Marcus Baskerville opened Weathered Souls Brewing Co. in 2016. Credit: Christopher Hernandez

Name:  Marcus Baskerville

Title:  Co-Founder, Head Brewer of Weathered Souls Brewing Co.

Birthplace: Rancho Cordova, California

Industry Experience: The former Citibank fraud manager took to home brewing nearly a decade ago. The hobby became a passion and led to him opening of Weathered Souls in 2016. Baskerville has since launched a second location in Charlotte, North Carolina.

San Antonio’s Weathered Souls Brewing Co. launched its Black is Beautiful campaign in 2020, raising money for social justice groups by encouraging other craft brewers to augment a special imperial stout recipe and donate some of the proceeds. Some 1,200 breweries got on board, raising $2.2 million during its first year.

Though the campaign charges on, company co-founder Marcus Baskerville has expanded his reach to include work on the Harriet Baskerville Incubation Program, an incubator aimed at helping underrepresented groups get a leg up in the craft-beer industry. In January, the brewery also picked up a James Beard Award nomination for Outstanding Bar.

We caught up with Baskerville for an update.

Let’s do a post-Black is Beautiful check-in. Can you give me an update? How many breweries and how much money, ballpark?

I’ll be completely honest, as far as Black is Beautiful goes, I stopped keeping count probably mid-2021. I would say we’re in the 1,500-brewery range, because we don’t get too many people that reach out to say, “Hey, we’re brewing now.” We do still get a lot of people that reach out to say, “We’re brewing it again,” or that they contributed again. At some point, I need to log into the website and see where the actual amount is. Because, again, that’s something that I don’t think I’ve looked at since the beginning of 2022, at the very latest. I’ve just been so focused on trying to grow the [Weathered Souls] brand, and not specifically Black is Beautiful.

So, in terms of growing the brand, that includes the program named for your grandmother. Can you catch me up with what’s happening there?

The Harriet Baskerville Incubation Program. We actually just had the ribbon cutting back in February and hired a full time employee to start guiding the program and start working on writing grants and all of that fun stuff. And then we also just hired an educational program staff member because I don’t have the capacity to go between locations. So, we thought it was important that we actually had somebody that was going to have dedicated time and space for that. So, we’re working on the education plan now. And then we’re hoping to have our first core service program by the end of May, so the application process is open currently.

What dreams do you have for the next five years?

I want people to realize the beers that we create are an experience, right? The experiences that we try to create within our beer, it’s not about just throwing brownie batter in a batch. We also toast coconut and walnuts in-house, we hand-select vanilla beans for their particular flavor notes — Mexican, which is going to be more floral, versus Indonesian, which is going to have a completely different character. All of those things go into the beers that we make, and I think a lot of people don’t realize that. So, one of the things that I’ve been doing is trying to speak more, engage more about that. Sometimes that looks like doing sensory panels and dinners at the brewery and attempting to build the culinary experience part of it, because beer is a beverage, but it’s still within the culinary world. It doesn’t have to be one dimensional, just because that’s been the history of what beer is.

Elaborate on that a bit: what you’re trying to build around the culinary aspects of beer.

With the recent [James Beard Foundation] nomination, I’ve been wanting to focus on highlighting the local culinary community, so you’re gonna see more beer dinners here. You’re gonna see more focus on bringing in pastry chefs and different people that are at the top of their culinary crafts making food that pairs specifically with our beers. I can’t give you names yet, but we’re going to have some pretty popular, James Beard-nominated chefs coming in soon to start having some fun with our kitchen. Because our kitchen is closed Mondays and Tuesdays, I also want to start hosting pop-ups with people that don’t have commercial kitchens that are still trying to grow their brand. As far as Charlotte goes, we hired four-time James Beard nominee Gregory Cole [as Executive Chef], and it’s the same experience, generally, but we’re also including cocktails out there. We have a world-renowned mixologist there that is curating cocktails along with the food experience — you know, trying to bring that synergy of food, beer and liquor together. And that’s something that hopefully within the next year or two, I’ll be able to figure out in San Antonio.

Is there anything about plans that are already in motion?

We’re also working on some additional locations in San Antonio over the next couple of years, at least taproom-wise, and also more potential locations for taprooms in Charlotte within the next couple of years as well.

San Antonio seems to be an already saturated market in terms of craft beer. Thoughts?

San Antonio is [one of the largest cities] in the United States, and I feel like people have this mentality that you have to choose, right? You can’t support everybody, and you have to choose one brewery and that’s your favorite brewery, and that’s it. It’s just crazy to me that there hasn’t been more community around craft beer here. But I also look at the cultural effects of San Antonio, a Hispanic city. The preferences of minorities are definitely reflected in the culture of craft beer. So, if your dad drank Coors Light and Modelo your entire life, that’s … what you are going to gravitate towards, typically. Plus, we’re more of a liquor city, so having to grasp the attention of craft beer drinkers here has always been an uphill battle, because there’s not many of them.

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This article appears in May 17-30, 2023.

Nina Rangel uses nearly 20 years of experience in the foodservice industry to tell the stories of movers and shakers in the food scene in San Antonio. As the Food + Nightlife Editor for the San Antonio...