Behind the Bar with Lily Waite
In September I was lucky enough to both meet and then interview Lily Waite, founder of Queer Brewing Project, award winning beer writer, photographer and potter. I can’t pretend like meeting Lily wasn’t a pretty big deal for me, I can still remember the excitement I felt when I stumbled upon Queer Brewing Project about 18 months ago. Up until that moment I was really unsure on whether or not I would be able to start carving a path in beer.
I had spent the previous summer working for an electrical installation company alongside my full time hospitality job. It was a toxic environment where I had endured both sexism and homophobia; the experience really knocked my confidence and made me feel ‘othered’. Looking through the Queer Brewing Projects Instagram, seeing pictures of Lily working with breweries and being supported was a real turning point for me. It felt like someone had reached through my phone screen, grabbed my hand and said “you can take up space here”.
Lily’s work within beer is so important and is making the industry better for everyone. During our chat we talked about how she got into beer, inclusivity within the beer industry, transphobia within the queer community and building tables.
How did you get into beer and what has your journey been like so far?
Lily: It started with spirits. I started doing catering and temp work for events when I was 18, I really enjoyed hospitality and giving people a nice time around food and drink. I worked for a Greene King pub for two and a half years on and off whilst I was at university and then I started to get into spirits. I did my WSET Level Two in spirits, I then realised I was passionate and interested in high-end drinks and crafted beverages, shall we say. When I moved to the Wild Bear Co’s first bar in Cheltenham, I then realised that the crafted beverages world also applied to beer. I tried Punk IPA, Goose Island IPA and I think Camden Hells and thought, these are really flavourful and delicious. I didn't know that beer could taste like this. I then had my first really hoppy IPA and my first sour beer and kind of just fell in love with it from there. When I finished my degree, which was in fine art, I thought, I'm not going to make it as an artist overnight, I need to get a job so I worked in a bottle shop in Kingston-upon-Thames. I was there for just under a year, I started blogging whilst I was there, then got a job writing and doing social media for We Are Beer, the beer festival company and then went freelance!
Helen: I always really wanted to go to the Cheltenham bar but I never made it over there, that’s the problem with working in hospitality really.
Lily: It was a really nice space and the initial team were really close because we'd worked together before. I just remember there being so much passion and we were all in the relatively early stages of learning about beer, so it was an amazing atmosphere and that obviously translated to the other side of the bar.
Helen: How long have you been freelance and how is it going for you so far?
Lily: Yeah pretty good, when I was with We Are Beer. I wrote a piece for Good Beer Hunting, which put me on the scene slightly in terms of beer writing, people started to pay attention to my blog Craft Queer - which is simulataneously the best and worst name I’ve ever given anything. Then I wrote a piece which sort of just came out of nowhere, I'd never written professionally before, I just pitched Matt Curtis and said, hey, I've written this thing, which is all of my feelings and experiences. Having worked in hospitality as a queer trans woman, and dealt with a lot of shit, here are my feelings on the beer industry. And it was published by Good Beer Hunting.
I got a really good reception. And a lot of people said “oh, we didn't even realise that this was a thing. That you had to deal with all of these issues”. Then I started writing for Good Beer Hunting intermittently. Then Matt started Pellicle magazine with Jonny Hamilton and I started writing for them, then gradually started writing for different publications and now I write for about five or six. I've really enjoyed being freelance, I really like working for myself and it's given me the freedom to also start a small pottery business. I recognise how privileged I am to be able to be freelance and have that creative freedom as well. I wouldn't change it for the world now.
Helen: Being freelance isn't the easiest thing in the world to do, I was freelance for a few years, and honestly it wasn't good for my mental health. But I think that if you can do it in an industry that you love being in then I imagine it could definitely be different.
Lily: Yeah, it's interesting with freelancing because my mental health took a big dive this summer. I was just like, I can't write. I was in a really shitty situation with creative output. And then I was like, ah, but the creative output is how I get paid.
And then there's a sort of issue with being in an industry that you love, because it also is an industry that for a lot of us, the lines between our identity and our output are blurred. So being freelance working at home, it's like there's no real separation.
