re on the outside looking in. This is why we’re so grateful to the Pink Boots Society, and why Sarah remains so involved—even when it often requires driving across the Commonwealth for Boston Chapter meetups. She quite literally wouldn’t be where she is today without this organization, and we’ve only recently  discovered that now it’s our turn to pay it forward, too.