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. 

In praise of equal-opportunity wine consideration, a look at the brands and distributors daring to embrace all-American wine beyond the expected.

WORDS Kathleen Willcox

It probably doesn’t surprise you to learn that California has more than 4,200 wineries. But it might surprise you to learn that Missouri has more than 100 and Alaska has four.

In latte form, the frothy, jade-hued sips are every social-media influencer’s favorite alternative to morning coffee. Matcha is that eyepopping burst of green in everything from Kit Kats and wellness smoothies to face masks and martinis. It’s a superfood that may prevent cancer and reduce stress all the while improving skin tone and boosting metabolism too.

Indeed, far more than its utility as a beverage, matcha has a multifaceted appeal with a broad range of American consumers. And more than just a passing trend, the green tea’s sales in the U.S. surpassed $10 billion in the past 25 years.

As a Japanese American, I feel a bit of pride for this hometown kid’s success. Who could have predicted that in a single generation, matcha would become a household term in America?

But to be honest, America’s frenzy for everything and anything matcha feels a bit peculiar too. Americans adore the stuff, but few have any awareness of its deeper historical, cultural and spiritual significance.

Matcha is the finely ground powder of leaves from the Camellia sinensis plant. It’s the same plant that produces most caffeinated tea leaves. Uniquely, however, matcha is made from plants cultivated largely in the shade to boost the development of chlorophyll and amino acids that give the drink its distinct deep-green hue, characteristic sweetness and richness.

And unlike teas brewed by steeping whole leaves in water, matcha is made from whole leaves ground into a chalky powder and whisked into hot water. The tea is lustrous and creamy, with a pleasantly grassy tone and subtle bitterness. In contrast to the electric rush and jitters of coffee, matcha can offer the clarity and focus of caffeine with an anchoring sense of calm, often­ attributed to the high amounts of L-theanine in the leaves.

For most Japanese, matcha is fundamentally more than just tea, explains Yoshitsugu Nagano, a master of the Ueda Soko School, practitioners of traditional samurai tea rituals that date back 400 years. Surprisingly to most Americans, matcha is rarely whisked up casually and served at home in Japan.

“It’s not something you’d drink when you’re thirsty, or something you’d sip with friends over a bustling conversation,” says Nagano.

Rather, matcha is the cornerstone of one of Japan’s most historic cultural practices: the ceremonial preparation and presentation of tea known as chanoyu or sado.

MATCHA ORIGINS

Matcha originated more than 1,000 years ago in China as a part of ritual­ tea ceremonies practiced by Chan Buddhist priests. It arrived in Japan alongside Zen Buddhism, which was adopted from Chan Buddhism, in the 12th century and later proliferated in Japanese monasteries.

The tea was incorporated into the practice of Zen Buddhism in part because of its medicinal properties. Zen meditation requires intense physical and mental focus over extended lengths of time.

“Matcha was a fortifying drink that helped monks to concentrate and recover—a function not dissimilar to modern-day energy drinks or supplements,” says Nagano.

By the 16th century, chanoyu had also become ritual practice among Japan’s warrior class, or samurai, the modern-day equivalent of soldiers. Nagano explains that in times of war and amid the constant threat of mortality, samurai found salvation in the mindfulness and meditation of matcha.

Generations later, while matcha and chanoyu spread among ordinary citizens, matcha is still regarded by most Japanese as a component of a highly rarified practice. Chanoyu is a revered tradition still taught by ancient houses tracing their lineage to Japan’s founding tea masters. It’s an artform that often requires years, if not decades, to master.

There’s an “inherited sense that matcha is something elevated and distinct from other teas—sacred even,” Nagano explains.

CULTURAL SHIFT

In America, glimmers of matcha’s spiritual and meditative history—generic references to nameless monks and tea masters, or buzzwords like enlightenment and Zen—tend to pepper the lexicon of contemporary matcha marketing. Kourtney Kardashian, whose passion for matcha lattes is broadcasted regularly to millions of Americans, sells “Purity Powder” for “spiritual balance” and a “higher state of consciousness” via Poosh, her popular e-commerce site.

All of this adds an attractive haze of exoticism to matcha that feels authentic enough to many American consumers without burdening them with the weight of the tea’s historical and spiritual significance.

Matcha in America tends to “exist in this bubble of health and wellness,” suggests Zach Mangan, the CEO and cofounder of Kettl, a Brooklyn-based importer of Japanese teas. It’s caught on as an alternative for people who don’t drink coffee, and in turn, spawned an entirely new culture of Instagrammable morning-matcha smoothies, overnight-matcha oatmeal, gummy supplements and their ilk.

