Celeste Beatty Is Forging A Path For Black Women In The Craft Beer World

The founder of Harlem Brewing Company turned a home-brewing adventure into a business that brings people from different cultures together.

In 1993, North Carolina native Celeste Beatty moved to New York City and, soon after, started home-brewing in Harlem, a neighborhood whose brewery history dates back to 1905. In 2000, she founded Harlem Brewing Company and became one of the first — if not the first — Black women to own a craft beer brewery. Though her business is based in Harlem, the brewery has yet to open a taproom in Harlem —the beer is brewed and bottled in upstate New York and then gets distributed to bars, restaurants and retail outlets — and that’s just one of many challenges she’s faced. Later this year, she hopes to open Harlem Brew South, a taproom and educational center located in the beer desert Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Besides running the brewery, she keeps busy in other ways: She co-hosts a monthly National Museum of Women in the Arts happy hour; she’s writing a cooking-with-beer cookbook; and she’s implementing the Grain to Glass Initiative, which provides grain seeds and processing equipment to Black farmers for growing grains for brewing, distilling and flour.

In this edition of Voices In Food, Beatty tells Garin Pirnia about how ice cream led her to beer, the obstacles she’s encountered in a white male-dominated industry and the impact that beer can have on communities.