To savor Saturday’s Black beer festival, you don’t have to be Black and you don’t even have to drink beer.
As organizers including founder Day Bracey have been telling the uninitiated, the Barrel & Flow Fest also celebrates music and art and food and more, just all with an emphasis on diversity and inclusion and positivity.
This year’s festival, which returns for the second year to The Stacks at 3 Crossings in the Strip District, even has a STEAM tent offering individuals and families hands-on science, tech, engineering, arts and math activities presented by Carnegie Science Center and Atithi Studios.
Attendees can taste more than 80 craft beers of a wild variety of styles and flavors, most of them collaborations made specifically for this event by breweries in Pittsburgh and far from here who pair up with artists and entrepreneurs, community groups and each other. Many beverages are being poured by some 40 breweries and distilleries owned by Black people from around the country.
But fest-goers also can get a taste of learning how to brew with interactive demonstrations presented by the Pittsburgh Brewers Guild, the Master Brewers Association of the Americas and Three Rivers Alliance of Serious Homebrewers. Those who are 21 and older can taste the home-brewed and commercial versions of the beer that’s being made; younger folks can taste the wort, which is the beer before it’s fermented by the yeast. It is science!
“The beer has never been the main focus of the festival,” says Bracey, the comedian and “Drinking Partners Podcast”-er who co-founded the event that started in 2018 and has grown into a national reputation. (Once again, readers of USA Today recently voted it to be the country’s No. 1 beer festival.)
From the start, this event has been about getting more people of color not just into beer fests and tap rooms but also into the business of making and marketing beer as well as reaping the side benefits.
“It’s a Black economic empowerment movement,” says Bracey, who points that this also builds the industry. “It’s back and forth. It’s mutually beneficial.”
The festival fosters other entrepreneurs, too, by including artisans as well as food vendors along with the community groups who’ll have tables there. Point Park University and Penn State University will be there, with information about jobs and careers. “You don’t even have to like alcohol to be paid by this industry,” Bracey says.
Throughout, DJs, bands and solo musicians — including Mars Jackson — will perform on two stages, while on four live artist stages, live artists will be doing painting demos.
The event brings together and purposefully connects a massive number of people of all beer experience and walks of life, with a pledge to keep them all safe and having a good time. As the website lays out, “We embrace everyone and invite you to enjoy art + music + brews, regardless of race, gender, age (21+), sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, genetics, and body shape and size. We will continue to celebrate a diverse experience. … Any participant who violates our harassment policy will be escorted out expeditiously for the culture. … Try these brews. Don’t try us.”
What’s flowing from the “Barrel” part of this festival is dope, and not just beer, as in the “for instance” that is Youngstown’s DOPE Cider House & Winery‘s collaboration with Pittsburgh’s Threadbare Cider: A dragon fruit cider dry hopped with South African Queen hops, some of which was put into cans beautifully illustrated by on Autumn Joi Ellis. As noted on the label of this Remix, “This modern interpretation forces us to expand our views of what is cider and pushes the genre into bold new territory.”
That’s pretty much Barrel & Flow in one can.
Barrel & Flow in one (very limited edition) bottle? Pomme Noire, a brandy-based collaboration by Lawrenceville’s new Noire Distillery and industry giant Angry Orchard — with a label designed by Melroy (Melanie Royster).
Pittsburgher Marcus Wyatt’s baby Windy Bridges Brew did two festival brews — one with giant Tröegs Independent Brewing in Hershey (Tropical Stout, with label art by sara huny young) and one with Philadelphia up-and-comer Two Locals Brewing and Bloomfield’s Trace Brewing (New Futures Hazy IPA, with label artwork by Social Living).
Wyatt, who still is looking for a location for his brewery, nonetheless will be pouring both of these brews at his own table between Tröegs’ and Trace’s. To touch elbows with people who have his same beer aspirations and many who look like him is the best part, he says. “It’s just a great experience.”
Seeing such connections get made and be successful and sustained is proving to Bracey that the “unapologetically Black” fest was and is a good idea. “This isn’t like a theory anymore,” he says. “I feel like we’re building a case study.”
He adds, “It shows where the void is, not only in this industry but in all of them.”
Having been building on social and other media for months now, the Barrel & Flow party actually starts Thursday, with pregaming events around town, and there’s a daylong conference and networking event as well as a nighttime bottle share at Marriott City Center Friday, and the fun will continue into Sunday with after-parties and a brewers brunch.
Festival tickets are available at different levels. General admission gets you in from 5 to 9 p.m. Saturday and a taster glass for $60. There also are VIP ($225 for three days admission plus swag) and early access (3 to 9 p.m.) tickets. And there’s also an “Art Enthusiast” ticket for $30 for those who want to drink in not the booze but the sights and sounds, the people and the vibe.
Pittsburgh Brewers Guild board member Malcolm Frazer, who is moderating a Friday talk titled “Beyond Beer” with Ferguson and others, has loved this fest from the start. He now has several friends from different states because of it and is very proud that it still happens right here.
“It’s been a something Pittsburghers in general, and especially Pittsburgh Beer, can be exceptionally proud of. Barrel & Flow showcases Black artists and businesses, but it elevates the entire city,” Frazer said.
Tickets, full schedules and more details are available at www.barrelandflow.com.
Bob, a feature writer and editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is currently on strike and serving as interim editor of the Pittsburgh Union Progress. Contact him at bbatz@unionprogress.com.
