Words cannot express how excited I am to share this story with everyone. I started seeing this brewery pop up a little before San Francisco Beer Week when they were tagged in a post about a collaboration with podcast alum Freewheel Brewing, after that they were tagged in a post about the SFBW Silicon Valley region collaboration. After a little digging, I noticed one crazy detail about this company, they didn’t have a brewing facility!

Brewing with Brothas is the idea of two longtime friends and Peninsula natives, Denzel Jackson and RiSean “Bookie” Tinsley, who, after a brief discussion during a camping and fishing trip for Denzel’s birthday, came up with the idea to start making their own craft beer. Now, this is where their story gets awesome. With the majority of the stories you have heard on this podcast, just about every story begins with “Brewing beer was a hobby of mine” or some other variation of that statement. Bookie and Denzel decided to skip the hobby and go straight to making it a business! Of course, they turned to homebrew in order to get the process going and experiment with different styles and brewing techniques which currently the base of operations is out of Bookie’s house in East Palo Alto.

Now their mission statement, which I’m unofficially calling it their mission statement, is where I really connect with these two guys. They, like myself, are born and raised in the Bay Area and have a lot of hometown pride. Being from East Palo Alto, there really aren’t, if any, spots where you can go and enjoy a lot of craft beer. The closest one was The Tap Room in downtown Palo Alto, but that, unfortunately, has closed. After that, they would have to go to Freewheel in Redwood City or down to Sunnyvale or Mountain View. One of their main goals is to establish a location for the residents of East Palo Alto to call their own and come enjoy a pint. 

Another major goal for them is that being men of color, they want to show the Black community the world and the wonders of craft beer. As you’ll hear in the episode less than 1% of breweries in America are owned by people of color and one of the reasons for that is that they just don’t know about it. In the episode, you’ll also hear about the support they have had to get their feet on the ground from other Black-owned breweries here in the Bay and along with them, other incredible breweries. I really hope you enjoy this episode because I see great things coming from these two in the future. 

Also, if you know of somewhere or someone in the East Palo Alto area with an industrial location available for rent please let me know or contact Brewing with Brothas. Let’s help them find their potential home.

Cheers \m/,
Joe Hawk