Vine Street Brewing shares Black Is Beautiful fonio ale recipe

Vine Street Brewing used the Black Is Beautiful platform to push the collaboration beer conversation into lighter, brighter territory. The Kansas City brewery, identified as Missouri’s first Black-owned brewery, shared a fonio-forward recipe that swaps the stout-heavy expectations of the original idea for a more drinkable golden-ale profile built around grain character and hop lift.

The recipe came from cofounder and head brewer Elliott Ivory and was published as a five-gallon all-grain batch with a 4.7 percent ABV, 22 IBUs, 1.046 original gravity and 1.010 final gravity. Those numbers make the beer immediately useful to homebrewers, because the recipe is not presented as a vague concept or a one-off draft room special. It is a finished target that can be brewed, measured and adjusted.

Fonio is the ingredient that gives the beer its point of view. In the recipe notes, it brings tropical grain character, while Citra adds lemon-lime and white-wine-like notes. That combination keeps the beer crisp and easy-drinking rather than heavy or specialty-driven. In practical terms, it shows how a brewer can use an underused grain without forcing it into the role of an exotic accent. Here, fonio is not a garnish. It helps define the beer’s identity.

That matters because Black Is Beautiful has always been more than a grist bill. The open-source framework gave breweries a shared platform, but Vine Street’s version shows how the idea keeps evolving as different shops reinterpret it through their own ingredients, house character and brewing goals. In this case, the recipe connects cultural meaning with technical choices, pairing a socially rooted collaboration beer with a grain that invites experimentation and a hop bill that keeps the palate moving.

Craft Beer & Brewing also made the recipe available in BeerSmith and BeerXML formats for subscribers, which gives brewers a practical way to copy the beer or tweak it into something of their own. It appeared in the magazine’s From Grain to Glass issue, where the recipe sits alongside broader discussion of wheat, fonio, specialty malts and modern brewing techniques. For homebrewers, that is the real lesson in Vine Street’s version: purpose-driven brewing does not stop at choosing a cause. It shows up in the grain bill, the hop choice and the decision to make the beer drinkable enough that the message travels with the pint.