Once you’ve visited a few Washington DC breweries, you start to get the message. At DC Brau, the city’s first production brewery for almost 60 years when it opened in 2011, a sign inside demands “Statehood for the people of DC”.

City-State Brewing Co., founded in 2021, has also tied its identity to that of the city, and Right Proper Brewing Co’s glassware declares the beer was “made in the Douglass Commonwealth”—the name DC would take upon statehood.

Politics is everywhere in beer, but rarely does it feel as vivid as here. In one sense, it’s only natural. This is the horsetrading, filibustering, pork-barreling centre of the world; in reality, though, the struggle for statehood comes from a very different place to Capitol Hill, a place that can feel like an entirely different city.

“I remember as a kid driving into the city with my Dad from Virginia,” says Thor Cheston, who co-owns Right Proper Brewing Company with his wife Leah. “And I said, ‘you know, Dad, it seems like there's two DCs—the DC that's on TV, and everything else, where the people live?’ He's like, ‘Yes, that's exactly it: there's Washington, and there's the District of Columbia. The District of Columbia is its own thing.’”

No brewery in DC embodies this difference, and the battle for statehood, more than Right Proper. This brewery is centre stage in a political struggle that uses the city’s Germanic lager-brewing past in an attempt to forge a different, perhaps better future.

This is a city with an international, some say transient, population, a city where black-owned breweries are better represented than anywhere else in the USA. With three black-owned breweries, DC leads the nation: as of summer 2022, that was more than 20 percent of all the brewing operating in the city, by proportion greater than anywhere else. (States like Georgia have more black-owned breweries in purely numerical terms).

DC is also a city which has been denied proper political representation for centuries. It’s a fascinating mix, and at the heart of it is a beer called Senate.

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When Washington DC was legislated into existence in 1790, one thing was utmost in the Founding Fathers’ minds: to be in control of their own protection. The Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783, when the Philadelphia-based Congress was assailed by a violent protest that went unchecked by local leaders, served as compelling motivation.

With the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801, which formalised the creation of a 100-square-mile capital carved out of Maryland and Virginia on either side of the Potomac River (the latter section returned to Virginia in 1846 in a row over slavery), DC’s destiny was set in stone. Since they were no longer part of a state, the people of Washington DC had no representation in Congress, for which US citizens vote by state. They still don’t.

Residents of the District of Columbia couldn’t even vote in Presidential elections until 1961 when the 23rd Amendment was passed. Christian Heurich, the German-born brewing magnate who bestrode the city in the first half of the 20th century and whose brewery produced Senate, voted just once in a Presidential Election, says historian and writer, Mike Stein, despite having a second home outside the city.

“I get the feeling, reading historical documents, [that] he felt sheepish about voting, because when he came back to the District everyone here was denied that right,” Mike says.

““People are thirsty here for something that came before—and that relates not just to beer but to Home Rule, too.””

— Mike Stein, Lost Lagers

Mike and his research partner Peter Jones have done more than most to revive the memory of Heurich’s brewery, which closed in 1956, 11 years after his death at the age of 102 (he founded it in 1872). Beginning as homebrewers, the pair have put together a project called Lost Lagers, which aims to recreate beers in all 50 states plus DC. They’ve done 12 so far.

Senate, though, is their most significant work. It’s not the first Heurich beer they’ve helped recreate—that was Heurich’s Lager, made at DC Brau between 2013 and 2017—but Senate is the key link to DC’s brewing past. As a display of advertising at Heurich House Museum shows, it was DC’s beer of choice until the mid-50s, when it made up much of the brewery’s capacity of 200,000 American beer barrels.

The recreation project began in 2014, when environmental historian Jones stumbled across Korean War records involving the Heurich Brewery. The file related to a bad batch of beer at Heurich and war restrictions on the amount of tin breweries could use, but it was something else that caught Peter’s eye.

“There was this really detailed laboratory report on making Senate,” he says. “20 pages on the specific gravity of the beer, the colour, everything. How it was built is not like how a modern brewer would do it, but if you follow the steps you can make a great beer.”

The project took wing in 2019: Heurich House’s director Kim Bender enlisted the help of Oregon State University’s Fermentation Science Department to develop a recreation of the beer before Right Proper brewed and released the first batch. It has since gone from strength to strength, now making up about 30 percent of Right Proper’s output, and rising.

It’s not just a nice lager with a fun back story, though. Heurich House advertises the beer on its website with the tagline “Take Home Senate Beer. Support DC Statehood”, and it’s clear that its success has much to do with the building of local identity.

