A Keg Full of History
Native Americans own just a tiny portion of U.S. breweries. Jacob Keyes, whose Skydance Brewing teaches native culture through the beers it makes, is one of them.
In 2012, Jacob Keyes was cleaning out his father’s house in Little Axe, Oklahoma, a rural community on the banks of Lake Thunderbird just east of Norman. About six years before, his father, Ritchie, had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Keyes and his brother had moved Ritchie to a nursing home, and now, with their dad’s health rapidly deteriorating, they had to get their childhood home ready for sale.
Jacob remembers going through his father’s bookshelf and coming upon a dusty, dog-eared copy of “The Complete Joy of Homebrewing,” by Charlie Papazian. The find stirred childhood memories of the warm smells of his dad’s home-brew kit, his dad’s gentle explanation of the craft when Jake took interest, and when Keyes was old enough (or perhaps even a little before), the malty, bitter taste of a homemade beer shared between equals. As adults, they had even dreamed of opening a brewery together.
As he was flipping through the book, a small piece of paper fell from between the pages. It was a list of ingredients in Ritchie’s handwriting. Keyes quickly deciphered it as a recipe for an oatmeal stout. Since his father had fallen ill, Keyes had been consumed with a career selling cars and then running casinos for his native Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma, a connection he got from his mother, who was full-blooded American Indian and who left his father when the boys were young. He had scant time to brew. But with the discovery of a beer that appeared to be his father’s invention, Keyes was determined to make it and let his father taste it.
After delivering the beer — and getting kicked out of the nursing home for doing so — Keyes took the rest of the batch to his buddies in an Oklahoma City home-brew club. They pushed him to enter it in a home-brew competition in Dallas. He traveled to Dallas, entered his beer, then flew immediately to an Indian gaming conference in Phoenix. Upon arriving at the Phoenix airport, he got some good news: His beer had won bronze. And then at the hotel, his brother called with the worst news ever: Their father had died. Ritchie was only 61 years old.
“I thought I had years and years to open a brewery and let my dad be a part of it,” Keyes says. “But you don’t really have all this time you think you have. I was 35 at the time, and I told myself right then that I was going to open a brewery by the time I turned 40.”
Dreaming With Dad
Keyes walks through the front door of Skydance Brewing, a modern brick-and-glass building with an arched steel ceiling in a revitalized area of downtown Oklahoma City. It’s just after 10 a.m. on the first Saturday in October. In less than an hour, this empty taproom will buzz with thirsty patrons lining up to drink beer — Keyes’ beer.
Keyes kept his promise to himself. After years of trial and error on the home-brew kit, perfecting recipes between shifts at the casino, Keyes brewed the first official batch of Skydance beer at a nearby brewery incubator. It was November 2018, three weeks past his 40th birthday. After a year of rapid growth and two more weathering a pandemic that closed breweries across the country, Skydance moved into this sleek new facility in late fall 2021.
Today is the taproom’s one-year anniversary celebration. Soon, Keyes will be busy pouring special-release stouts and IPAs and handing out goodie bags to patrons who bought a special ticket for the pre-party before the place opens to the public for a day of food-truck barbecue, music, and hourly tappings of new concoctions. For now, he has a few minutes of silence to consider the accomplishment and think about how much his dad would have loved to be here.
“I thought I had years and years to open a brewery and let my dad be a part of it. But you don’t really have all this time you think you have. I was 35 at the time, and I told myself right then that I was going to open a brewery by the time I turned 40.”
Ritchie Keyes was a single dad and a bit of a hippie who was devoted to working with his hands. He roasted his own coffee beans, tied his own fishing flies, and worked his own leather. He also brewed his own beer so he could drink the darker styles that you couldn’t really get in Oklahoma in the 1980s. When one of his annual Oktoberfest brews didn’t taste quite right, he confronted a 12-year-old Keyes, who admitted to sticking his hand down in the tank, which contaminated the batch. Instead of scolding his curious son, Ritchie enlisted him, letting the boy stir the pot and pour hops in the boil.
“There was something about one day having just grain and the next day it’s in this glass,” Keyes says. “It was just like something you bought at the store, but you made it at home. There was something cool about that.”
When Keyes got older, one of his first jobs was bartending at and then managing a local brewpub. After closing time, Ritchie would come in and the two would sit at the bar, share a couple of pints, and muse about how amazing it would be to one day open a father/son brewery.
Dreaming of Mom
On this celebratory Saturday, it’s natural for Keyes to think about his father. But Ritchie isn’t the only parent whose spirit is walking beside him today.
The drywall around him is adorned with impressionistic renderings of American Indian dancers spinning in regalia and a war-painted Cheyenne Dog Soldier drawn by local native artists. The styles of beer from IPA to stout to sour are rooted in white European tradition, but the names Keyes has given them point to Native American traditional pop culture, like the Fancy Dance (a common powwow ritual) IPA, Rez Dog blonde, NDN (a slang abbreviation of Native Indian) Time amber, and Skoden (Native slang for “Let’s go then”) IPA. The different labels on the cans in the coolers each tell a story about not only the beer, but the name and its indigenous heritage. Even the “S” in Skydance is portrayed as of two symmetrical eagle feathers, sacred Native symbols of dignity, bound together at the quills.
