Alisa Bowens-Mercado with husband John Mercado (right) and Two Roads’ Phil Markowski (left) ).
This stout tastes like oats, chocolate — and social justice.
Rhythm Brewing Co. and salsa dancing entrepreneur Alisa Bowens-Mercado offered these notes on her latest beer, a product of the Black Is Beautiful beer campaign.
The limited-edition beer launched on Friday with the Two Roads brewery in Stratford.
“It’s a really beautiful dark brown, dark chocolate color,” Bowens-Mercado said. “You might think you are smelling vanilla or chocolate. It’s a classic stout that is really well developed.”
A brewer in San Antonio, Texas, Weathered Souls co-owner Marcus Baskerville, started the campaign. Moved by recent Black Lives Matter protests, Baskerville chose to brew a stout for the range of dark colors it can embody and published his recipe and the Black Is Beautiful label design online. He asked other brewers to join him and use 100 percent of the beer’s proceeds for organizations supporting police reform and legal aid.
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Alisa Bowens-Mercado’s latest beer, a collaboration with craft beer giant Two Roads.
Bowens-Mercado, one of the few women of color in a white, male-dominated industry, heard about the campaign and reached out to the Connecticut Craft Brewer’s Guild. The guild connected her with one of the giants in craft beers, Two Roads Brewing Co.
“It was nothing short of amazing to walk into Two Roads and see where Rhythm Brewing can go. It lets us know to keep going,” said Bowens-Mercado, who started her brewing company in 2018.
Bowens-Mercado worked with the Two Roads brewmaster, Phil Markowski, to develop their variant of the Black Is Beautiful recipe, an imperial oatmeal stout. They spent all day chatting as they worked about their lives and current events.
“It was so enjoyable that at times I lost track of the underlying seriousness of our effort, to produce a beer that will help fund two very meaningful charities,” Markowski said in a press release about the collaboration.
The charities the two companies chose are not quite the police reform and legal aid organizations Baskerville requested, but they still help the movement, Bowens-Mercado said.
The proceeds from the beers will go partially to Two Roads’ pick, the Stratford Education Foundation, to help with area schools’ Teaching Tolerance efforts. The rest will go to Bowens-Mercado’s pick, the Boys and Girls Club of New Haven.
“We were focused on our future, that our youth can come out of this and be resilient,” Bowens-Mercado said.
Plus, she had just finished a fundraiser for Black Lives Matter New Haven and wanted to try a different angle.
Over 1,000 breweries in every U.S. state, including 14 in Connecticut, have joined the Black Is Beautiful campaign. Breweries in other countries have gotten involved too, including companies in Tokyo and Jakarta. View the full list on the campaign website.
Bowens-Mercado and Markowski’s contribution to the campaign will be available from the Two Roads brewery starting Friday. Bowens-Mercado urged those who want to try the beer to order online. The two companies brewed enough for a few hundred cases of stout and she expects them to sell out quickly.
“If I didn’t brew it and order online, I might not get my hands on it either,” she said.