Helen: Definitely, especially because if it’s an industry that you love, but you don’t feel like it necessarily loves you, do you know what I mean?
Lily: I completely get it. I've been working in beer for five years, and I feel like I pour a lot of myself into it. I'm not still on the outside, but it feels like I am sometimes. There's like five or six trans people I know in this industry and I never get to see any of them because we're spread around the country - or world. That’s when I feel like I’m on my own.
Helen: I've spoken to so many people from doing this, especially in the UK, and everyone has talked about your article from Good Beer Hunting: Buckled Knuckles. And how we all came away from it with the feeling of we all need to do more and we all need to step up. It’s actually been great in the way that there have been some really great conductive conversations from it but it’s also awful because it can’t have been an easy thing to put out there.
Lily: So I wrote that when I was really not in a good place. It’s interesting because the way it was written is actually similar to the way that I wrote my first Good Beer Hunting piece; in fits of despair and anger, I would write two to three lines of my notes on my phone. And then it got pulled together into a larger, more cohesive piece. I wrote a line that was something like: when I first wrote that piece, I came out swinging and now I'm just sort of blistering fury and buckled knuckles. It was quite poetic and I just thought well this is the sort of basis for this piece. I probably only wrote it in like half an hour… it was just white hot rage on the page.
It’s a really vulnerable feeling, doing something like that. I'm so lucky to work with Claire Bullen, who is a fantastic editor, she was very sympathetic and very mindful of how much emotion and how much of myself I put into that. But also, I often feel self conscious writing about things like that, because these are just my emotions and my feelings. Why does that have any place in the world of beer? So it is always so nice to hear what you just said, that people talked about it and it sort of made people think.
Helen: I mean for the past few years, I think that members of the queer beer community, myself included, have been like, hey look at all the work that Lily is doing, she’s amazing, look at her go! But never at any point saying oh I should definitely help her or she is just carrying the load. So when I read Buckled Knuckles, I was already in the process of building Burum, so instead of just standing still with guilt, it really helped fuel me and become more determined that we need to pull together and work with each other as a community.
That's the problem with being on your own within your immediate industry because as you said, all of the queer beer people I know are all over the world and not where I am based. In lockdown, it was quite nice because I got to meet so many more people, I became way more connected.
Who is it that “diversity and inclusion” serves in the industry? It just serves the people saying it and pretending to do it.
Lily: That does make sense. There was a paragraph that got cut from the piece which was basically just how the industry often just goes ‘no, we are inclusive, because we say we are, and we are diverse because there's a trans woman over there or like three people of colour… aren’t we great?’ When a trans woman got heckled by a warehouse worker at Beavertown, they put out a statement afterwards condemning it, but they just said: no, we are an inclusive place. And I was like… well you’re not because that happened and you can't just say you're inclusive without doing the work. It’s like what Ren said in your interview, you can't just say that your door is open if I can't see the door.
Who is it that “diversity and inclusion” serves in the industry? It just serves the people saying it and pretending to do it. Patting themselves on the back and giving themselves a sticker without putting in the hard work. It’s like putting a little rainbow flag sticker on a door to a pub, but not advertising anywhere else. I still have to find that, actually go and look for it, and then maybe I might be welcome because you put it there, but how do I know.
Helen: They don’t want to put the work in, at the end of the day, and that is the problem.
Lily: I think they're afraid to. I mean, we're all afraid to some degree that we're not as tolerant and inclusive as we think we are. We also align self worth with tolerance and inclusivity. So I think a lot of people are seeing the mirror held up to them and then getting quite scared and going, am I a bad person? The work is hard but we’ve all got to do it.
Helen: When I did my interview with Paul Jones, we talked about how people are scared to stand up and say something because then you have to keep saying things, doing the work and be welcome to change. Accept that you will get picked up on certain language you use and that it is okay to make mistakes. I think some people just think it’s dangerous territory to start going into. Part of the problem is that so many bars and breweries are ran by…
Lily: Blokes!