Keyes’s mother wasn’t physically present through most of his childhood. But she was always there. She is half Osage, a quarter Iowa, and a quarter Otoe-Missoura. As a child, she had been adopted out of her tribe at a time when no laws regulated such adoptions, as they do now. She was many years younger than Ritchie, and after the two married and had children, she grew restless with her homebody husband and left. Nevertheless, Keyes always felt a spiritual bond with her and the side of himself he inherited from her. And when it came to his passion for beer, this heritage manifested itself in complicated ways.
First, to him, there was an obvious connection between the grain-to-glass magic of brewing and Indigenous Peoples’ way of living off the land, using what the Earth gave you to nourish yourself, your family, and your community. But on the flipside of that coin, there was the persistent stigma of alcohol mixing with Native Americans, the stereotype of the “Drunken Indian.”
“We’re trying to show that first, that stereotype is not true, and second that making beer is a craft,” Keyes says. “Not only can Natives drink craft beer and be fine, but we can also make it. The best way to change that is to show them. Craft beer is a good way to tell stories. We do that through our packaging, our beer names, and the events we put on — a chance to tell people our story.”
"Craft beer is a good way to tell stories. We do that through our packaging, our beer names, and the events we put on — a chance to tell people our story.”
But Keyes is not speaking only to non-Natives through his beer. He also has a message to his fellow Natives.
Keyes’s mother eventually reconnected with both her sons and her own father, who was chairman of the Iowa Tribe. Through that connection, Keyes was introduced to the tribal hierarchy. It’s how he was able to get a job and then pursue a career at the Indian casinos, which taught him most of what he knows about the business side of running a brewery. As he worked his way up through the tribal organization, he woke up to a common stigma that even he and his tribespeople had unconsciously bought into: That Native Americans couldn’t be successful in business.
“People who come from that type of environment — any minority — your mindset is ruined because you don’t see yourself being a business owner or a CEO,” Keyes says. “But when I was managing the casinos, I’d be sitting back at a table and listening to these casino CEOs talk about the business and leadership. Then we’d have a few beers, and they’d loosen up and start telling you where they come from, and you come to the realization that ‘Holy shit! These people come from where I come from. They grew up in a trailer, too!’
“If we tell the story as much as we can, show that this is a Native American brewery and that this is where I come from, I think somewhere, some native kid who is listening will be motivated by it. He’s going to open a brewery or she’s going to open a design studio. If we go out of business in five years, but we hear of another person like that who was inspired to go into business for themselves, this will have all been worth it.”
A Member of the Tribe
Keyes is proud of his mother’s Native blood. He is not only a registered member of the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma, but he’s also the tribe’s current vice chairman.
“Jake is very invested in his heritage; he has a passion for it,” says Rod Alexander, Keyes’s partner in Skydance, who was also a member of the home-brew club that got the first taste of Ritchie’s oatmeal stout. “He sincerely wants to change the stigma of alcohol within the Native American community. And he’s always trying to promote Native American culture. But I also believe he’s 100 percent invested in his trade. He wants to put the best beer out. And he is always trying to better his business, his craft.”
As passionate as he is about telling his story and sincere as he is in wanting the best for his people, Keyes is also a savvy businessman. He knows that of the 9,000-plus independent breweries across the U.S., only 0.4% of them are owned by Native Americans. He understands that leaning into American Indian culture in his marketing and presentation differentiates his business from almost all his competitors in a crowded marketplace.
But Keyes will always be equally proud of the other side of his heritage.
“Ritchie is still here,” says Bobbi Gabler, Keyes’s fiancée, who helps with operations and bookkeeping. “Jake says a lot, especially when we accomplish something big, ‘I just wish Dad could see it. He’d be amazed.’ He’s very spiritual about it. At times, you can tell that his dad is heavy on his mind.”
When the doors open at 11 a.m., drinkers who have begun to line up outside steadily stream into the taproom. They pass a table where they can grab a gift bag stuffed with Skydance merch, emblazoned with the Native eagle feathers. They pass artwork of a Native dancer and warrior to approach the bar, where they order beers with Native names and stories.
“Jake is very invested in his heritage; he has a passion for it. He sincerely wants to change the stigma of alcohol within the Native American community. And he’s always trying to promote Native American culture."
Then some of them, pints in hand, meander to a side lounge with low-slung leather chairs. They toast the occasion. On the wall behind them, among a pair of abstract paintings incorporating buffalo and another of a Native woman dancing in a serape, hangs the oil-paint portrait of a white man standing in a sun-drenched wheat field. He has a thick, graying black mustache and blue eyes that squint beneath the shadow of a cowboy hat.
A local artist painted the image from a photo of Ritchie Keyes. It has hung in this building since it opened, and it will look out onto the people enjoying his son’s beer as long as this brewery is here.
About the author
Tony is a freelance writer based in St. Louis, Missouri. His work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Pacific Standard, Men’s Health, ESPN The Magazine, GQ, The Columbia Journalism Review, USA Today, Atlanta, Indianapolis Monthly, and St. Louis. He is a five-time finalist for the City and Regional Magazine Association Writer of the Year award. He was anthologized in "Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists." He is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and a Missouri native.