OnTap Magazine

B arb Baker grew up in Ohio, among the foothills of the Appalachia. "[It’s] a very depressed area," she explains. Her mother was a nurse, and her father – who passed away when Barb was young – worked in a steel mill, making them a middle-class family. This feature of her upbringing, which included attending a Black church with her mother on Sundays and an all-white Catholic school during the week, she cites as one of the reasons she tends to get along with everyone. She can adapt to differing environments and social contexts with ease. Barb attendedOhio University where she studiedbroadcasting. It was duringher time there that she consumed her first beer. Her sophomore, or second, year as a student, a " guy from a white fraternity – fraternities at OU were extremely segregated – in my class invited me to the biggest party of the year." She immediately conferred with her girlfriends, asking, "Should I go to this?! Will we even be welcomed?" In the end, they did go. And welcomed they were. “That was my first entrance into the beer world,” Barb says, “...everyone was so friendly.” Soon after arriving someone handed her a Heineken. She had never heard of Heineken much less tried one. “It was delicious,” she remembers. But then importantly she adds: “50% of [my reaction] was that the beer was good, and 50% was that I was having a really amazing time. People were very kind, very sociable, and happy that I was there.” “That, to me, represents the beer industry and my journey in it.” LOOKING FOR COMMUNITY Despite loving her first Heineken at that frat party, Barb’s involvement in beer did not actually take off until she moved to the state of Michigan after getting married. “Michigan has a lot of breweries,” she emphasizes, and it’s also a place where “people brew to their culture.” By this she means that Germans will often brew German beer, the English brew different English styles, and so on. Barb found this intriguing and she started to hit the brewery circuit with her husband. While thoroughly enjoying herself she also started to look around and realize that nine times out of ten she was the only woman, and the only Black person, in the room. She decided she needed to find a community of women in this new arena that she was growing to love. She started looking – and not just for fellow consumers but those who “love the education and want to know more about beer.” That search resulted in her discovering Fermenta, which was at the time a newly formed women’s craft beer collective comprised of beer educators, brewers, and sales reps. Barb immediately wanted to be part of the team, soon thereafter becoming the founder and editor of their newsletter. That was in the mid-2010s; Barb continued in that role up until last year when she became President. Barb credits that group of women with turning her love of beer into a passion and profession. During those years Barb also aggressively pursued that beer education she was so committed to, which involved everything fromlearninghowtohomebrewto“reading a lot of books.” She points out, however, that all of this was really for her own growth and pleasure. She was then somewhat surprised when her mentor (Annette May, the first woman to achieve Certified Cicerone status) strongly encouraged her to take the Level One Cicerone exam. Having already inhaled books like Randy Moser’s Tasting Beer , a Garret Oliver-signed copy of The Oxford Companion to Beer , Julia Herz’s Beer Pairing and How to Brew by John Palmer, Barb claims the exam “really wasn’t too hard.” The Siren of Stout was now a "Cicerone Certified Beer Server." A GENERATIVE CYCLE On Barb’s Instagram page it says she is a “craft beer ambassador” at the top. I ask her what that means to her. “I want to be a good representation of the industry in order to welcome other people in – people who more than likely wouldn’t feel welcome. That’s the kind of ambassador I want to be.” “One of my goals as President of Fermenta was to increase the number of women of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community in [the collective.]” When Barb started at Fermenta she tells me there were three black women involved. Almost a decade later now, there are at least 30 women of color, the majority of whom are Black women. Membership has also grown, in part because Fermenta has been able to shepherd women who were once “office people,” as Barb puts it, working in Human Resources or IT, into roles they love in the beer industry, whether that's brewing or sales or otherwise. Those same women frequently end up coming back to Fermenta and serving on the Board, cultivating in others what was once cultivated in them. It’s a generative and fruitful cycle. WHEREVER YOU GO, YOU BELONG In a picture I had seen of Barb, she is wearing a t-shirt that has a phrase written ontapmag.co.za | Summer 2023 | 21