July 27, 2022
At a community center in the industrial city of Orange, N.J., Joe Mettle and Roger Apollon, Jr. proudly stand in front of an arched stained-glass window before class starts. The two former New Jersey charter school teachers and craft beer connoisseurs are the founders of EEB, which stands for Entrepreneurship and Equity in Brewing, a 10-week training program that provides Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC), and other underrepresented individuals in craft brewing an opportunity to learn how to brew, and in turn, run a business.
This inaugural semester of EEB offers classes in brewing history as well as tasting and evaluating beer (and the necessary vocabulary). More than half the class load covers how to make beer—breaking down styles, basic chemistry and safety, and procedures to begin brewing at home. Each student even gets their own 5-gallon kit to practice with.
For Apollon, who’s been homebrewing for the past decade and who opened Four City Brewing just footsteps from the Orange Transit station right before the pandemic, it wasn’t until three years into running his brewery, that, as a Black man, he realized there weren’t many others like him in the industry. With EEB, he hopes to extend the same kind of access he was lucky enough to have to everyone else.
Apollon has been a part of the craft beer world since creating the Brew Council, a tasting club run out of his living room, over a decade ago. “It was a once-a-month gathering that started with five guys and grew to 30. The idea was not only to drink beer, but also get educated,” says Apollon. Guests like Thomas Maroulakos, owner of Skopos Hospitality Group in New Jersey, as well as Garrett Brown, regional sales manager for Firestone Walker, came to drop their knowledge on the group. “We even made polos and wore them to a beer fest (Essex County Turtle Back’s Brew at the Zoo). Someone came up to me and asked where my brewery was, and that’s when I started drawing up the Four City business plan,” said Apollon.
While Mettle, a burgeoning entrepreneur, is admittedly a spirits guy first, his first foray into craft beer was through drinking with Apollon. Four City’s The Keg Stand is his current go-to beverage, an American-style lager brewed with Heidelberg malt, flaked rice and corn, New Zealand Hallertau hops, and a house lager yeast that is designed for session drinking at 5.5 percent ABV.
If Apollon is the builder, then Mettle is the architect behind EEB. “The aha moment came at the height of Covid-19 when everything was shut down and we quarantined at home,” says Mettle. It all started with a conversation by the fire pit in Apollon’s backyard. “It was the day before Thanksgiving 2020, and we were talking about the lack…
