Kweza Craft Brewery

Let’s reconsider some basic issues and questions. What is beer? What are its origins? Who makes it? Since women are traditionally the brewers of local alcohol around the world, why do they only represent 2% of brewery owners in the United States, and less than 10% of management? Meaning, they are not profiting from the knowledge, labor, and products they created. And why are only 1% of breweries in the U.S. Black owned? And regardless of industry, why do female founders only receive 2.7% of capital investment, despite performing 63 percent better than companies made up of all-male team members? (US Brewers’ Association data 2018).

Let’s reinvent. Kweza Craft Brewery is Rwanda’s first craft brewery. It’s women owned, women led, and women brewed by a team of Rwandan, Zimbabwean, and American women, backed, so far, by majority female investors including a C-suite executive at Microsoft Corporation. Have we picked an uphill battle? Yes. Finding experienced commercial female brewers, and experienced female brewpub managers are needles in haystacks. Finding the investments to start the country’s first craft brewery, during a global pandemic, no less, is difficult. But the women are there; and the support and interest is there; and the market is drooling at our pilot brews.

We are starting Kweza by both benefiting from women’s traditional brewing knowledge, and the general knowledge around the global USD $1.5 billion alcohol industry. But we stop and ask “why? And does this make sense for us, HERE in Rwanda, and NOW.” We’ve shifted some basics due to that reinvention. Most beer globally is made from barley, wheat, etc. But in Rwanda, we grow sorghum, cassava, maize, and other crops that also ferment into delicious beer, making it a local agricultural supporter, climate friendly, and more cost effective. And we can source from women’s co-ops to keep our goals going. Even the basics of how to serve beer need to be questioned. Glass is made from sand, which comes from beaches and sandy rivers. Rwanda is a small landlocked country in the middle of Africa with clay soil. So, rather than bar glasses, we’re working to source locally made clay steins and growlers, and potentially even giant clay amphorae—historic fermentation vessels to use in conjunction with modern stainless steel equipment!

Now, we’re building our brewery, with a female led and majority female architecture and engineering team, of course! We’re applying the same principles of asking what we have wealth in, such as rain and sun, versus Rwanda’s extremely expensive electricity and intermittent municipal water supply. So, we aim to be rainwater, solar, and wastewater wetland self-contained.

We aim to not only be a successful business, but nurture the start of the whole industry in Rwanda. We want to set the “bar,” and set ourselves up to pay it forward and help other women and African entrepreneurs join us, to show what diversity in ethnicity and gender can do for the global economy and customer experience.

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