Jenny Sassman Waters is Back Into the Brew – Charlotte Magazine

Brewers Alliance director couldn’t stay away from her beloved craft beer for long

Jenny Sassman Waters has just arrived, and she’s decided she could use a beer. Couldn’t we all? Heather Harris needs to pass her the executive director’s baton anyway, and, this being a beer event, she does it by passing a pint. Harris draws a Captain Jack, Olde Mecklenburg Brewery’s flagship pilsner, from a tap behind the bar and hands it over with a grin.

Not long ago, Waters would have gone for something a little more potent. “When I was at Birdsong, I used to drink Higher Ground at lunch,” she tells Harris, referring to the brewery’s popular and high-octane IPA. “Now I’m 40, and it’s like, ‘Auuuugh …’”

Those of us north of 40 can sympathize. It’s a Monday evening in late March at the NoDa offices of Ekos, a software developer for craft beverage makers (thus the bar). This is Harris’ last meeting as executive director of the nonprofit Charlotte Independent Brewers Alliance. Waters is taking over for Harris, who’s moved to Wilmington. Plenty of CIBA members here know Waters, although by her maiden name; she recently got married. Her lament aside, she’s still only 39.

She’s a key player in a large and successful Charlotte beer community, and size and success come with complications. Can Charlotte-area brewers and teams maintain their sense of community now that it has swelled to more than 100 taprooms, including several from other cities? Can CIBA make a strong case for membership in a Charlotte-oriented group when many new breweries are opening in the suburbs?

Will Gen Z drink less beer? “The bulk of the consumers who were drinking craft beer in the 2010s and up until just the past few years—they’ve changed,” she tells me as CIBA members amble in. “The young kids are a little more health-conscious about what they are consuming. The seltzers have come into play, all of the low-calorie items, session items, where they can drink them all day. And I think this generation coming up drinks less than us in general.”

Waters has enthusiastically consumed and sold Charlotte beer for years. She’s loved craft beer specifically since a night years ago when she was playing beer pong—“I think I was 19”—and took her first sip of craft beer, a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. “Someone handed me one of those,” she says, “and I had my first taste of Cascade hops and never, ever looked back.”

Waters tended bar around town, then worked in sales for Birdsong Brewing Co. for nearly a decade. Three years ago, she took a marketing manager job with the residential real estate company Corcoran HM Properties, which a family member owns. She still has and enjoys the job. But #CLTBeer flows through her veins. “Oh, I miss it. I went into such a depression when I left. I mean, it was part of my identity,” she says. “The sense of community is incredible. We’ve just experienced that with the Wooden Robot tragedy. Nobody bands together like the beer people.”

Wooden Robot co-founder Dan Wade’s accidental death in February was the first major blow to Charlotte’s beer community, and Waters says she wants to arrange for something permanent, like a scholarship fund or even a park bench, “to keep his memory alive forever.” Other aspects of the community are more temporary. In recent months and for assorted reasons, some breweries have closed: Blue Blaze, Weathered Souls, Dreamchaser’s over in Waxhaw. A scene as large as Charlotte’s is bound to experience some churn. But Waters acknowledges that as young people move to the Charlotte area and sample ever-expanding food and drink options, they may not be as loyal to #CLTBeer as their millennial predecessors. CIBA’s mission was clearer when the scene was newer and smaller.

“I was delighted to hear of Jenny’s appointment as CIBA ED. I knew Jenny was going to be a difference-maker in CLT Beer,” Nils Weldy, the longtime CIBA director who left Charlotte for his native New England in 2022, says via email. Weldy’s now the executive director of the Rhode Island Brewers Guild. “I will be curious to see which direction she and the board take CIBA in its latest chapter.”

Waters and the board will work that out in the months to come. She does plan for another four-day schedule of events for Brewed Weekend, as in 2023; the 2024 dates hadn’t been set as of April. She also wants better estimates of craft beer’s economic impact, more extensive surveys of brewery owners and employees, and to explore new ways to keep Charlotte beer at the front of drinkers’ minds and mouths.

“That’s our job: to educate them on what is local, why you should drink it—you know, you probably have a neighbor in the Charlotte craft beer scene,” she says. “We just need to make the connection.”

GREG LACOUR is the editor.