While many breweries are turning inward, focusing on making payroll, reducing input costs, and streamlining staffing, Vine Street’s leadership team is firmly oriented outward. That attitude has helped establish the brewery, at just two years old, as a small-business leader on the local and national stages.
Its four co-owners divide and conquer—brewing collaboration beers with musicians, joining local economic-development projects, and lobbying for craft beer as a whole. As the industry is looking for its next wave of champions and leaders, Vine Street has already stepped up.
“They’re good for Kansas City, and they’re good for beer,” says Andy Doohan, managing partner of Mike’s Wine and Spirits, a family-owned liquor store in Kansas City, Missouri. “I believe in what Vine Street is doing. And because I care about what they’re doing, it helps me recommend their products.”
Those kinds of relationships are inseparable from the brewery’s success. Vine Street opened to national attention in 2023 as Missouri’s first Black-owned brewery—but any brewery’s initial buzz lasts only so long. It’s the commitment to service and relationships that has helped the brewery build momentum since then, growing production 10 percent in its second year to about 400 barrels. And there have been accolades: USA Today named Vine Street one its Top 5 Best New Breweries, and the National Black Brewers Association (NB2A) named it the 2024 Brewery of the Year.
“They are leaders amongst their peer group,” says Kevin Asato, executive director of the NB2A. “No one’s given them a playbook. But are they brewing great beer? Are they building their particular brand within their space? Are they helping the larger beer community? Unequivocally, they check each box.”
It’s not as if the four members of Vine Street’s leadership team—co-owners Woodie Bonds, Jr., Kemet Coleman, Elliott Ivory, and Annie McGinnis—have more hours in a day than anyone else. In fact, they have day jobs, side hustles, and kids, yet they still manage to grow their small business while championing others. When energy reserves are low and the requests for time stack up, McGinnis says, the team draws on its original mission: What’s good for the community is good for Vine Street.
“We all recognized that it was going to take work, and a lot of communication, and building relationships, and not being scared to take on some challenges and have a few extra-late nights,” says McGinnis, the brewery’s director of business development. “Overall, it’s paid off. But we still work at it every single day to make those relationships. … I know I wake up feeling every bit of it.”
It Starts in the Neighborhood
People who work in craft beer often talk about community, but Vine Street’s team can be more specific than most about whom it considers to be its core people.
They were deliberate about choosing to open in Kansas City’s 18th & Vine district, a historic African-American neighborhood two miles from downtown. The brewery takes up two stories of a 150-year-old limestone building, helping to revitalize a part of town that’s been neglected and marginalized since its heyday in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. To the Vine Street team, serving the community means—first and foremost—providing a gathering space for neighbors in Kansas City’s East Side.
But it also means being ambassadors of the 18th & Vine neighborhood to the broader world. McGinnis has been part of a working group that’s pushing to bring streetcar service to that area, making it easier for Kansas City residents to connect to businesses via public transit. The brewery also is planning programming and promotions around the upcoming FIFA World Cup; the city is scheduled to host six matches next June and July, attracting fans from around the world.
Often, what’s important to the business is also important to the neighborhood. When the previous restaurant tenant closed up and left, leaving brewery patrons with no nearby food option, Vine Street’s owners stepped up to personally recruit a new tenant.
All that neighborhood advocacy doesn’t go unnoticed by neighbors or by business partners.
“Vine Street is very authentically Kansas City,” Doohan says. “Their beers tell a really important story of what they represent, which is the urban core of K.C. … They represent our city really well. That’s something they do as well or better than anyone else.”
Civic engagement is a long game. Vine Street can’t know, just two years in, what the full effects will be. In the short term, however, outreach is helping the brewery distinguish itself to retailers and partners amid a throng of other local breweries. Bonds, Vine Street’s sales lead, even goes out of his way to appear in Mike’s Wine and Spirits’ social-media videos.
“Breweries have to go the extra step to get my buy-in because just making good beer isn’t enough,” Doohan says. “Vine Street does a good job on the relationship side, and K.C. is a relationship city.”
Vine Street distributes across the metropolitan area, on both sides of the Missouri-Kansas line, via two craft-focused distributors. It’s the rare brewery that has nothing but praise for its wholesalers; Ivory says they leverage the brewery’s story, rather than promotions, to gain placements. Bars and restaurants have been especially receptive, as the brewery collaborates with restaurants on custom beers and brews a house wheat beer for stalwart gastropub Beer Kitchen.
