Craig Bowers and Samuel Chawinga are on a mission to create a craft beer community in South Los Angeles. Bowers, a marketing executive and events producer, and Chawinga, a longtime brewer, are behind the new South Los Angeles Beverage Company, an incubator, production and packaging facility scheduled to open in Florence, Calif., next year.
The 13,000-square-foot facility will include a brewery, tasting room, outdoor area with multiple food vendors, coffee roastery and cidery. It will be part of the SoLA Beehive, a 92,000-square-foot retail and production space located in a federal Opportunity Zone, one of several thousand Opportunity Zones nationwide, created as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act meant to promote investment in low-income areas.
“In this summer of 2020, we had a lot of conversations about wealth[and] racial inequality. Obviously South Central has had a lot of things going on throughout the years, so we are very much interested in igniting that entrepreneurial spirit that already exists here,” Bowers said. “We want the people in these communities to stay in place and to empower them to be part of the overall process.”
“Brewing is a labor of love, and once you get hooked, you get hooked,” Chawinga said. He spent many years brewing beer in Portland, Ore., before moving to Los Angeles in 2016 to open Boomtown Brewery in downtown L.A.Cans of Legacy, a hazy IPA from the People’s Republic of South Central made by the South Central Beverage Company.