BIPOC brewers bring a new perspective to Yakima Valley hop selection

On a recent Wednesday evening, Leon Loza Jr. slit open a bag of freshly baled Citra hops from Loza Farms and pulled out a handful of the delicate cones, rubbing them together to release their sharp, tangy scent.

Then, he turned to a group of watchful brewers and doled out another handful.

At first glance, the group isn’t that different from the hundreds of other brewers that visit the Yakima Valley each September for annual hop selection events. But ask them, and they’ll be proud to tell you they’re award recipients with the Michael James Jackson Foundation for Brewing and Distilling. In the world of craft beer – which remains an overwhelmingly white, male industry – that’s no small distinction.

The Michael James Jackson Foundation for Brewing and Distilling, or MJF, is a New York City-based nonprofit focused on funding technical education and career advancement for the next generation of Black, Indigenous and people of color in brewing and distilling. MJF founder and Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster Garrett Oliver said the goal is to bring new, diverse talent to the industry by providing a steppingstone to people with their foot in the door.

Even a few months ago, bringing MJF to Yakima hadn’t necessarily crossed Oliver’s mind – but when Yakima Chief Hops CEO Ryan Hopkins approached him at the 2025 Craft Brewers Conference and asked how the company could support MJF, they quickly pulled together a plan. MJF would choose a group of past awardees to bring to the Yakima Valley, and Yakima Chief Hops would host them for its annual hop harvest and selection.

Last week, nearly a dozen awardees made their way to Central Washington for a week of hands-on learning and tours like the one at Loza Farms.

Filling a gap

It was around five years ago that Oliver started asking hard questions about the craft beer industry.

Despite having more than 30 years of brewing experience, he said he didn’t see many people like him in the field.

“Often, I would go to events and there would be thousands of people there,” he said. “I would be the only person of color in the room. And I didn’t believe that the interest wasn’t there.”

Then, in 2019, Brooklyn Brewery founder and American Institute of Wine and Food president Tom Potter approached Oliver with an opportunity.

During the 1990s, the institute had set up a brewing and distilling education fund with renowned beer and whiskey writer Michael James Jackson. Fast forward a few decades, and the institute still had around $35,000 left in the fund as it was beginning to wind down. When Potter asked Oliver if he would be interested in helping choose scholarship recipients for the remaining money, he said yes – but only if the funds would go primarily toward supporting people of color.

“At first he was a little bit taken aback,” Oliver said. “But I kind of said to him, you know, ‘I’ve been brewing for 36 years.’ I’ve been head brewer for, at that point, you know, it was nearly 30 years in two different places. I had never seen a single African American applicant for a brewing job ever.”

As he began diving deeper into that disparity, he kept coming back to a key barrier: education.

Typically, when a head brewer is making a hire, they look for someone with two to three years of brewing experience, or a certification from a brewing program. Those programs can last anywhere from six weeks to six months, and tuition can range from $2,500 to $26,000, said MJF Director of Operations Breeze Galindo.

“If you have less than 1% of people of color in the brew house, where are you going to find somebody with two to three years of experience? And if people can’t afford the education, how are they going to show up with the certificate?” Oliver said. “So it turns out that the system had produced the result, and I, despite being African American, am sitting there on top of the system.”

The foundation was born as a way to change that, Oliver said. Applicants go through a rigorous application process, with three board members interviewing the finalists. Awardees get to choose where they want to pursue an education in brewing or distilling.

A push in the

right direction

Since its launch in 2020, the MJF has raised more than $1 million and given out 68 scholarships to BIPOC brewers and distillers.

Eleven of those recipients made their way out to the Yakima Valley last week – including 41-year-old Zack Day.

Day started home brewing in Chicago in 2017 and formally launched his business, Funkytown Brewery, in 2021 with two friends. Going professional had always been part of the plan, but with the expense of tuition, he said a formal education wasn’t in the cards – until he learned about MJF.