“Our distributors don’t need incentives like free shirts or whatever,” Ivory says. “They know that the product is strong enough to stand up and sell, and all they need to do is get in front of somebody, and then it’ll do the rest of the work.”
Music Is the Heartbeat
In today’s market, brewery operators know their taprooms have to function as much as event spaces as they do watering holes.
Few embrace it to the degree that Vine Street does, leveraging Coleman’s connections to the music business—he’s a rapper, producer, and DJ—to bring in performers and even collaborate with musicians on beers. The taproom hosts live music about twice a week, plus album release parties and larger events such as Brass & Booojee—a Halloween party featuring Brass & Boujee, a local mashup of hip-hop and big-band jazz.
It takes a lot of organization, weekly meetings, and countless email threads to manage the calendar among the brewery’s four leaders, who all have other roles and responsibilities.
“Our Google events calendar is insane,” McGinnis says, “but it’s all broken down in different categories, so each color means something. From a distance, if we just happen to see the calendar, we know what the heck is going on.”
At Vine Street, music doesn’t just check a box—it’s an authentic part of the brewery’s identity, helping to distinguish it from other businesses. Almost any bar can host live bands, of course, but few have the deep connections to hip-hop that Vine Street does. Events such as trivia nights or even showing Chiefs games haven’t proven popular with Vine Street’s regulars—it’s clear that music is what customers expect from the brewery.
Ivory estimates that business increases 20 to 30 percent over baseline when they host music performances on weeknights. Part of that boost includes existing Vine Street customers who enjoy performances, but the artists also attract fans who might not yet be familiar with the brewery—so the live music is an important marketing tool.
Private parties and corporate events are also critical, McGinnis says. Not only do they provide important revenue, but they introduce people—some of whom might not have visited Vine Street otherwise—to a positive brewery experience. That’s critical to driving on-site visits, but it also has a ripple effect on retail shelves.
Between 2019 and 2023, according to Brewers Association data, the number of people between the ages of 21 and 34 who said they were drinking more craft beer because they were visiting more taprooms and breweries increased. The percentage of women in that age group who said that was true grew 8 percent—a sizable jump.
Private events can be natural invitations for drinkers who might not consider themselves dedicated “beer people.”
The Liquid
Besides establishing itself as a community hub, Vine Street has also established its reputation for quality in a range of beer styles.
Its bestseller is Jazzman, a black lager; the East 71 cream ale is also popular. The lineup also showcases fruit beers, saisons, IPAs, and even a tropical stout.
“They’re nimble, and they know what they’re doing,” Doohan says. “They’ve got stouts that are good, sours that are good, lagers that are good. They’re good at making beer, and they’re adventurous and [have] fun with it.”
This year, Ivory says, he’s focused on standardizing and documenting brewing processes, to help the brewing team to further dial in variables that affect beer quality. The production team is taking more notes, paying more attention to pH readings, and more carefully logging standard operating procedures as well as measurements from each brew day.
In particular, that level of recording and attention to detail led the team to focus more on water chemistry. Vine Street uses filtered city water; Ivory says Kansas City’s water is relatively high in sulfates, generally, but testing found that the water profile varied significantly from season to season. Based on those changes, Ivory began adjusting the additions for pH control and calcium chloride on a quarterly basis.
“During the fall, we start to see sulfates rise even higher,” he says. “And so, we’re … adding more calcium chloride to kind of balance that out.”
In 2026, Ivory says he plans to continue to make those types of small adjustments and procedural improvements while also increasing the number of brewing collaborations on his schedule. Those fellow collabs will join a calendar already packed with community outreach, musical events, run clubs, bingo nights, and preparations for Kansas City’s turn on the global stage during the World Cup.
It’s a tall order for a young brewery, especially given the budgetary challenges that all breweries are facing. While acknowledging those realities, the Vine Street team seems tireless—a resolve that’s drawn from the brewery’s historic mission and community role.
“Getting to be part of how the city is growing, getting asked to participate and have a voice,” McGinnis says. “Our business makes an impact in the community enough that we can help lead the way and make things happen, to keep our city growing. That’s been a big honor.
“Even nationally, a lot of people know about how good our beer tastes, [know] our story and our history of our building, and the history of the city that we’re in. Getting to celebrate that has been pretty damn cool.”