Helen: Yes. I think there’s a chance they will continue to be stuck in this standstill of being too scared to say anything. They’re looking at their management teams that are full of more privileged people who don’t know what to do either, but it’s up to them to fix that.
Lily: I think there's also a fear of vulnerability, which is much broader than beer and is obviously a societal thing and maybe a gendered thing. There's a fear that if you open your mouth, you'll say the wrong thing, then you'll get cancelled and then your career will go down the pan because you made a mistake.
Helen: There’s also definitely a feeling of, well we got rid of the sexist and racist beer labels, what more do you want? Surely it’s over now, like that’s a wrap on discrimination in the beer industry.
Lily: We can’t use slurs in the street anymore, so surely it’s sorted?
Helen: Because all of the macros are gone. Don’t worry about the micros, we'll just ignore those.
Lily: People need to become comfortable with being corrected and just take it on the chin. Sometimes when people misgender me and I point it out they go on about it for four minutes, like you have made more of a deal out of it than I have. Just say sorry and do better.
Helen: 100%, people just need to get comfortable with the fact that sometimes you're going to say stupid things. I'm relentlessly saying stupid things. It’s human nature to be on the defensive but you have to be able to seperate yourself and be willing to learn - it's just about listening to each other.
I'm always reticent to use the word TERF, but it's a sort of convenient hook to hang the idea on. I mean, they're not radical feminists. They're neither neither radical nor feminist about what they do. They're just transphobes.
Helen: So how do you feel about the beer industry currently? Do you feel like it’s an inclusionary space at the moment in the UK?
Lily: I mean, most of my interaction with the beer industry at the moment is through Twitter. I don’t really tend to follow people who I don’t want to listen to, so I exist within a bubble. I tweeted about a taproom manager from a brewery - who is currently going nameless, who said “the good thing about small brewers duty relief is that no one is talking about trans stuff on Twitter anymore”. I got such a strong vocal response via Twitter, from people saying ‘who is this brewery, we want to be able to boycott them, there’s no room for this behaviour in our industry.’ Which was great but I wonder… how much of that is actually a vocal minority?
How many people in the industry do agree that certain groups within it are too vocally ‘woke’ and are talking about ‘the gay agenda’ too much. I think there’s a lot of push for inclusion and diversity and there are some people really trying. There are also people waiting for something to come along that they can throw their weight behind because they don’t really know what to do.
Personally I think I often feel included, but then I remember that I’m one of the only people like me that I know because there’s not many of us. I wonder if that’s because from the outside, the beer industry doesn’t look like a particularly hospitable place for trans people. So why would you join? In short, I don't know the answer to your question. I think people want it to be and people want to do good from what I can see... But we also have to bear in mind that the beer industry is not just small, lovely progressive craft brewers. There are some arseholes out there, and that might be indicative of a larger swathe of people than we like to think.
Helen: I think it's pretty much down to what I mean what other people are experiencing. From my perspective of bartender to customer, I watch some men walk into our bar, which has pride flags up all year round to show our support, and they are either nudging each other and raising eyebrows, or just straight up shout “I hadn’t realised this is a gay bar”.
I guess what I am looking for is that bars and breweries are more vocal about where they stand and about who they care about essentially. I often feel like men will assume that a bar is their space, and a space for them to say gross things about women because their wives are at home or can say something inappropriate towards bar staff because who is stopping them? No one is stopping them, no one has ever stopped them. Until now. The more bars put their foot down and say hey, this behaviour isn’t acceptable then hopefully the more people will realise that their behaviour is problematic. Or at least stop asking for a ‘lady drink’ for their wives.
Lily: I think we are gradually moving past “beer = man drink, cosmopolitan = lady drink” but then there are still so many people who do think like that. That it will always be a man's drink and no bloody pride flag-wearing gays are going to tell me different. But then at the same time, there is an element of confirmation bias at play. In that we will remember more people who say beer is a man's drink and comment upon pride flags, they stand out more. For every one person who comes in and says something gross, you’ll have 10 more people who will walk in and say “ooh what a nice flag”.
