Wild Ideas Worth Living

Indigenous Brewing with Missy Begay and Shyla Sheppard

Episode Summary

Shyla Sheppard and Missy Begay are the founders of the first and only Native-women owned brewery in the U.S. They use Indigenous and local ingredients to make unique brews at Bow & Arrow Brewing in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Episode Notes

Shyla Sheppard and Missy Begay are the founders of the first and only Native-women owned brewery in the U.S. They use Indigenous and local ingredients to make unique brews at Bow & Arrow Brewing in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The beer they make at Bow & Arrow Brewing is more than just a drink: it celebrates Missy and Shyla’s heritage and shares their stories with their community.

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Episode Transcription

Shelby Stanger:

We've had a few guests on the show who've talked about the relationship between food and adventuring. Chef Maria Hines is all about growing and eating food that supports her climbing. Christian Gering makes Pueblo energy balls using native ingredients to fuel his long races.

Shelby Stanger:

Shyla Sheppard and Missy Begay are exploring another way to use indigenous ingredients. They're the founders of the first and only Native women-owned brewery in the US. The beer they make at Bow & Arrow Brewing is more than just a drink. It celebrates Missy and Shyla's heritage and shares their stories with their community in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Shelby Stanger:

I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production. Shyla Sheppard and Missy Begay grew up on reservations a thousand miles from each other. Shyla is from the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, and Missy is from the Navajo Nation. She grew up in the northeastern corner of Arizona. The pair met at Stanford University. While they were there, Shyla got really into beer. A pint of Hefeweizen at a local brewery opened her eyes to the brewing process and how to use different ingredients and yeasts.

Shelby Stanger:

Shyla Sheppard and Missy Begay, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.

Shyla Sheppard:

Thanks for having us.

Missy Begay:

We're excited to be here.

Shelby Stanger:

Will you guys each introduce yourselves?

Shyla Sheppard:

I'm Shyla Sheppard. I'm co-founder and CEO of Bow & Arrow Brewing here in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Missy Begay:

I'm Missy Begay, and I'm the creative director of Bow & Arrow Brewing.

Shelby Stanger:

You two met at Stanford and then, years later, you started this brewery together. What did you both do after school?

Shyla Sheppard:

While at Stanford, I was really curious actually what is this whole Silicon Valley business. Coming from a very rural area, being on a reservation, there's always talk of why are there so few businesses here, and so, being in the heart of Silicon Valley, I was really intrigued with that whole industry, so went on to move to the southwest and joined a venture capital firm that had a social impact angle on it. In some of that work, I started learning more about the slow food movement. I was at a fork in the road, and Missy was wrapping up residency, and so we were talking through just the timing of it and feeling like we had a little more stability for me to go out and take this risk.

Shelby Stanger:

Missy, you were a doctor at this point?

Missy Begay:

Yes, that's correct. I'm a sleep doctor.

Shelby Stanger:

What's a sleep doctor?

Missy Begay:

The study of sleep disorders and sleep medicine, the best part of life, sleeping.

Shelby Stanger:

The most important part of life. Right?

Missy Begay:

Yeah, the most important.

Shelby Stanger:

Do you still do it a little bit on the side or did you jump in full time with the brewery?

Missy Begay:

Yeah. I mean, I still practice medicine full time, and then I assist in the brewery as the creative director and round out my scientific background with this creative endeavor.

Shelby Stanger:

You both have such interesting, intricate stories. I'm just curious how you have the courage to. I mean, you had to put a little bit of your careers aside to launch into a startup.

Shyla Sheppard:

It's like you take these small experiences and, over time, you get more confidence for me, just going back to where I grew up and then just learning about our family's history. One interesting fact is I'm a direct descendant of Sacagawea. Hearing about her journey and the courage that she had to basically guide Lewis and Clark, everything's named after Lewis and Clark as though they were responsible for making it west, but, really, they had a lot of help along the way, including that of Sacagawea who, in fact, also had a baby with her. Just knowing how brave she was and knowing that I'm a direct descendant, I think that's given me some courage over the years, and then also just making the transition from our small community Twin Buttes to Stanford and then being in the venture capital industry where you don't see a lot of people of color or women. I just think, with all of that collective experience in my life, I just started to be more confident and comfortable with taking risks and being in places where there weren't people like me.

Shelby Stanger:

Will you ladies each tell me a little bit more about where you grew up?

Shyla Sheppard:

Yes. I grew up in Western North Dakota on the Fort Berthold Reservation, and that is home to the Mandan, Hidatsa and the Arikara Nation, and it's all just rolling hills, beautiful prairie, Little Missouri runs right through our reservation. I spent most of my time whenever I could outside, whether it was running the hills or riding horse with my family and my best friends.

