Imbibe 75 People to Watch: Stephanie Grant

The pandemic paused one of Stephanie Grant’s favorite pastimes: getting together with girlfriends and drinking beer at bottle shops and taprooms around Atlanta. Surrounded by her plants at home, “I was missing the conversations that I would have with my girls,” she says. “I was like, ‘I just want to talk to people.’ ”

The beer writer thought about making a beer magazine for Black women before settling on a more personal quarantine project, a newsletter called The Share. Her weekly dispatch highlights the Black women working in and around the brewing industry, giving Grant a chance to chat with women she admires, such as Eugenia Brown. “Being a Black person and understanding what it’s like to walk in a Black person’s shoes, I can ask questions other writers might not think about, and maybe other Black people will feel more open to talk to me about their experience in the brewing industry,” she says. Telling these stories is “important for Black women because there are many times that we get passed over and we’re not appreciated.”

For her part, Grant has focused on beer writing while holding down a copy writing job, harboring dreams of working in the industry. “I started my dream job in the middle of a pandemic,” says Grant, who is now the social media coordinator at Monday Night Brewing, in Atlanta. In addition to the Share, she’ll use her new job to tell stories of unsung industry members, such as women working in brewing labs, making the arcane accessible. “There are so many parts of the beer industry that I think craft enthusiasts don’t understand.”