I got really depressed about all the TERFs [trans-exclusionary radical “feminists”] that are in the mainstream media recently. Which is a very serious issue but also there are nice things happening to trans people in the world and it’s important to try and remember those. I’m not trying to be pious about it.
Helen: I guess that’s the thing, the more visible people are, the more pushback there’s going to be. Transphobia has been around for as long as western colonisation but I suppose it’s only recently that it’s been paired with feminist dialogue. Which is particularly dangerous because some people who aren’t more clued in or even young women discovering feminism just can't see through it. Whereas to me it is wildly apparent that their “concern” for the safety of women is all fake and just a cover for their transphobia [I’m still looking at you Joanne].
Lily: I'm always reticent to use the word TERF, but it's a sort of convenient hook to hang the idea on. I mean, they're not radical feminists. They're neither neither radical nor feminist about what they do. They're just transphobes. Trans visibility is a double-edged sword, but it's an incredibly murderous double-edged sword. The cases of transphobic motivated murders are just increasing year on year since 2014. Tomorrow marks one year since the Guardian published an article written by a trans person, and I think in the last month, one TERF has had like four articles published. The press is owned by the right.
You’re right, they use feminist language that is all predicated around the safety of women. Which is very othering because what they are saying is that we’re not women, we’re men and we’re predators. They also use radicalising techniques and scaremongering and nonsense like this. They always go back to this one story of a trans woman attacking a cis inmate in a woman’s prison, but never discuss every single other trans person who has never attacked anyone. Then there are those who are demanding the right to survey our genitals when we use the bathroom, because “we’re the predators”. How many trans people are actually harassing cis women, comparatively to the cis women who are harassing trans women in toilets. It’s completely absurd but apparently they are doing it for safety, but not for our safety, despite us having used these facilities forever. We have been around forever.
I’ve always had a sense of obligation, to some extent, to make the lives of everyone coming behind me, making the lives of other trans people better. Using my privilege to make the world a better place for people like me, so they don't have to feel the things that I have felt.
Helen: This “gender critical” movement is one of the most dangerous movements the queer community has faced for decades, the worst part about it is that it is also coming from inside the house. We’ve got gay cis men and women who are transphonic, which makes it harder to fight because it means we have heterosexual people saying ‘well I know lesbians who feel at threat too’.
Lily: They’re conveniently forgetting all of the trans women who stood with them 50 years ago, trans women have always fought for the rights of everyone within the community but now there’s queer people abandoning the T part of LBGT. it is so dangerous and it doesn't just harm trans people, it harms a lot of cis people. There are so many cis women who get harrased for presenting more masc.
It is such an exhausting fight. I follow a lot of trans people on social media and there’s no respite from it because they are arguing with TERFs and then I have to see all of this bullshit opinions that are about me. And then there's cis people who aren't involved have no idea what's going on. So it's like... I'm drowning in this and it is really impacting my mental health. I think a lot of people go ‘well, it's not my fight and I don't know how to get involved.’ So I'm on my own again... cool.
Helen: I do find it interesting how many cis men don’t know how to get involved, I can see how confusing it must look, women claiming to be feminists and saying they are trying to protect women. It’s harder to weigh in on a fight that is like “minority” vs minority, there must be a nervousness of: I don’t know how to have that fight. But then it’s shit because, especially for you, trans people are constantly having to do the work of educating everyone else, as well as looking after yourself and keeping yourself safe.
Lily: Yes, before I started Queer Brewing Project, I would talk to my therapist about the idea that living a quiet life and not discussing trans or queer rights is a much more peaceful existance; and I would feel happier. Then I started QBP and set a path in motion where this is pretty much what I talk about now. I’ve always had a sense of obligation, to some extent, to make the lives of everyone coming behind me, making the lives of other trans people better.
Using my privilege to make the world a better place for people like me, so they don't have to feel the things that I have felt. So that quiet life is never gonna exist for me because we have to do something.
