One of the taps in Green Bench’s taproom is always more special than the others—and it doesn’t have much to do with the beer that pours from it. It has more to do with the people who brew it, who pour it—and especially with those who choose to drink it.
Open since 2013, when it became St. Petersburg, Florida’s first independent brewery, Green Bench is highly regarded for a diverse range of technically accomplished beers: IPAs, lagers, saisons, mixed-fermentation concoctions, ciders, meads, and even classical session-strength ales. But on that special tap, the style—currently a keller-pils, for what it’s worth—is less important than the context.
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The context: Green Bench brews Kulture Khronicles in cooperation with Beer Kulture, a locally based nonprofit founded by Dom and Latiesha Cook, using beer as a catalyst for social change. Whether you order a pint or take home a four-pack of Kulture Khronicles, $1 of each purchase goes to what Head Brewer Khris Johnson calls a “hyper-local” charity.
“When I’m talking hyper-local, I don’t want to deal with Tampa or Tampa Bay,” Johnson says. “I’m talking about my city. Down the road.”
Green Bench’s chosen charity is Building Beds, which builds and delivers beds to any of about 7,000 kids in the St. Pete area who lack them. “We also donate our time,” Johnson says. “And it really hit me hard because—and I said I wanted to think ‘hyper-local’ when I came up with the idea—the last house that my girlfriend and I went to was like four blocks from our house. It was literally in our neighborhood. We went in the house, and we built three beds in that house.”
From the start, Johnson and fellow cofounders Steven Duffy and Nathan Stonecipher wanted their brewery to strengthen their community and to be a place that was open to all—the sort of aspirations that get lip service from many breweries, if not always tangible action. Involvement and inclusion were high among their lofty ambitions about nine years ago, when the three of them were homebrewing and sitting around a campfire in Duffy’s backyard.
That was when they chose the brewery name.
From the early 1900s, the green benches of St. Petersburg were the kind of attraction that appeared on colorful postcards, depicting happy locals and tourists lounging and chatting in the Florida sun. The reality was less colorful. The benches were simultaneously a symbol of St. Pete’s hospitality and its segregation—a reminder that not all were welcome. The city’s black residents were not allowed to sit there.
“St. Pete used to consider itself this communal town,” Johnson says. “St. Pete marketed itself using the green bench as a symbol, as this place of social gathering. But you know, what was also brought up at that campfire was, ‘Well, yeah, but not everyone could use those.’ And it was like, ‘Yeah, this is our opportunity to get it right this time.’
“You know, it’s been nearly 100 years since the green benches were introduced to St. Petersburg,” Johnson says. “And we want to have the same message, which is that this town is communal, that this town is accepting. But this time, we get to actually own it in a way that the city never had the opportunity to really do.”
The outdoor garden space between the brewery and Webb’s City Cellar offers a welcoming environment, and the covered patio offers shade from the Florida sun. Photo: Valerie Niager.
Growing, and a Growing Obsession
Johnson, 33, was born in Memphis and lived there until he was 10, when he moved to St. Petersburg to live with his white father and stepmother. It was a major cultural adjustment for a boy who had grown up among black family, friends, and classmates. He went on to attend the University of South Florida in Tampa, studied English literature, and became the first member of his immediate family to graduate from college.
College is also where Johnson started homebrewing. “I kind of fell in love with it and got—as is probably no surprise—a bit obsessive,” he says. “And I really enjoyed it, man. I really love learning, and I met a bunch of cool people. And there just wasn’t anything I’d experienced like it before. And I was seeing some personal success in the field, too. I was good at it, I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed being good at it. So, I was mostly self-taught for everything.” (These days he also teaches others, as a founding faculty member of the USF St. Petersburg Brewing Arts Program.)
Johnson had professional stints at Cigar City Brewing and at Southern Brewing & Winemaking—a small brewery/winery/homebrew shop in Tampa. Eventually, he knew he wanted to start his own brewery. That’s when a mutual friend connected him with Duffy and Stonechipher—St. Pete locals, longtime friends, and fellow homebrewers who also wanted to make a business out of their hobby. There was serendipity in this union; the trio complemented each other: Duffy’s background was in construction, Stonecipher’s in finance, while Johnson brought the brewing chops and experience.
It took years for them to find the right spot, get the exemptions they needed from the city, and find the right debt partner to turn their vision’s seed into a sapling that would grow. They say the lessons they learned along the way made them wiser. (“This is how an outstanding product is made,” their website says, in words written by Stonecipher, “with sacrifice, sweat equity, and tears. The process shouldn’t be easy. You should have to use all that’s within you to chase down the dream, and then when you catch it, the fruits of your labor are priceless.”)
Their first full year they produced about 1,200 barrels; last year they brewed almost 5,400. After opening adjacent Webb’s City Cellar last year—a facility devoted to barrel aging, mixed fermentation, mead, and cider, with a taproom and space for events—their potential capacity grew to 12,000 barrels. After the first three months of this year, they were on pace to brew almost 7,000 barrels in 2020. “Things were looking pretty good,” Johnson says.