Day applied for a scholarship in 2022, and after an initial rejection, successfully applied again in 2023. Now, he has a certification from the Siebel Institute of Technology for its concise course in brewing technology.

“The board giving me the ability to get that technical education kind of fortified the business, kind of legitimized our business,” he said. “It legitimized my role and gave me the necessary education and skill that I needed to kind of take the next step.”

Day isn’t the only one who’s gotten a leg up through MJF. Awardee Robert Young said he initially started home brewing before volunteering and later working as an assistant brewer at a brewery in Augusta, Georgia, with hopes of one day opening a brewery of his own.

“You can make it at home, but you know, anybody can make anything at home,” Young said. “And so I knew that I needed some credentials behind my name, other than just working at a brewery for a couple years, to kind of help people understand that I was serious about what I wanted to do with owning my own brewery.”

Now, after graduating from the Siebel Institute’s World Brewing Academy on a scholarship from MJF, he owns and works as a brewer at Tapped 33 – a 30-barrel operation based in Augusta.

Juleidy Peña has also seen her career take off with the support of MJF.

Peña started home brewing in the Dominican Republic. After moving to the United States seven years ago, she started working in breweries, and in 2022, she received an award to take the Siebel Institute’s concise course.

Recently, she was promoted to a head brewer role at Notch Brewing in Massachusetts.

“Having that formal education kind of like seals the deal in a way,” she said, “like, ‘Hey, I know what I’m doing, and I know what I’m saying,’ … and it also gives you that sort of confidence.”

Experiencing the Yakima Valley

Young considers the Yakima Valley a mecca of the beer industry – and for good reason; the region produces around 75% of the nation’s hops. But most of the 11 MJF awardees hadn’t been to the area or seen its hop operations.

A driver for Yakima Chief Hops and MJF’s partnership was finding a way to help change that.

“Sometimes you can get stuck with just getting a box (of hops) delivered at your door, and not understanding the true impact of it,” said Victoria Garza, Yakima Chief Hops’ CSR and HR program manager. “And I really think it just stems down to them just getting a deeper base of their knowledge, because what they take from here, they will take back to the brewery that they work at, and that could help with recipe development, that could help with the storytelling of their beer. And I think that goes a long way for the consumer at the end.”

Often, hop selection is an experience reserved for a company’s head brewer or owner. Although members of the cohort aren’t choosing hops to bring back to their respective breweries this year, Garza said she still sees the value in having awardees at the table. Any feedback Yakima Chief Hops gets from brewers plays an important role in its decisions – and it can lay the groundwork for future connections with growers as awardees go farther their careers.

For Galindo, the MJF operations director, the experience is also about building confidence. As a woman of color, she said she’s found herself in sensory events where she’s been one of one.

“I would be so shy to speak up,” she said. “I would be so uncertain about what I’m smelling, what I’m picking, and everybody else in the room, everybody had a voice, and I felt like I just didn’t.”

But last week, as awardees worked through their own selection experience, Galindo said no one was shy about it.

“My hope is that it really encourages them to have that confidence, or that push to continue to have that voice back at their breweries,” she said.

More than a scholarship

If you ask Oliver – or Young, or Peña – they’ll tell you that beer is all about people.

On top of providing scholarships, MJF also offers mentorship – everything from offering career guidance through an email or FaceTime call to providing a reference or connecting graduates with industry leaders and internship opportunities.

“When they show up in the room, they don’t just show up alone with nobody around them who looks like them or comes from their background,” Oliver said. “And I think that’s really, really meaningful.”

The vision of MJF isn’t just about supporting individual brewers – it’s about elevating the industry as a whole, he said. Diversifying the industry brings in new talent, new cultural perspectives, new ideas about flavor and new ways of reaching communities.

Those changes, he said, can benefit everyone.

“That rising tide can lift all the boats, so I see this personally as not a so called ‘DEI thing,’” Oliver said. “You know, this is a service to the industry at large. We are the good news in the room, and I think that people are starting to realize that.”