The people who just sit back and watch the world proverbially on fire and just going “well someone else can deal with that”. I just think, how do you do that?
Helen: My parents have always said, you just need to worry less and you can’t fix everything. Which I understand in theory, as you say it’s better for my mental health, but it is something I have always found difficult because… I just can’t imagine being in a privileged position and not standing up for others, especially within our community. I have met far too many gay men and women who say ‘well I don’t need pride so we shouldn’t have it’ or ‘I don’t need to go to gay bars so lets get rid of them’. That dismissal of community smacks of ignorance. Black and trans women are exhausted because they are fighting on their own and putting their mental healths last to, as you say, make the world a better place for those who come after them. It wouldn’t be such a sacrifice for those individuals if we all fought together, for each other.
Lily: I was just thinking like the intersections of blackness and transness. I mean for ages I used to see another trans woman be murdered and think “stop killing us”. And I just couldn't see the link between all of the murders. I didn't feel in danger, but I felt that someone like me could be the same level of risk. I think that was just white privilege because I realised: they're all trans women of color. I think 80% 85% of all trans people murdered are trans women of color. And it's just fucking awful. So when you see racist trans people it's like ‘what are you doing’?? Where is your solidarity and understanding? Where's your understanding?
Helen: What kind of things are you looking to do in the future, in a world post-virus?
Lily: The goal I’m working towards is opening a brewpub. I’m always talking about taking up space, but what if I create space and create jobs for queer people? Try to bring people into the industry that way. We've also lost a number of queer venues in London recently and the ones that remain are ones where I don’t feel comfortable. So why not create something that can show queer communities that there's more to beer than cans of Red Stripe and try to bring people in that way.
That’s what I’m going to be working towards with the Wayfinder scheme, trying to create space within queer communities for beer and create space within beer for queers. Also hopefully do a couple of collaborations with Cloudwater and I’m also potentially looking at producing a core beer for Queer Brewing Project so there is always something out there. There’s always so much demand for each beer that gets produced but it goes so quickly, it would be good to have a beer that is readily available. Hopefully I could put it into places that aren’t craft beer focussed too.
The main pipe dream is to create a physical space. Like other brewery origin stories where they say they wanted to create beer they want to drink; well I want a space that I feel safe and comfortable in, but something that says “hello all of you, come in with me”. I think it would be wicked as well.
Helen: I completely agree with you, it would be something really brilliant. To use the table analogy, we no longer want a seat at your table because it’s been a ballache to get to and you clearly don’t want to give us a seat. So now we’re making our own tables.
Lily: Yes, I don’t want to sit at your cis het table.
Helen: Also we clearly have a better understanding of inclusivity than you do, so we may as well be the ones to make the space and then, it wouldn’t be a case of het people not being allowed in there, it would be a safe space for EVERYONE.
Lily: You can also only expect so much from people who don't have the same life experiences as you. Rather than asking for a seat at the table and being thrown a bone occasionally. Why don't we create our own table where we have a whole menu designed to cater for us?
Helen: Having breweries that are going to be supportive of these kinds of ventures is so important. I also hope that more breweries observe what you're doing with the Wayfinder scheme and find a way to replicate that, not necessarily matching funding but even just basic support would be incredible and help give a leg up.
Lily: I think that that's exactly what Cloudwater are doing with the Wayfinder, by saying here are all of our ideas, which would you like to use? Because rather than asking the beer industry to change, why don't we just change the industry? What do we want within the same sphere? It might fail on it’s ass and not work, but I would rather have tried.
With regards to the Cloudwater scheme, neither party knows what's going to happen. There's the opportunity for something really cool to come out of it. Both in terms of the objectives we meet, and the sort of the things we achieve, but also just learning.
Like I said though, the thing I'm most excited for is to create a space, and to be able to create jobs. Have a non-alcoholic draft line where sober queers can feel welcome… I almost want to have a meeting room for the queer agenda. We can take over the world in this little resistance bar, with flip charts everywhere and walls that spin round when you press a button.
Helen: I would LOVE that
Lily: The glitzy resistance.