Shelby Stanger:

Really quickly, I was reading that you have amazing memories of your Magoo, which is your grandma.

Shyla Sheppard:

Yeah, she learned from her grandmother a lot about our agricultural history and practices. We have heirloom seeds that we've grown, corn and Hidatsa beans, and so, growing up, I just really enjoyed going to visit her. I think a lot of people tend to think that tribes from the planes are nomadic, but that's not the case. We have a deep agricultural history. Unfortunately, in the late 40s or early 50s, there was a series of dams by the Army Corps of Engineers called the Pick-Sloan Project, and one of those dams is the Garrison Dam, and actually they declared eminent domain and relocated our people out of our ancestral homelands along the river, which was a huge disruption to our way of life because it was less fertile land up above.

Shyla Sheppard:

Yeah, so that's a really tragic history, but a lot of our people continued to try to carry on those practices in less fertile lands. My grandma carried that forward, and I'm really proud to say, over the last couple years in particular, we've really reclaimed some of that history. I live in New Mexico now, but I'm growing our traditional Hidatsa beans here and just wanting to learn more and more every year about those ways.

Shelby Stanger:

Missy, tell us about where you grow up on the Navajo Nation.

Missy Begay:

There's a lot of similarities, I think, between where Shyla grew up and I grew up. One of the big differences is the Navajo Nation is one of the largest tribes in the United States. We have a really large geographical land base which is about the size of West Virginia. Growing up in Navajo, I mean, I think the main thing is we're a matrilineal clan system. What that means is that a person who's Navajo identifies themselves through their mother. My maternal clan is Towering House Clan, and so that's how I would identify myself to another Navajo person. That's super important.

Missy Begay:

I grew up in a small community called Tsezhin on the Arizona side of the res. The really cool thing about that is it's near this really beautiful canyon called Canyon de Chelly, and that's where my grandparents made a living ranching and herding sheep and growing corn. When you grow up in a family that, it really teaches you a lot about what you really need in life. One of my favorite memories growing up there as a kid is, when we would go to sleep, my grandma would have these oil lanterns when she'd walk up and down the hallway. With the oil lantern, you can just see that faint glow. As a little kid tucked up in bed, you just felt like it was a Disneyland, magical-type of thing. Yeah, I think it was a pretty simple life in terms of there wasn't a whole lot of distractions, so you had to distract yourself all the time by either building tree houses or we'd make these sage brush tunnels and just being really creative with your imagination and never feeling bored. There was always something new to explore.

Shelby Stanger:

Missy and Shyla continued to pursue their work with a sense of imagination, curiosity and exploration. In 2012, they started talking seriously about opening an indigenous brewery. The following year, they came up with a business plan and financing strategy. Next, they secured a small business loan, did tons of research, got permits and found the perfect location. In February of 2016, they opened the doors to Bow & Arrow Brewing.

Shelby Stanger:

How did you come up with the name Bow & Arrow Brewing?

Shyla Sheppard:

It's definitely a big step. It's a big decision to settle on a name, and so it took us a while. We knew we wanted to incorporate elements of the southwest in beer and design and all of that, but we also wanted the brand to be meaningful to us. We always try to focus on positivity, so we're not going to use words like broken, because some people are like, "Is it broken arrow?" We're like, "No, nothing's broken here. It's Bow & Arrow," but, yeah, it was a drive I remember specifically, the moment Missy and I were driving up to Santa Fe, and we were passing through Cochiti and making our way north. I remember coming up the hill, and Missy just blurted out, "How about Bow & Arrow?" and, I don't know, in that moment, it felt like it was the absolute right thing.

Shyla Sheppard:

In both of our tribes, bow and arrow does represent strength and also protection. A lot of times, you may see a bow and arrow above a doorway. Also, I think for us being very goal-oriented people, to me, the bow and arrow represented something that with practice and skill, over time, you can use to achieve your goals.

Shelby Stanger:

When we come back, we talk about how Shyla and Missy source their ingredients locally, their favorite beers on the menu and more.

Shelby Stanger:

Shyla Sheppard and Missy Begay are the first indigenous women to own a brewery in the United States. Their beers are brewed with local southwestern ingredients like blue corn, prickly pear fruit and sumac berries. Inside Bow & Arrow Brewing, you'll find turquoise details, beautiful woodwork, vaulted ceilings and rows of communal tables. Even the beer labels are thoughtfully designed. They feature Missy's graphic artwork that often references local landforms and native motifs.

Shelby Stanger:

The labels, the labels are beautiful. I think, Missy, this is your wheelhouse. Talk to me about the vision for the design of the brand especially when it comes to the beer cans, the labels, what inspired them.

