I didn't realize that
I could even do this,
and I didn't realize that there were pathways for me
to make an impact on my community that I live in.
There's nothing more fulfilling than brewing beer,
and sharing those experiences.
I've kind of always been into stories.
I've always been into storytelling.
There is so much rich history in beer.
From the very beginning, we always kind of leaned into history
as an inspiration for what we were doing.
In 2013, when we started,
there were actually no breweries in St. Petersburg,
and while the industry grew, it was kind of obvious
that the diversity wasn't growing at the same rate.
We decided on naming our brewery
Green Bench Brewing Company,
and it provided us an opportunity
to tell a deep story about this city.
In the early 1900s here in St. Petersburg,
at one point, there were over 3,000 green benches
adorning downtown St. Pete.
We marketed ourselves as the city of the green benches.
And the history that, you know, you mostly hear on the surface
is just as bright as the sunshine outside.
The full story here, though,
is because this was in the early 1900s,
it was a time of segregation.
It was an unwritten rule that African-Americans
couldn't sit on those green benches.
I don't know why anybody's surprised by that.
I'm extremely fascinated in people.
I'm extremely fascinated in people's experiences.
And I think, for me,
I was pulled in several different directions.
And it took me a while to feel comfortable with who I was,
and feel okay with
this sort of identity that I had for myself.
I'm biracial.
My mother's Black, my father's white.
They're both from Memphis, Tennessee,
which is where I was born and raised.
Oftentimes, had a little bit of an identity crisis, I think,
growin' up because of that.
For Black people, sometimes I wasn't Black enough,
and for white people, I was definitely Black enough.
I would be nothin' without my family.
They're my world.
My mom was a single mother,
and we grew up in a one-bedroom apartment.
We shared a room with my grandma,
like me and my sisters and my brother
slept in this... bunk bed,
and my grandma slept next to us.
And my grandmother kind of raised us
'cause my mom was workin' two, three jobs,
so I rarely saw her. She would sleep on the couch.
And she sacrificed so much
for us to, to just be who we are now.
And when I was nine,
they made the decision to send me to Florida.
But it ended up being the best decision they made for me.
It provided me a lot of opportunities.
And, to me, that's the foundation of who I am.
In the mid-'90s, my father was a homebrewer,
so I remember I was like, you know, my dad
used to homebrew, and he liked it.
So, I started researching. I realized real quick
that I would die not knowing everything about beer.
And that was exciting
because I, I'd get to learn every day.
We make all kinds of styles of beer here.
The list kind of goes on. We typically make
a lot of IPAs, a lot of lager, a lot of mixed culture beer,
and Saison farmhouse ale, fermentation-forward stuff.
And our tap list is designed to ease into the style,
and not necessarily force it down anybody's glass.
But end of day, the most important thing
is what the beer tastes like.
There's a lot of science involved,
so I can control mouthfeel, body, and sweetness
in the process of what temperature I rest these at.
And then, there's also a ton of engineering,
and sometimes us building it because no one else has before.
Canning line does about 6,000 cans an hour.
And there is a lot of creativity.
The last thing that really got me into beer
is people.
In the future, I see breweries to foster community growth.
Once people realize how much of an asset
these breweries can be to their neighborhoods,
they're gonna use them.
There's an estimated 7,000 children
in Pinellas County alone
that don't have a bed to sleep on every night.
And so, I decided to start The Culture Chronicles
where we brew a collaboration,
and money from every single can
and every pint that we sell goes directly to building beds.
And actually what struck me in the last home,
it was... five blocks away from my house.
It was the moment I realized,
we're accomplishing what I set out to do,
which is do anything that we could for the people
that, literally, live down the street from us.
That's the only way we're gonna tell history correctly,
is if we actually tell everyone's experience:
the good, the bad, and the ugly.
We can see how much room to grow we still have.
There's kind of a soft haze
that you carry with you where you go.
For me, it's kind of an inspiring history.
It's a history of redemption.
We can make sure that our future
and our tomorrow is way brighter.
While at one point,
these green benches were not for everybody,
now they can be.