The bar at Green Bench Brewing Co. in St. Petersburg, Florida, was bustling, but Khristopher Johnson took his time with the IPA in his glass, explaining its structure as he did. Then he swept his visitors into the production area and poured a Helles lager directly from the tank. A sermon regarding the decoction mashing process followed.

Moments later, Green Bench’s co-owner and brewer ducked into Webb’s City Cellar, Green Bench’s wild fermentation arm. He started pouring samples, then disappeared into the back and emerged with even more bottles, talking all the while about terroir, wild microbes, barrels, time, process, patience.

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“I spend a lot of time obsessing over how to best express ourselves and myself, how to provide the best experience you can get with beer, specifically in our community and our city,” he says. “It’s not just about one experience with one beer. It’s the experience with all of our beers.”

Johnson took up homebrewing as a hobby in college to balance his premed course load, and soon landed a part-time job at Tampa, Florida’s Cigar City Brewing Co. He worked with then-brewmaster Wayne Wambles, who says he realized Johnson “had a great deal of love for creating harmonious, complex beers.”

Micki Bell Lenza

Eventually, Johnson put his medical career on hold and settled in St. Petersburg, where he and his business partners opened Green Bench in 2013.

The brewery’s name is crucial. Thousands of green public benches were installed on St. Petersburg’s streets in the early 1900s to encourage people to relax for a spell. But due to segregation, those benches were off limits to Black people.

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For Johnson, naming the brewery Green Bench acknowledges the shortcomings of the St. Petersburg community and society at large and allows him and his employees to discuss the past and use it as a tool for unification.

While he may be the face of the operation, Johnson attributes Green Bench’s success to the whole team, from brewers to front-of-house staff. This was evident earlier this year at the Best Florida Beer awards, where a dozen or so team members ascended to the stage as the brewery’s name was called repeatedly.

“Khris is really the whole package,” says Garrett Oliver, the longtime brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery. “He’s a successful brewery owner, one of the best technical brewers in the country, and also dedicated to the community.”

To bring along next-gen brewing professionals, Johnson also helped create the brewing arts program at the University of South Florida. More than 85% of the program’s graduates have gone on to either work in a brewery or open their own brewery, says Johnson. That work is what led Oliver to tap Johnson as a board member for the Michael James Jackson Foundation for Brewing & Distilling, which supports Black and Indigenous professionals and people of color in the industry.

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“A lot of brewers, especially brewers of color, look up to him, and that’s something he takes seriously,” says Oliver. “The fact that he has the best hair in the business, that’s just a bonus.”

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