Like many Asian Americans, I feel inordinately protective about things that I fundamentally associate with my cultural heritage. And it’s often difficult to navigate America’s unbridled enthusiasm for everything matcha without feeling some level of distrust and unease.

But Tomoko Honda, head of global operations for Ippodo Tea, a Japanese company founded in 1717 in Kyoto, sees things in a very different, overwhelmingly positive light.

How Americans enjoy their matcha is often surprising from a Japanese perspective, she says—the gobs of honey or maple syrup sweeteners, the endlessly customizable range of plant-based milks and fruity add-ins, or those hand-held electric whisks used in American cafes, for example.

Personally, “if Americans would learn to enjoy matcha straight, I would be happier,” she says cheerily, but fundamentally, she’s “very glad that Americans are inventing their own unique ways to enjoy matcha.”

Afterall, “matcha was born in China,” she reminds me. “As Japanese, we can’t really claim that it’s ours.”

Despite matcha’s cultural significance, it’s also inherently a commodity meant to be marketed and consumed. In the same way that Honda doesn’t always think about coffee’s origins, history or cultural context while drinking coffee, she explains, “I don’t think it’s necessary for Americans to think about Japan whenever they drink matcha.”

Nagano, too, expresses excitement for the evolution of a unique matcha culture in the United States, regardless of whatever new and unexpected form it takes.

“Culture is not static,” he says. “It’s meant to adapt and evolve as it spreads to different places and people.”

He adds that not only did Japan adopt matcha from China, but the Japanese fundamentally changed the culture of matcha, incorporated it into a uniquely Japanese style of tea ceremonies­ and, in recent gene­rations, popularized matcha as flavorings­ for ice creams, lattes and Kit Kats. Americans whizzing matcha into caramel macchiatos­ or matcha steak rubs is hardly any different.

“The Japanese don’t have the right to tell people in other countries, ‘no, you’re doing it wrong,’ ” says Nagano. Moreover, if we want the Japanese way of enjoying matcha to be protected, it’s our job as Japanese to do that—the responsibility isn’t on anyone else, he suggests.

MOVING FORWARD, WITH TRADITION

Indeed, the preservation of Japan’s traditional matcha culture is a critical challenge for teaists today. Chanoyu is venerated in Japan, but in modern times, it’s a practice estimated to be enjoyed by less than one percent of Japan’s population. Disproportionately elderly as a demographic, the number of practitioners has dwindled down to a third of what was claimed just thirty years ago.

Many teaists feel that restricting access to the culture of matcha or insisting on notions of ownership or authenticity­ are only likely to en­danger its survival.

“A century or two from now, no one knows if Japan will still be central to the culture of matcha, or whether chanoyu­ will even survive,” says Nagano.

The explosive popularity of matcha in America gives Nagano hope that tenets of chanoyu may thrive outside of Japan, even if they evolve into­ something completely different. Nagano relocated from Japan to New York City in 2019 specifically to expand the warrior tradition of chanoyu in America.

“New Yorkers may not confront their mortality each day like the samurai,­ but it’s clear that the amount of pressure and stress they endure is enormous,” he says. Elements of chanoyu, he thinks, may not only resonate with American matcha enthusiasts, but provide much needed healing—even salvation—to Americans too.

Thus far, Nagano has found Americans to be strikingly open and curious in their exploration of matcha. He notes that Americans might try the green tea for the first time at Starbucks or hear about it on social media, but they don’t hesitate to buy their own matcha bowl and whisk on Amazon and then teach themselves to make matcha at home by looking up a video on YouTube.

“This kind of natural progression doesn’t occur as easily in Japan because matcha is still perceived as such a significant or formal, even intimidating, thing,” says Nagano.

The establishment of exceptionally quality-focused American matcha purveyors like Kettl also point to a new growth stage for matcha in America. Kettl, established in 2016 by Mangan and his wife Minami, focuses on the direct import of a wide range of small-production teas from throughout Japan—the kind of matcha, sencha, hojicha and the like that rarely found their way outside the Japanese market before.

The brand’s marketing is refreshingly void of hollow references to monks or generic health and wellness hype. Instead, it’s focused squarely on educating matcha consumers about the diverse origins and production methods of tea, as well as the farmers and purveyors it sources from.

Overall, the culture of matcha in America, along with its marketplace, is still so nascent, suggests Mangan.

“People may start at these sensationalized places—the Kardashians or whatever,” he says. “They may start with a very low-grade matcha from Amazon or something they tried in a café. But what’s unique about this marketplace is that as people gain more experience and the opportunity to taste better product, they tend to stick with that. Not every matcha drinker will necessarily end up as our customer, but the Kardashian door is a huge door and you’d be surprised how quickly people can go from the Kardashian level to being a Kettl customer.”