A South Asian Beer Club Collaboration Features Three Texas Breweries
A new, first-of-its-kind, beer collaboration brings together brewery owners of South Asian heritage in the U.S. through the South Asian Beer Club and the Chicago Brewseum. Subcontinental: A South Asian Beer Club Collaboration Brew is a jackfruit lager brewed by Roughhouse Brewing in San Marcos TX (available in the taproom only), Misfit Outpost in Cypress TX, Windmills USA in Dallas TX, and Azadi Brewing in Chicago IL.
Austin writer Ruvani de Silva moved to Texas in 2017 from London, England, and started exploring and writing about all things beer in Texas. She quickly found her voice as a vocal advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the beer world with bylines in PorchDrinking.com, CraftBeerAustin.com, Good Beer Hunting, Beer is for Everyone, Texas Highways, and more. But one thing she couldn’t find was other people that looked like her in beer spaces, “no one else here looks like me, so I started reaching out to people on social media,” she said. As a result, she founded the South Asian Beer Club during the pandemic as an online forum designed to celebrate, connect and amplify South Asian beer folks.
In 2021, the Chicago Brewseum Beer Culture Summit included a panel discussion coordinated and chaired by de Silva entitled, Where Are All The South Asians in Beer?, which was the first panel at a U.S. beer event made up entirely of beer industry professionals of South Asian Heritage.
From the press release, “The discussion explored critical issues around being a South Asian in American craft beer and asked relevant, pertinent questions that allowed panelists to share their collective experience and expertise productively. The panel was re-shown as part of the Brewseum’s 2022 Beer Culture Summit, prompting de Silva and Brewseum executive director Liz Garibay to begin the next step in the project – coordinating a collaboration beer between multiple breweries with South Asian ownership to help amplify the presence of South Asians in the US beer industry.”
More from the press release, “Part of the Brewseum’s ongoing series of history and culture-focused collaboration beer releases, Subcontinental is a jackfruit lager. Jackfruit is a culturally significant fruit across South Asia, where it is eaten ripe and unripe, curried and often used as a meat replacement due to its thick, chewy flesh. The plant’s fruit, leaves and bark also feature in traditional medicine, and wood from the jackfruit tree is used in certain Hindu and Buddhist ceremonies. It is also the national fruit of Bangladesh and the state fruit of the Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Pairing jackfruit with a lager, the most popular beer style consumed in South Asia, came about through close collaboration between the four breweries, and extensive discussion on ways to make a beer that captured a specific South Asian flavor that would be new to some drinkers in a fashion that would be both approachable and exciting.”
