Foothills Brewing Celebrates Black History Month by Shipping “Sexual Chocolate” to Atlanta

The headline isn’t exactly true, but it’s hard to imagine something more poorly timed than the arrival of Foothill Brewing’s “Sexual Chocolate” in Martin Luther King’s birthplace, on February 1st, the first day of Black History Month.

To bring you up to speed, here’s Sexual Chocolate’s label art, an imperial stout something-or-other out of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Someone at Foothills Brewing looked at a calendar and said to themselves, “February 1st is a great day for Sexual Chocolate to land in Atlanta.” And they dropped-off those bottles faster than they could drop a mic.

Here’s Foothills Brewing’s owner Jamie Bartholomaus, talking about the beer at a release last year. Notice how the first thing he mentions isn’t his beer’s flavor, how it’s made, or what it’s made from — Jamie talks about how it has a great name and a great logo.

Jamie Bartholomaus brews a beer called “Sexual Chocolate” and thinks it has a great name.

Predictably, beer nerds in Atlanta got frothy over its arrival, while publicly debating how they might politely request the beer from African-American cashiers at their local package store. What a dilemma!

It would be one thing if Foothills named a beer Sexual Chocolate after Randy Watson’s backing band in “Coming to America”. In fact, here’s three inoffensive ideas for labels that Foothills could have created instead:

The label art could be a hand in a blue tux, dropping a mic.
The bass player. A label of a guy in a blue tux, playing bass.
The label could be a man’s chest, where Eddie Murphy’s white ruffled shirt meets blue lapels. And those chains...

Either way, it would be a massive inside joke that fans of the movie would love and respect. I would happily buy it and give it as gifts.

But to name a beer “Sexual Chocolate”, create label art of a busty black woman, have it drop into your newest market on the first day of Black History Month isn’t just tasteless, it’s dumb.

While craft beer’s descended into click-drinkers and list-tickers who pursue releases in a Pokemon-style game of one-upsmanship, these limited bottles affect the FOMO-sphere of a craft beer lover’s brain. Predictably, it looks like Sexual Chocolate sold-out here on Monday, which doesn’t just affirm Foothills’ ability to make great beer, but to create the kind of marketing buzz that successfully equates black women with imperial stout.

Such a phenomenon it’s been on the news (in North Carolina).

Sweetwater plays a similar game, with their infamous release of this tone-deaf seasonal, “Happy Ending,” featuring “an explosive finish” and tissue. Sweetwater might be local heroes (owned by San Francisco-based private equity) but I’ve moved on. Fantastic, barrel-aged imperial stouts are as common now as diacetyl-struck amber ales in 1995. (For completion’s sake, here’s a list of other offenders.)

While macro-apologists beg to differ, beer is never “just beer”. It’s always about economics (there’d be no Sexual Chocolate if it didn’t sell) and the decisions consumers make about when, where, and how to spend their money. And in this day in age, no one wants to boycott anything if it’s delicious, right?

While Sexual Chocolate (why didn’t I just call it SC?) is a success in the marketplace, it’s also a sophomoric ploy to sell you a luxury item at the expense of black women. The sexier the message, the longer the lines. Didn’t we learn that from Budweiser? Or was it Tarantino?

I’m probably the only one left who expects more from craft beer, especially one from the South, but we can do better, folks, can’t we?

Happy Black History month, Foothills.