Page 5 - BusinessWest December 9, 2024

Sarah Real and Mike Dell’Aquila say there’s a story behind each one of their beers.
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revitalization of downtown Pittsfield, a central business district that was, as everyone knows, decimated by the loss of General Electric roughly 35 years ago now, and has
been reborn as a center for the arts, culture,
fine dining, and, now, a craft brewery that is, indeed, making an impact on many levels.
Start with the fact that it’s one of the
very few Latina-led breweries in the country. Fewer than 1% of American craft brewer-
ies are owned by women of color, a statistic that has led many visiting the School Street home of Hot Plate, a sporting-goods store a few decades ago, to conclude that Dell’Aquila is the genius behind such offerings as Rock- in’ the Gold Tooth, Agent Cooper, Countess of Flanders, and the ever-popular Capable of Anything, a chamomile blonde ale that has become quite popular with women.
He is proud — and quick — to correct them.
“I think we’re starting to leave behind that novelty act of ... ‘it’s a Mexican-American woman making that beer,’ to the fact that Sarah’s just a brewer who makes good beer. We’ve gotten over that hump.”
“It’s been fun to be a gender-inverted
team in that way and play with people’s
expectations,” Dell’Aquila said. “People will
come in with assumptions about who does
what; very often I have to make the joke that
Sarah does the hard work, and I’m just the pretty face, and that always gets a laugh.”
But as the Hot Plate story becomes more known, and as its beers rack up more accolades — its Italian Pilsner and Belgian Golden Strong ale were recently recognized, for example — fewer people need to be corrected, and the brewery has in many ways moved past the gender prejudices and the ethnicity stats.
“You can use some level of differentiation by who made it and what they look like, but if the beer’s not good, it’s not going to
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