Here at the Brewers Association, our Core Values and Beliefs include not only promoting and celebrating the small, independent, innovative culture of American craft brewers, vigorously defending our industry, and providing craft brewers with a unified voice, but also fostering a diverse and collegial community within the craft brewing universe. 

Today, the Brewers Association Board of Directors approved the association’s new Code of Conduct, which will become part of our foundational documents. The next step in the process to shore up the gaps in our governance documents is to create a member complaint process. The intent of the complaint process is to hold our peers accountable for unacceptable behavior while pursuing an educational path forward that leads to a more inclusive and respectful craft beer community. The Governance Committee is developing this complaint process for review by the full board, and subsequently the membership, in the coming weeks.  

The Code of Conduct codifies our commitment and responsibility as an industry to comply with state and federal regulations and to eliminate discrimination, harassment, and bias of all types. We take our leadership role seriously and recognize that we must be actively anti-racist. To this end, the Brewers Association is partnering with the Racial Equity Institute to conduct staff-wide training on structural racism on August 26. We see this as a step toward building our staff’s collective awareness of the context of structural racism in which we are all operating.   

While we know that we have a long road ahead, the Brewers Association staff, Board of Directors, and Diversity Committee have taken several steps in recent years to promote diversity and inclusivity in our community. We invite you to review those steps here and are eager to make more strides in the coming weeks. We look forward to sharing our progress and listening to and learning from you during an upcoming virtual town hall in September. More details will be forthcoming.  

We deeply appreciate your membership, your support, your feedback, and your patience as we work through these steps toward positive action together.