Celeste Beatty

"There’s less than 1% of Black-owned breweries out of 9,000. We would probably be a lot further along if it were not for gender or not for race. But we didn’t allow that to stop us."

"The project we’re working on in Rocky Mount is really a digging-in kind of project where we want to create the Brewers Village to try to create a space where people in the community — many of whom I meet day to day — have never imagined they’d be brewing beer."

"You want to help us out in February and that’s a good thing — but what about the rest of the year?"

"That experience gave me a lot of things to consider as far as creating a beer company and thinking about, well, people like drinking beer. But how can we do something good with good beer? And that just blossomed in a way that I never imagined. I never imagined we could support elementary schools and things of that nature."

"For my community, they saw me as the first Black woman in the craft beer business, specifically. They saw me out there doing things: brewing beer, having a product, having a brand, selling the brand."

"At that time, I wasn’t really thinking in any significant way, “Oh, this is a way to build brand awareness,” because people weren’t even using that phrase then. I was like, “This organization could use beer for their event and this can help them raise money, so why not?”"

"We gave away a lot of product. But from a strategic standpoint, there wasn’t any strategy. It was just, “Wow, this is what companies do and this is something I believe in.”"