Brewing, Cideries & Spirits  February 25, 2025

Launch of student-brewed beer caps Black History Month at CSU

Assistant professor John Wilson’s class at Colorado State University brewed the special peach cobbler beer for Black History Month. Courtesy Ashur Lockrem. CSU
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FORT COLLINS — Students at Colorado State University have come up with their version of soul food — a peach cobbler beer — to celebrate Black History Month.

The brew, which is already on tap at the Ramskeller in the Lory Student Center, will be served at a launch party there from 3 to 5 p.m. Friday.

Brewed by CSU students, the beer was inspired by the rich culinary traditions of the Black community. Students with the Black/African American Cultural Center began thinking about what flavors to feature in the special beer about five months ago, according to Nina Askew, the center’s interim assistant director. The students submitted their ideas through Instagram and an online form, she said, and when someone suggested peach cobbler, it gained a lot of support.

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“It was just a really nostalgic option,” Askew said, “and they were excited to see a dessert become a beer.”

Enter John Wilson, a CSU alum and an assistant professor in the Fermentation and Food Science Program, whose students brewed the beer in the Ramskeller teaching brewery at the end of the fall semester. 

“I’m from Georgia originally, and peach cobbler was part of every summer, so I was really excited about it,” Wilson said.  

The ingredients included hops that taste peachy and malts that taste like a caramel, biscuity pie crust, he said. Throw in some nutmeg, cinnamon, vanilla, natural peach essence and some mango extract, and it became what has been officially dubbed, “Tropical Peach Cobbler.” 

“You could totally put a scoop of ice cream in there,” Wilson said. 

The beer, an amber ale that is 5.5% alcohol by volume, has “the brightness of peaches and mango on the nose, with a rich yet refreshing experience on the tongue,” according to its official description. “This beer is lightly sweet and fruity with just enough bitterness to provide balance.” 

A nonalcoholic soda option designed and made by CSU students will also be available at the event.

Wilson noted that another element of the project that may be unexpected for some people is the rich brewing and distilling history of the Black culture.  

While many people think of white founding fathers such as Samuel Adams as being the first beer brewers in America, it was enslaved Africans who did the actual brewing and who fine-tuned the technical processes, Wilson said. He added that on both sides of his family there were enslaved people involved in brewing and distilling. Then, during Prohibition, there was a concerted effort to remove Black people from those industries, he said.

“That’s a space we have just now started recovering from,” he noted.  

Wilson said the original master distiller of Jack Daniels whiskey was a Black man named Nathan Green, better known as “Uncle Nearest.” According to The Three Drinkers website, Uncle Nearest introduced a special technique of charcoal filtering that he had learned when cleaning water in West Africa. The method of filtering whiskey through sugar maple tree charcoal became known as the “Lincoln method,” which is still used today.

Wilson said there is a movement to diversify the field of food science and human nutrition, including fermentation science and technology, and he looks forward to doing that at the university level.  

“We are open to collaborating with other cultural centers,” Wilson said. “We are really trying to strengthen our relations with other communities on campus.”

The Fermentation and Food Science Program is part of the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition in CSU’s College of Health and Human Sciences.

Students at Colorado State University have come up with their version of soul food — a peach cobbler beer — to celebrate Black History Month.

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