“I mean, Zelienople didn't look like this before three fucking breweries opened up.”

Day Bracey isn’t wrong. He rarely is.

I met with Day, the comedian/festival producer/podcaster extraordinaire at ShuBrew, a charming brewery with a beautiful rooftop overlooking downtown Zelienople, a town 30 minutes drive north of Pittsburgh. It’s slowly moving into modernisation, restaurants and culture popping up in its central strip despite it primarily looking like a town out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

It’s also a town that, as of the most recent census, was 97.91% white. It placed Day in an environment that he’s all too familiar with.

“For the most part, I am the only fucking Black person in a brewery,” Day tells me over a beer. “But five, seven, ten years ago? I definitely knew I would be the only one, whereas now I might actually see a couple folks that I didn’t bring.”

That’s the thing with Day: you know you’re never getting anything less than the honest truth. I noticed it early on, his ability to not sugarcoat, not spin, yet radiate such charm and humour that you’ll end up on his side, one way or the other. Hat always to one side, always laughing with someone even as he’s telling you how fucked up The Latest Thing is, his laidback-vibe lets him see the big picture, and his passion lets him get it done.

This combination drives Drinking Partners, his very successful Pittsburgh podcast with his co-host Ed Bailey—their tagline reading simply “We drink and talk shit”. The podcast started on a whim, and certainly not with the ambitions of helping to shape craft beer in the Pennsylvania city.

“I started in comedy and entertainment in general,” Day says. “And a lot of it is just an excuse to sell more alcohol. The Pirates, The Penguins, the Steelers, improv, like, wherever you go, the thing that's keeping the lights on is the alcohol sales.”

“And at the time (2014), the craft beer scene started to really pop in Pittsburgh. So, you know, I was bringing craft beer, he was drinking Henny, and we were just like, doing these drunk conversations,” he adds.

““For the most part, I am the only fucking Black person in a brewery””

— Day Bracey, Barrel & Flow Fest

Those conversations started to include people within the industry, live tapings recorded at breweries (Day described some of these initial interactions succinctly: “we walked in, we’re the only black folks there, we're like, What the fuck are we doing?”), and a growing need for diverse voices throughout the craft beer industry, both locally and nationally.

And so, slowly, Barrel & Flow Fest—the most important beer festival in the United States—was born.

***

The Stacks at 3 Crossings is the perfect Pittsburgh setting. Nestled in the Strip District, right along the Allegheny River, the space was home to mills, factories, and shipping hubs, an ideal location for companies as varied as US Steel and Heinz Ketchup. Of course, over the better part of 100 years, the mills dried up, and the luxury apartments came in. Welcome to Pittsburgh.

Funny how when these stories happen, the casualties end up being the people that have lived there the longest. And so we find Pittsburgh, growing exponentially in the ashes of its steel industry collapsing, yet doing it off the backs of the people that made it what it was. Rent is at an all-time high in the city, while the number of Black people leaving, specifically Black women, is only going up. Between 2009 and 2018, the city of Pittsburgh lost 7,000 Black residents.

“In my specific conversations, I learned that the city is losing Black people for a lot of reasons, mainly its reputation as unliveable for Black women and its lack of support for those women, especially when they are low-income, mothers, or creatives” says Dani Janae, a writer whose story for the Pittsburgh City Paper: ‘Why are so many Black women talking about leaving Pittsburgh’ shone a light on a lot of these imbalances. “The city often overlooks or doesn't support Black talent in the ways other cities do. One of the women I talked to cited an almost immediate improvement in her mental health after leaving the city.”

Barrel & Flow, which Day has produced since 2019, would be something wholly unique no matter its location; the fact that it exists in Pittsburgh makes it nothing short of a revelation. In a sea of beer festivals hosted and attended by the same group of people, Barrel and Flow’s mission is to get everyone in on the fun. The hype breweries are there, without a doubt; 2022’s lineup boasted stalwarts Revolution, Other Half, and Dancing Gnome. Yet here’s the twist: they all collaborate with either a Black-owned brewery or a Black artist, creative, or restaurant (for example) to make an original beer for the festival.