“A lot of cities have had recreated beers [like this], but this seems to be one of the more popular ones,” says Peter, who grew up in Florida. “That might be because DC wants to connect to its past.”

Mike, who was raised in New York, is less equivocal. “I think this is unique to DC because people are thirsty here for something that came before—and that relates not just to beer but to Home Rule, too.”

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For his role in reviving Senate, Peter Jones is guaranteed free beer for life at Right Proper’s production brewery in Brookland, a north-eastern neighbourhood. Lucky him; it’s a lovely spot. The brewery and tasting room sit in a brick-built industrial unit amid streets filled with 1930s terraced houses (‘row houses’, as they’re called in the US), most with closely-cropped lawns in front. Gentrification vies with the neighbourhood’s longer-established culture: on this warm June morning, a man is taking a Corgi for a walk, while another works with a wood saw on his porch.

Right Proper was founded as a brewpub in Shaw in 2013, opening this space in 2015. Their core beers (Raised By Wolves, an IPA, Li’l Wit and Senate) are made at this facility, run by Thor, with all others at the brewpub, where Leah is in charge. While they originally focused on foeder-aged beers, it’s the city and its people that obsess them now.

“We’re a community-focused business first and a brewery second,” says Thor, whose brewery currently makes about 5000 US barrels (close to 6000 hectolitres) of beer a year. “People don’t come out just for craft beer anymore. You need something else.”

Senate Beer is clearly a big part of that.

“We treat it as a public history project,” he adds. “It’s a tool for us to talk about the history of Washington DC, what it means to be a resident of Washington DC, and the importance of the District of Columbia as opposed to Washington.”

Statehood, too. Leah is at the pointy end of that struggle, as President of the DC Brewers’ Guild and Vice-Chair of the Brewers Association Board of Directors.

“There’s a brewery in pretty much every Congressional District in the US now, and [as the Brewers Association] we meet every year on [Capitol] Hill,” she says. “It’s frustrating for me because I have one meeting to go to [with DC’s non-voting congressional delegate] and everyone else has six or seven meetings.”

Congress’s conservative bias (sparsely-populated rural states like Wyoming have as many Senators—two—as mighty California, for example) means statehood for DC, which is staunchly liberal, is not an immediate likelihood.

“[Statehood] doesn’t seem likely right now,” Leah says. “But we wouldn’t be the smallest state. There’s 600,000 of us. But it’s going to be a hard fight in the current environment.”

In the meantime, Senate acts as a lightning rod for local feeling. Envisaged originally as a one-off beer in 2019, it was re-brewed in 2020 to be sold at Nationals Park, the city’s major-league baseball stadium. Covid-19 meant they had to pivot to home delivery, through their website and that of Heurich House. Sales were overwhelming, says Thor.

““People don’t come out just for craft beer anymore. You need something else.””

— Thor Cheston, Right Proper

When the Covid-induced lockdown ended, Right Proper invested close to $400,000 (£338,000) in capacity and branding. It was a good decision. Senate is perhaps the stand-out beer in a national wave of historic recreations made with corn (maize) or rice—Senate uses corn. Its popularity marks a key moment in the history of American craft beer, which has spent 40 years looking to the UK, then Belgium, then Germany and the Czech Republic before finally becoming comfortable with its own tradition.

A lot of hard work goes into Senate, it’s fermented and lagered for more than 30 days, but in terms of flavour it is an easy-going experience; clean, smooth, light, with a faint touch of corn character.

“It's a beer-flavoured beer,” Leah says. “It’s a refreshing break from the double IPAs and the imperials and everything.”

If Senate is all about DC, the name ‘Right Proper’ references Leah’s roots in Shelby, North Carolina, where the local dialect resembles that in parts of England, with the word ‘Right’ used as an intensifier, as in: We’ll be there right quick.

“Thor was so charmed by that, by the way my father spoke,” Leah says.

There’s a certain small-town charm to DC as well, as Thor explains.

“When you get the federal government stuff, the CNN stuff, out of the way, everyone knows each other,” he tells me. “And we all love the same things.”

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That small-town flavour is on show at Heurich House on the evening of Thursday the 23rd of June. It’s the night before Savor, the Brewers Association's annual food-and-beer shindig, and many of beer’s movers and shakers are at an event entitled The Complexity of Innovation. Leah is in the front row; Fritz Hahn, the Washington Post’s beer and bars man, is a few rows back; Bob Pease, the Brewers Association’s president and CEO, is sitting behind Leah. Kim Bender, meanwhile, does the introductions, welcoming the panel and moderator, journalist Jamaal Lemon.