Then came COVID-19. The rest is a more recent story familiar to breweries across the country and around the world.
About 64 percent of their production until the mid-March lockdown was draft beer, with most of the rest in cans. Almost two-thirds of their business—and the higher-margin portion of it, at that—was gone overnight. And like others, they quickly had to transform their business to prioritize packaged beer, online ordering, and to-go sales. A team of 28 shrank to 11. Johnson says their current production is about 60 percent of what it was.
Getting their beer garden open again—in the space between the brewery and Webb’s City Cellar—has been a stop-and-go affair, frustrated by local and state laws that have been less than clear about whether most bars and taprooms are allowed to open. The good news is that draft beer is flowing again—for now, anyway—at the Green Bench taproom and beer garden.
That means there is a Green Bench tap list again. That in itself is worthy of celebration.
Mixed-fermentation beers are a passion for Johnson. Photo: Valerie Niager.
Diverse Beers for Diverse People
The typical Green Bench list is that rare sort that can appeal to newcomers as well as to just about any stripe of beer geek. There are light lagers and session-strength classic styles, such as a dark mild. There are hazy IPAs and bright West Coast ones, too. There are a handful of dutifully brewed (and decocted) Czech- and German-style lagers—pilsner, rauchbier, tmavy, often on side-pull faucets—as well as a range of farmhouse-inspired, mixed-fermentation ales. It’s hard to imagine any serious beer enthusiasts perusing that list and not finding something they like—if not several they might love.
That diversity of beer is not exactly by design. It’s a by-product of Johnson’s serial obsessions. “We don’t have a bunch of stuff just because we’re trying to please everyone,” he says. “We have a bunch of stuff because I’m trying to please myself. I’m in love with so many different things fermented.”
The top seller by far, especially this year, is Sunshine City IPA, which Johnson describes as “tropical Pacific Northwest–style.” Double-dry-hopped with Mosaic, Citra, and Azacca, checking in at 6.8 percent ABV, the beer hits those mango-papaya tropical notes, works in some lemon-grapefruit ones, too, and manages to walk the sweet-bitter line without going too far in either direction. Before the pandemic lockdown, that beer was about 60 percent of Green Bench’s production. After shifting more toward packaged beer and core brands, it’s now about 85 percent. “And I still find that I’m obsessive over that beer,” Johnson says. “You know, making sure that it’s right and it’s better.”
The Bench Life lager—at 4.6 percent ABV, with flaked maize, a soft 7 IBUs—is a fixture. “We have a premium lager that I spent three years of my life trying to perfect,” Johnson says. “That’s one of our core brands. It does really well in the tasting room. It’s also, frankly, what the staff drinks the most. Our brewers drink Bench Life probably more than anything else.”
Johnson’s own preference usually leans more toward the Postcard Pils—an “American-style” pilsner and another of their core beers. It also gets a bit of flaked maize, German pilsner malt, Mount Hood hops to the tune of 35 IBUs, and an elaborate single-decoction mash. That’s another one he says he has spent years perfecting. After Sunshine City IPA, it’s Green Bench’s No. 2 seller.
Johnson’s lager love runs deep, and local drinkers have deflated the team’s early worries that lagers might not sell. He purposefully installed a three-vessel brewhouse that can manage decoctions. He also befriended Ashleigh Carter and Bill Eye of Bierstadt Lagerhaus in Denver, Colorado, known for their dogged devotion to traditional German lager-brewing methods. “I could ask them anything at that point, and that’s when I started basically asking all sorts of questions.” While Johnson soaked up knowledge, their friendship led to collaboration. When Green Bench opened Webb City’s Cellar, the first event there was a Bierstadt tap takeover with Carter and Eye.
Johnson’s brewing team jokes that the direction of the brewery changes every time he wakes up with a new obsession. “And I disagree with that to an extent,” he says. “What I would say to them is, ‘The direction hasn’t changed. We’re still going to do all the shit we were doing. We’re just adding to what we’re doing. We’re just going to do even more than what we were doing. And I become just obsessive with perfecting whatever it is.”
One of Johnson’s prides is a state-of-the-art Italian CFT Group canning line, known for minimal oxygen pickup. When they bought it from the Parma-based company last year, CFT told Johnson that Green Bench was the smallest brewery in the world to own one. “We have such strict guidelines in our brewery on how we do things. Producing the wort, transferring, fermenting, centrifuging, lab work, daily lab work—tons of lab work!—canning. I’m so obsessive over quality that we just do more than I think most do on a daily basis—just because I can’t sleep at night.”
Green Bench’s 15-barrel brewhouse was custom-built by JVNW in Oregon. Almost half of their fermentors are 30-barrel tanks, which they fill with double batches. In all, there are about 560 barrels of fermentation capacity—but that doesn’t include the remarkable Webb’s City Cellar.
The Cellar is where it becomes abundantly clear that mixed-fermentation brewing is more than an afterthought at Green Bench. The team pumps wort from the brewhouse, under the beer garden, and into foeders at the cellar. One foeder holds 90 hectoliters (about 77 barrels), while three others hold 40 hectoliters (34 barrels) each. The cellar has room for another 700 wine barrels. There are also tanks for fruiting beers such as Blackberry Alice, an initially golden sour ale that is foeder-fermented and wine barrel–aged, spending three months on seven pounds of blackberries per gallon of beer.
