He helped put the craft beer industry on the map. She's taking it from Sugar Hill to Rocky Mount and beyond

There's hard-earned wisdom on tap as Sam Calagione, founder of four-time Inc. 5000 company Dogfish Head Brewery, talks with Harlem Brewing Company founder Celeste Beatty on extending opportunity to new suds-men and suds-women.

- GRAHAM WINFREY

CELESTE BEATTY DIDN'T set out to be the first Black woman in the United States to own a brewery. It just happened that way. After years of homebrewing in her New York City apartment, Beatty founded Harlem Brewing Company in 2000. But while that represented progress, growing the brand hasn't been easy. Since Harlem Brewing launched its first beer, Sugar Hill Golden Ale, competition in the U.S. craft beer industry has exploded, with the number of domestic breweries growing from around 1,500 to more than 9,000.

Beatty's company remains a small operation, with distribution only in New York, Virginia, and North Carolina. Still, Anheuser-Busch saw enough value in the brand to make an acquisition offer in 2006, which Beatty declined. She currently has no plans to sell the business.

Indeed, when Beatty talks about scaling these days, she says she's as likely to be talking about community engagement as revenue. "The question is, how do we get more Black and Brown brewers?"

The answer, she believes, lies in leveraging Harlem Brewing's brand to create opportunities for other entrepreneurs of color in the industry. To that end, Beatty, 58, is turning a historic tobacco warehouse in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, into a "brewers' village" called Harlem Brew South. There, new and aspiring brewers will be able to test their own recipes on a small-batch brewing system.

Dogfish Head Brewery founder Sam Calagione knows a few things about building community around a small beer brand. After founding Dogfish Head in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, in 1995, Calagione grew the tiny company into one of the largest craft brewers in the country. Dogfish Head made the Inc. 5000 four years in a row in the mid-2000s; in 2019, it merged with the Boston Beer Company, maker of Samuel Adams Boston Lager, in a $300 million deal.