Brewing Community

In the absence of physical structures, a look at how brewers foster togetherness and connect their brands to the people, places and ideas that matter most.

WORDS David Nilsen
IMAGES Erick M. Ramos

C ommunity is a buzzword in craft beer, an idea so celebrated it sometimes loses its meaning in a wash of social media marketing and overeager PR proclamations.  Community, it seems, often just means packing as many people  as possible  into a local taproom. But what does community mean for a brewer in a new place where they know no one? What if community is a state of mind, a posture  with which we approach the world, something that can be invited and offered by the way a beer is presented, shared or even just brewed?

Averie Swanson is the heart and mind behind Keeping Together, a brewing  project built around the idea that beer can bring us together—and hold us there—in meaningful ways. After stepping down as the head brewer at Texas-based Jester King Brewery in 2019, she moved to Chicago to be with her partner. She set about creating a beer brand not so much in her own image as in the image of what she wanted beer to be, what she hoped it could be. What community could actually mean in this space.

A MOVEABLE BREWING FEAST

“In the beginning, it was something I was trying to put words toward,” Swanson says from her new home in Santa Fe, New Mexico (we’ll get to that). “It was this idea of creating community and sticking by one another regardless of where you are and what you’re doing and just leaning on each other’s humanity.”

The beers that came out of this were as approachable and intriguing from a sensory standpoint as they were esoteric and novel from a production standpoint—mixed- fermentation saisons  with ingredients like lavender-smoked malt; or roasted rhubarb, angelica root and honey; or dried oranges, roasted chestnuts and rosemary. They were bottled in 750-milliliter bottles that demanded to be shared, and carried names like The Earth Is What We All Have In Common.

Swanson brewed these beers at Half Acre Beer Co. in Chicago, Illinois, and had no taproom or permanent facility of her own. Community, in this case, was a moveable feast, a concept held together by the invisible threads that connect us as humans.

That concept is now being stretched as the feast moves across the country to the high desert of the Southwest. Last year, Swanson and her partner decided it was time to start somewhere new, and now she’s wrestling with what her brewing  project—one centered around the idea of belonging—means when it lands in a brand-new place where she knows no one. 

“Living in Chicago, there were so many jaded people [in the beer scene], it was hard not to get a little bit jaded myself,” she reflects. “I’m glad to be reconnecting with the things that I enjoyed about beer in the beginning.” 

Swanson is currently working to purchase commercial real estate and establish a permanent home for Keeping Together. It’s a scary process; not only is taking on debt and launching a hospitality business hard enough on its own, but there’s a risk that what’s made the brand so special will change in the process.

For years, the identity of this community-focused brewery was that it had nowhere to call home. It was home in the hands of whoever picked up one of these elegantly packaged beers, understood it and shared it with someone else. Ironically for Swanson, the identity crisis of her brewery comes now when it finally has roots.

“There’s definitely a lot that could go terribly awry,” she acknowledges. “But the fear of regretting never attempting it is greater than the fear of it all ending horribly.”  

PAYING ATTENTION

Chase Savaira, the founder of the forthcoming Breakwall Brewing Co. in Narooma, Australia, resonates with that sentiment. Savaira’s brewing journey had already taken him around the world by the time he decided to settle down in this tiny fishing village on the southeast coast of Australia with his wife and baby. Like Swanson, Savaira knows that sometimes the scariest option is staying in one place.

Savaira earned his brewing stripes at East End Brewing in Pennsylvania and SanTan Brewing and Arizona Wilderness in Arizona. After leaving the latter in 2019, he and his wife planned to take a several-month holiday to Australia, where he would do some work with Wildflower Brewing in Sydney while intermittently  touring the country. They landed in Australia on March 1, 2020. With borders closing and life changing forever just a few weeks later, a few months turned into two years.

“We found ourselves in this foreign place where we had a little bit of a support group, but not a huge network,” he says. When his wife became pregnant in 2021, they decided they didn’t want to have a baby away from family and made plans to return to Arizona. When they got back to the States, they were surprised to discover they actually felt more displaced on home soil than they had Down Under. 