Webb’s City is also where Green Bench produces its mead and cider, which can go into another 10-barrel foeder or any of a handful of additional fermentors. The meads include eye-poppers such as The Darkest Timeline, a 14 percent ABV orange-blossom melomel loaded with blackberries, black currants, and raspberries. Some of the ciders are foeder-fermented, such as I Am Brut (6.7 percent ABV), which gets the house Sacch-Brett blend and further aging in neutral barrels.
The low-key and 21+ only Webb’s City Cellar houses the brewery’s barrel program, along with a separately licensed area for cider and mead production, all visible from the glassed-in second floor space designed for taproom overflow and event rentals. Photo: Valerie Niager.
Another St. Pete Legacy with Meaning
Webb’s City Cellar opened in early 2019 to local acclaim—even if it’s had to remain closed for most of 2020 due to the pandemic.
The Cellar is named for Webb’s City, a gigantic, once-famous department store that was a St. Pete attraction in its own right and employed 1,700 people—including many black people, at a time when other businesses would not hire them. Black people also made up a large part of its clientele—however, they were not allowed to eat there. Like St. Pete’s green benches, its history is complicated—and again, that’s exactly why they chose the name.
“Webb’s City was a place that was vital to the economy in St. Petersburg for nearly 25 years,” Johnson says. “And sure, while black people could shop there and black people were hired there, they didn’t have the best jobs at Webb’s City. And they couldn’t eat at the lunch counter. And guess where the NAACP [in 1960] decided to protest and host sit-ins?
“The green benches. And Webb’s City.”
Now, Green Bench and Webb’s City Cellar are not only open to everyone, but they’re also co-owned by someone who would not have been able to sit at that lunch counter 60 years ago. Johnson is aware and proud of that.
Photo: Valerie Niager.
Turning a Moment into a Movement
The George Floyd killing in May sparked nationwide protests and momentum for Black Lives Matter, and it led to new efforts to address racial injustice and disparities across various aspects of public life. That has included the predominantly white beer industry, as many people within it have taken a look inward and asked what else they can and should do.
Inevitably, a lot of them reach out to Johnson—not only because he’s a black brewery owner, but also because he and his partners have been involved in these issues for years. “And we’ve been doing it because it’s just something we’re passionate about and we care about.”
Local and state groups have approached him about getting involved in diversity committees. Johnson says he believes that they do want positive change. “But what ultimately ends up happening is a bunch of white people that are the board members … get to hear me, the committee leader, who’s—you know, they just feel comfortable because there’s a dude with a big nose … and lips, they feel better because they’re working with me. Then it turns into potentially them saying no to this initiative that the person of color is telling them needs to happen. And I just couldn’t do it.”
Johnson says he appreciates that people say they want to do more, but “I guess from my perspective, I’m really hoping that people don’t get burned out by all this. That’s my biggest fear. I hope they continue to fight, and they continue to care about this. I want people to continue to ask questions.”
However, people reaching out are not always aware of what he’s going through himself. “Yes, sometimes I do get a little exhausted emotionally with it,” he says. “It felt like everybody kind of came to me with all this stuff, and I almost couldn’t handle it. You know, I care about these things, and I’ve been caring about them for a while, and I’ve been talking about them for a while. People that I know, I’ve walked up to and said, ‘Here’s some stuff I’m passionate about [that] I want to do,’ and they were like, ‘Cool, cool, cool.’ And then they’re gone. Now they’re calling me, ‘Hey man, I can’t believe this is how the world is. What can I do?’ I’m like, ‘Dude, I’ve been talking about this for years. And now you want to come to me?’
“Because on the other level, you’ve got to understand, I’m also dealing with it. I was also pissed off. I was also protesting. I was also hurt and scared. I can’t help everybody with the emotional things they’re going through, necessarily—especially white people, you know? Like, even though I’m half white, it doesn’t mean I’m the guy you come to, to pat you on the back and make you feel like you’re ‘one of the good ones,’ or [to] use a term like ‘allies,’ which personally I find a little problematic anyway.
“I’m not here to be the shoulder to cry on,” Johnson says. “But I will be the brother marching next to you. You know what I mean? That’s what I can provide.”
In the past couple of months, Johnson says, he’s been channeling all the frustration of 2020 into positive energy. That’s where Beer Kulture has been important for him personally, via the therapy of having a clear-cut way to do good. Green Bench’s Kulture Khronicles—simply giving $1 per beer to a “hyper-local” charity that helps those most in need—is an elegant model that any brewery can follow.
Under Latiesha Cook’s leadership, Beer Kulture recently became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, with a structure and defined purpose. Johnson is now its vice president.
“I started writing a list of initiatives that we cared about and foundations that we cared about,” he says. “And it’s been so rewarding, to take this thing that’s been really emotional, and the thing that’s been scary, and have a thing that I can apply myself to. And I can push that energy into something that I know is positive.”