The panel is four-strong: the men and women behind DC’s three black-owned breweries (Eamoni Collier, CEO & Co-Founder of Urban Garden Brewing; Elliott Johnson, CEO & Co-Founder of Soul Mega; Kofi Meroe, Founder of Sankofa Beer Company) and Courtney Rominiyi, one of four co-founders of an organisation called Black Brew Movement.

Any attempt to build local identity in DC must start here. In 1957, the city became the country’s first predominantly black city; by 1975, more than 70 per cent of its residents were black (it’s closer to 40 percent now). It’s a very important city in African-American culture: Duke Ellington and Marvin Gaye, two of America’s greatest black musicians, grew up here.

Shaw, home to Right Proper’s brewpub, is part of one of the USA’s most significant black neighbourhoods, the U-Street Corridor, containing Howard University, the Howard Theatre and Ben’s Chili Bowl, where President-elect Barack Obama came to taste the local speciality, half-smoke sausages, in January 2009.

Urban Garden is DC’s newest black-owned brewery, having launched in 2021. 28-year-old Collier grew up in the city’s northeast; she’s an artist and musician who works at Right Proper’s production site as spirits and wine curator. One of the reasons she started her brewery was to bring DC beer and DC culture closer together, she says.

“DC has been called Chocolate City—it still is,” she says. “But as the city has changed [in recent years] then the beer culture [has come to] reflect the newcomers. I wanted to give the Washingtonians, the people who were born here, something they can be part of. It’s about bridging the gap.”

Her approach to brewing is based on her passion for herbs and spices and fruit, as opposed to the big hop character that dominates so much of American craft beer:

“I want to appeal to people with a different flavour preference, who like me grew up drinking Blue Moon and other witbiers,” Eamoni adds.

Her flagship, Chamomile, a 5.5% ABV golden ale made with chamomile and honey, is delicately balanced, and herbal, with a touch of bitterness, some acidity and a rich, authentic honey character. It’s smooth and very drinkable. As a result, Collier explains how she’s picking up more and more support from the city’s black community.

““I wanted to give the Washingtonians, the people who were born here, something they can be part of. It’s about bridging the gap.””

— Eamoni Collier, Urban Garden Brewing

“It’s been great; it’s astonishing because a lot of people can’t wrap their heads around me being a girl in beer, let alone a black woman making beer,” she tells me. “I’m seeing people’s whole perceptions of beer change—they can see people like them making the beer, or running the taprooms, talking about the beer.”

There’s clearly a growing desire to make Washington’s beer scene reflect the city. Courtney Rominiyi founded Black Brew Movement in 2018 alongside then-boyfriend (now husband) Charles Rominiyi, Simone Cope and Phil Jackson, who are also now married. Courtney, a sociologist by trade, says they got started when they noticed the paucity of black people in beer venues around the city.

“I’d look around and notice that there’s no one else that looks like us in here,” Courtney says. “That got us thinking—why is that? What’s the disconnect? You know, the places are great, the product’s good, we love the beer, the environment’s nice, good music, good food. So we thought - what could we do to help more black people be in breweries?”

Black Brew Movement hosts events and collaborates on beers with local breweries. Its first collaboration was with Right Proper’s brewpub, a beer called Cuffing Saison made with peach and honey, designed, Courtney says, to appeal to black consumers.

“And outside of that actual brew, we want to create an experience,” she adds. “We work hard on creating the vibe, and making it somewhere that feels welcoming to the people we’re trying to attract.”

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DC was a long way behind much of the rest of the USA when it came to craft beer: at least 20 years, Stein reckons, behind nearby Philadelphia. Much of that had to do with the nature of DC itself, from its shifting population to the restrictions placed on start-ups by a lack of industrial space and the city’s tight boundaries. But there’s an optimism and openness about the beer culture now that suggests DC is making up for lost time.

Still, there’s plenty of room for growth in DC, which has 15 breweries. Eamoni would like to fill some of it by opening her own taproom within the next five years.

“DC is not saturated,” Leah says. “We have far fewer breweries than the majority of US cities, relative to our population. There’s room in those parts of the city that don’t have breweries yet.”

Whatever happens, Right Proper’s focus will remain on DC and particularly the neighbourhoods they serve. “Our goal is to remain sustainable, and to keep being strong in the local market,” she says. “We don’t have any plans to be a national brand.”