Missy Begay:

I would say that our whole philosophy is to brew beer with intention, but then also to focus on what makes the southwest great. I think, for a lot of people who have been to the southwest, there's something mesmerizing about the vastness, the open spaces, the mesas, and there's some beauty in the high desert where people think nothing can thrive and grow, but there's so much here. I think what we try to do is put focus on that, on the bounty of the desert.

Missy Begay:

With each label, there's a story behind it, and so whether it's highlighting a certain place, like we just launched one of our hard seltzers, it's called Bisti, and it's named after the Bisti Badlands in New Mexico. It's like this really bizarre hoodoo rock formation, and it's really this kind of Mars-futuristic landscape, and it's a super beautiful place. Our labels tell a story, but it's also, I think, trying to record a historical record of what's happening today, the things that matter to us today, whether it's the celebrations we're having or the challenges we're having, so really giving focus to the land, the people and trying to make a historical record through our beer labels and what it's like to be a brewery in the southwest.

Shelby Stanger:

Can you dive into that a little more? What does that mean through artwork? Is that what you're saying? Through the artwork on the cans?

Missy Begay:

Yeah, through the artwork on the cans. I mean people come up to us all the time and they're like, "Yeah, you're the Native American brewery. What's this about? Can you tell me more about this?" I think, for us, we're trying to paint this perspective of what it's like to live out here in the southwest, but then also we have a responsibility as a Native-owned business to make sure that when we tell stories or when we talk about our culture or use symbols that it's done with respect and intention. I think, for us, for so long, as indigenous people, we weren't really at the forefront of telling our own stories and doing our own designs and there's a lot of appropriation that continues to go on, and so I think, for us, our artwork and our labels, it's a chance for us to not only take responsibility, but to be the ones in charge of telling our story from our point of view.

Shelby Stanger:

You source some of your ingredients locally.

Missy Begay:

Not all ingredients, but whenever we can, whenever it's financially feasible and available. It really just depends on the seasonality of what's available. I think one of the coolest things is that we might brew a beer and you might not be able to get it again ever until the next season arrives or the crop is good. There's always that element of surprise.

Shelby Stanger:

I watched this video, and I think it's you Missy, but you'd found some ingredients that you were looking for and, when you found it, you took some time to pray and give gratitude to it. I just thought it was a really beautiful interaction.

Missy Begay:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I think one of the summer-fall highlights is going out and foraging for wild hops. We do that here in the nearby mountains. What a lot of beer drinkers might not know is that hops, which is found in the IPA, the most popular beer in the US, hops are indigenous to the United States, and they grew in the Rocky Mountain region, and so it's the true wild American hop. Indigenous people have been using that as an ingredient in a lot of medicinal beverages and elixirs for hundreds of years. Yeah, every summer, we go out looking for this hop and, when we find it, we make sure to give it some good blessing so that we continue to benefit from it.

Shelby Stanger:

I'm sure, as the owners, you guys have your favorite beer. Tell me, what's your favorite beer at Bow & Arrow Brewery?

Missy Begay:

My favorite beer has been classically for probably the past couple of years is the Blue Corn Denim Tux Pilsner. It's just this really classic beer, but it's brewed with blue corn from the Santa Ana Pueblo. It's just really like this crisp, classic, refreshing beer with a New Mexican southwest twist.

Shyla Sheppard:

My favorite beer? I mean there's many, but I think the one that I always come back to because of how unique it is our Foederland, which is a foeder-aged farmhouse ale. If you're not familiar with a foeder, if you've ever seen a wine barrel, it's basically one of those giant turned on its side. We have one 30-barrel foeder. All of the ingredients are regionally sourced, so from the malt out of Colorado to hops, also actually out of Southern Colorado, but I think the most interesting is our house-mixed culture of yeast and bacteria. Some of that we actually captured here locally with yeast traps. It's like a dried malt extract, a sugary substance that we grew up, and some of them turned out really beautiful, and so we kept those and continued to grow it up. One came about from near our peach tree. We have a single peach tree here on site and then the other was from a lavender field in the area. That beer is, we talk about a farmhouse ale, we call it farmhouse because it's truly resident to this area. It's really drinking and experiencing this sense of place.

Shelby Stanger:

Is beer something that Native Americans have been drinking since the beginning of a time? In Peru, I remember the locals there drink Chicha, which is corn.

Missy Begay:

Yeah, Shelby can answer this because she gave a whole lecture on it.

Shelby Stanger:

Okay, and I'm sorry this is dumb, but I'm just... I don't know.