As a result, it’s a festival teeming with Black-owned breweries front and centre, Black performers on stage, black food trucks slinging BBQ and Caribbean food, and Black artists with pop-up tents selling everything under the sun. It has the chance of feeling opportunistic on the part of the non-Black breweries taking part, but the result is more than genuine. It’s a legitimate celebration of culture, not an excuse for middle-aged dudes to get hammered at 2PM.

“I remember a brewer, he came to me at the end of the first festival,” Day says. “As we were leaving he stopped, he goes: ‘Man, this was like, the best fucking beer festival I've been to. He's like, people were actually excited about the beer, they were asking questions. I get to introduce people to beer!’”

Not only does the festival allow for the liquid to be shown off in all its glory, but Barrel & Flow has created a pipeline and a network for Black businesses to actually engage with leaders in the industry. In short: it's an opportunity.

“We're not just going in and saying, ‘Hey, drink more beer’,” Day says. “We're saying like, ‘hey, why don't you come in and like, cross promote? And make something that you're proud of. And then go back to the hood and be like, this is an opportunity.’ This is a $400 billion dollar industry. Now the industry has connections to the community and vice versa.”

And the industry has taken note. “To put it simply, Barrel & Flow looks, feels, and expresses itself in a holistically different way than any other beer festival I've ever been a part of,” Aadam Soorma, Head of Marketing and Guest Experience at Pittsburgh’s Trace Brewing, tells me. “When I talk to folks who look like me and the conversation turns to beer, Barrel & Flow is the ultimate common ground.”

“We can smile and share memories of past (festival) years. We can recall artists who have been elevated by collaborating with breweries. B&F celebrates diverse communities with beer as the vessel for holding these experiences,” Aadam tells me.

““Barrel & Flow looks, feels and expresses itself in a holistically different way than any other beer festival I’ve ever been a part of””

— Aadam Soorma, Trace Brewing

Ultimately, however, a celebration of Black culture couldn’t go off without a reminder of where we still are. Last year’s fest looked like a roaring success from the outside, only to be revealed as the culmination of a months long battle between the festival and the German-owned brewpub chain Hofbrauhaus, with the festival marred by accusations that Hofbrauhaus Pittsburgh (located right next to where Barrel and Flow held their event) sabotaged the festival, refused to participate, and that their GM used racial slurs at attendees and staff. (For their part, Hofbrauhaus said that they conducted an independent investigation that didn’t substantiate the allegations, and reinstated the GM shortly after.)

Day, meanwhile, treated it as just another example of where the industry is, despite the progress. “If we as Black people leave certain areas, we endanger ourselves and subject ourselves to micro-aggressions, overt aggressions,” he tells me. “Over-policing, I mean, like, we could lose our lives driving in the wrong neighbourhood. So unless you as an organisation signal to us that we're welcome here, then we don't go there.”

He keeps coming back to opportunity, the fact that Pittsburgh’s issues are simply hurting its ability to become the city it could be. “For whatever reason, I think white folks think that Black people just don't have money. And it's like, that's why racism hurts everyone, including racists.”

The dichotomy between these realities and the joy Day’s fest brings the city and the community is reflected daily. As I was sitting with him, the brewers from ShuBrew came over, done with their collaborative brew day for the fest, with a Black-owned brewery out of Georgia named Khonso Brewing. The beer was called “Torchy Brown”, a grodziskie, a Polish smoked ale. The name came from a comic strip starting in 1937, created by a Black woman from Pittsburgh named Jackie Ormes, the first Black woman to create and syndicate her own comic strip.

It’s that kind of Black history that Pittsburgh has ingrained in it, and it’s that kind of culture that it’s at risk of losing to the next luxury apartment complex in a formerly Black neighbourhood. In that sense, Barrel and Flow isn’t just the most fun block party in the city; it’s preservation and perseverance.

***

Barrel & Flow Fest will return to Pittsburgh on August 12th, 2023. Tickets are available here.