They’re now heading back to Australia to put down roots, starting Breakwall Brewing in Narooma, a few hours south of Sydney. There’s irony in going halfway around the world to create  a home, but home is where you find it, and he’s eager to meet the needs of his new community.

“A lot of times people will go to a new place with the experiences they’ve had and try to fit a square peg into a round hole,” he says. “I think it’s really important to listen to the community around you, both the people and the environment. I’m listening to the community, what it needs and wants.” 

On the ingredient side, this means working with unique local flora such as lilly pilly, native fruits like bush lemon, and the oyster shells cast off by the local oyster fishing industry. On the human side, it will mean thinking outside the box when it comes to taproom events and experiences.

“I think it’s about paying attention to the interests of your city and dive deeper into those,” he says. “Instead of just having a bingo or karaoke night, maybe you should have a local talk about regenerative farming and gardening practices in your backyard if that’s something that is appealing to the people in your vicinity.” 

While launching Breakwall, he hopes to continue a side project he began at Wildflower called Lora Brewing. Much like Keeping Together, Lora allows Savaira to play with mixed fermentation and somewhat esoteric ingredients and to rethink much of the accepted brewing wisdom he’d accumulated over the years. He also developed his mixed culture for fermenting Lora’s beers from the honey of a local  apiary in Sydney. 

“In Sydney, we were in an environment that was relatively unknown to us with just a suitcase a piece,” he recalls. “When the borders closed, Lora was kind of an outlet to explore  the neighborhood.” 

He began paying attention to the plants growing along his daily walking routes, and one day left a note on a stranger’s door, asking if he could use fruit from one of the trees in their front yard. They granted permission, and he brought them a bottle of the finished beer sometime later. Brewing helped him establish connections.

TRANSIENCE AND HOME

Throughout craft beer, brewers are creating community in innovative  and personal ways. At Back Home Beer in Brooklyn, New York, Zahra Tabatabai is celebrating her Iranian roots and bringing people together with beers using Middle Eastern ingredients. Despite not having a permanent taproom, Back Home is stitching together a home within the people who understand its flavors and stories. 

At Queer Brewing, British beer writer Lily Waite has traveled to various breweries to brew beers that raise visibility for the LGBTQ+ community and funds to support adjacent  nonprofits, building a more inclusive industry along the way. Community is about so much more than four walls and some picnic benches. 

Being intentional about community when moving to a new space is about respect as much as it is about discovery. Swanson explains that Sante Fe has been a crossroads for many different kinds of people, and still has a strong Indigenous community, and she doesn’t want to be kitschy or appropriative in the way she honors that. She’s trepidatious about coming off like she knows what’s best for her new local scene.

“I don’t want to force myself into this community,” she says. “I’m enjoying integrating into the community in a little bit more organic way. I want to meet these people without coming off as a threat or as a disruptor. I don’t want to be the jerk that shows up and thinks they know how things should be done. It’s as much an opportunity to learn from the people who are here as it is for me to come here and reestablish what I’m doing.”

Swanson currently finds herself cultivating connection in the liminal spaces between homes as her project circles to land, but there are small connections that tie her back to where she’s been. For one thing, she’s brought the mixed culture that she’s used all along for Keeping Together’s beers with her from Chicago. There’s an austerity to the dry, funky, farmhouse-style beers Swanson brews that seems appropriate to the high desert of New Mexico. It’s home now, even though home has always been a changing concept for her.

“There are times when I struggle with it, because there’s a kind of freedom in transience,” she reflects, before explaining she’s okay with the change because it’s always just been about connection. “In the end, I’m just a girl trying to make saisons.”

She’s got that part down, offering graceful beers that eschew the ego and noise pervading so much of craft beer right now. It’s an invitation, and she hopes and believes the community will accept that invitation, sit down at the table and create a home with her.