Shelby Stanger:

No, it's really not. I mean, obviously, there's lots of stereotypes out there, which is unfortunate, and part of what we're having to pushback on every day. Yeah. No. I mean, I think people around the world were super creative in figuring out ways to ferment any sort of sugar that was out there. Yeah, you have Chicha in South America. You have pulque. There was even like a [unknown] wine that was made, essentially a wine here in the southwest. There's Apache folks that made basically a corn wine/corn beer as well. I mean, I think the world over, like I said, and maybe it wasn't specifically beer, but fermentation is definitely present in most cultures.

Shelby Stanger:

While there's a rich history of indigenous fermentation practices, there's no doubt that Shyla and Missy's business is revolutionary. The two are constantly walking the line of making beer that sells and running a business that honors their values. On top of that, they've taken their work a step further by organizing with other breweries to support indigenous communities.

Shelby Stanger:

Last year, Shyla and Missy launched the Native Land Campaign. It's an international craft beer collaboration. In November of 2021, Bow & Arrow Brewing made an IPA called Native Land. They invited breweries across North America to brew and sell the same beer using their recipe. There were two requirements to participate. First, brewers had to use Missy's label which left a space to acknowledge the Native land where the beer was made. Second, the proceeds from the Native Land IPA had to go to Native nonprofits. By March of 2022, 60 breweries in 26 states and one Canadian province had participated in the campaign.

Shelby Stanger:

I read something about the Native Land campaign. Can you tell us about that?

Shyla Sheppard:

Yeah. Sure. It started out as having this unique perspective and experience as Native people in the craft beer industry. Like I said, we've been just thinking a lot more about our own experience and this platform that we've built, I guess, over the last six and a half years. We wanted to use that in a way to educate people because, less often here in the southwest, I think more so as you go eastward, but you still encounter people who've never met a Native American person or, not only that, thought that we don't exist anymore. That's shocking as a Native person, the fact that there's still a lot of harmful stereotypes that exist against Native people in particular when it comes to alcohol and just wanting to share that we are not these one-dimensional characters. We're entrepreneurs, brewers, doctors, public servants. We exist in many spaces these days, and I think it's important for people to recognize that, but also to learn about and acknowledge the history.

Shyla Sheppard:

All beer is brewed on Native land, and so, originally, we were going to do this Native Land beer ourselves. We thought, "Oh, man, it'd be so cool to educate people here in Albuquerque. We're on Tiwa land. Let's create an opportunity for craft beer drinkers and fellow breweries to take a moment to learn about that history, to acknowledge it, not only that, but let's generate some resources for impactful Native nonprofits," and so we started reaching out to some of our brewery friends and running this concept by them, and everyone was so excited, and now we're discussing a version 2.0. That's been amazing, something we're currently in the throes of working on right now.

Shelby Stanger:

I feel like food and beer, too, has a way of bringing people together. Why do you think that is?

Shyla Sheppard:

I mean, food especially, it nourishes us not only physically, but when you come together for a meal or throughout the process of planting, tending to your gardens or your fields, harvesting of it, I think tying some of those threads together and sharing history and making it a more meaningful experience, some people are just going to come in, grab a pint because we make great products, but, at the same time, I think people really appreciate having the opportunity to direct their hard-earned dollars at businesses who are doing more.

Shelby Stanger:

I love the idea that we can do what we love and align it with our values and desire for social change. Shyla and Missy are incredibly thoughtful and intentional about how they incorporate their culture and their traditions into their beer and their business by telling their story and sharing their values one pour at a time.

Shelby Stanger:

If you want to learn more about Missy, Shyla and Bow & Arrow, check them out on Instagram at bowandarrowbrewing. If you're in Albuquerque, you should definitely stop by and try some of their beer. They have quite a tap list. You can head to their website, bowandarrowbrewing.com, to see what they're pouring. Their Native Land collaboration project also has an Instagram. You can find them at nativelandbeer, and keep an eye out for their 2022 launch.

Shelby Stanger:

Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, written and edited by Annie Fassler and Sylvia Thomas of Puddle Creative. Annie just spent a few days on the Oregon Coast with her 94-year-old grandmother. Happy early birthday to Nana Doris. Sylvia just went camping on the upper peninsula of Michigan. She'd argue the Great Lakes are better than the ocean, but she hasn't been surfing with me yet, so we'll see. Our senior producer is Chelsea Davis, and our associate producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby.

Shelby Stanger:

Our listeners are people like you. In fact, one listener, Janice Copeland, just emailed me to tell me how proud she was of her friend Dana King who just completed the Manitoba Climb in Colorado, which I looked up, and there are 2,768 steps to get to the top, so congrats to Dana, and thank you for sending this, Janice Copeland.

Shelby Stanger:

As always, we really appreciate when you take the time to write a review about this podcast. We read them all and they mean a lot. We also appreciate when you follow this show and send it to friends. Most of all, remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas. See you next week.