By the end of February the Boxing Rock Brewing Company, in collaboration with the Black Loyalist Heritage Centre in Birchtown and the Change is Brewing Collective, will be launching the new brew 'Back to Birchtown' in celebration of African Heritage Month.
Brew day was Feb. 4 at the Shelburne based craft brewery.
“One of the coolest things brewers like to do is get together with other brewers and make beer,” said Henry Pedro, co-founder of Boxing Rock.
It is fellow brewer Giovanni Johnson’s recipe that is being used for the Back to Birchtown beer. Johnson, who moved to Nova Scotia from the Bahamas in 2013, is one of the co-founders of the Change Is Brewing Collective and is the only assistant brewer of African descent in the Nova Scotia craft beer industry.
“This beer you can drink it fresh or you can let it age over time and it will still taste very well,” said Johnson. At six percent “it’s the perfect beer to drink in the wintertime… some call this type of beer winter warmers.”
Taste-wise, “it won’t be super hoppy,” said Johnson.
“You will get some maltiness, salty caramel and a little bit of floral notes to it,” Johnson said, adding the inspiration for the Back to Birchtown recipe comes from the beer people would have brewed in the 1700s using things like brown sugar, molasses and raisins
After fermenting for about 20 days, the beer will be packaged in 650 ml bottles, said Emily Tipton, co-founder of Boxing Rock.
The label is being designed by Amber Zaza, another founding member of the Change Is Brewing Collective.
Zaza said the replica pit house on the grounds of the Black Loyalist Heritage Centre is shaping up to be the inspiration for the label design.
Zaza said when the group toured the Black Loyalist site, “the pit house definitely rocked the whole team."
"Everyone was like a little bit mind blown that families could have spent a whole year basically living in a hole in the ground,” Zara said, with only some logs and moss covering it for protection from the elements.
The Change Is Brewing Collective was formed in June 2020 in response to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. The collective's goal is to diversify the craft beverage industry by creating pathways and access to information for the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) community.
Tipton has been working with the Canadian Craft Brewers Association to try and help the craft brewing industry be more inclusive and create more diversity.
Back to Birchtown will be the fifth brew the Collective and the craft beer industry has partnered on in the past seven months.
“A lot of that work we are doing at the national level is very structural and is about creating resources for breweries for hiring practices, creating inclusive spaces and that kind of thing,” she said.
“This kind of opportunity takes all that structural and puts it onto the ground in a way people can relate to," she added. "I feel both ends of this issue has to be worked from the topside structurally and also from the ground up helping to build inclusivity, skills, experience in the BIPOC community and the breweries.”
