For craft distillers, Vanessa Gravesande-Braxton’s story has a familiar ring. Except for all the twists.
In 1987, Vanessa was an engineering undergrad at New York’s historic and prestigious Pratt Institute with mad tinkering skills and a taste for booze, but no money. Hanging with moonshine-savvy dorm mates from rural Virginia, that’s when she got bit by the ‘shine bug,
To make a mash, she scrounged a tub of water and stirred in bargain bin macaroni and yeast. Using her dorm stove, the young mad scientist boiled the fermented gruel in a primitive still. And out dripped a bucket of potent NGS. Borrowing the handle of rapper Tone-Loc’s then-new hit song, she called her firewater Funky Cold Medina. Word spread fast among Pratt’s 4,000 students. Suddenly, to her classmates, young Vanessa became Liquor Lady.
And now, fast forward 35 years, and you learn of her unique twists: Vanessa won a Federal trademark on the phrase “BlackMomma.” She ran a successful million-dollar investor crowdfunding for her BlackMomma Tea Café. She perfected distillation of the cheese waste product whey for her popular craft brand Black Momma Vodka. She was officially recognized by the New York legislature as America’s first black female master distiller. And now, she’s on the cover of Distiller Magazine.
20 Years in Government, a Reality TV Family, and ADI Membership
After graduating with a Pratt degree in construction management in 1992, Vanessa spent two decades as a structural engineer for New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, or MTA. She helped the MTA navigate through giant infrastructure projects including the rebuilding of the World Trade Center station following 9/11. On her 40th birthday in 2009, Vanessa Gravesande-Braxton retired. And she set sail for the West Coast to learn the ropes as a craft distilling entrepreneur. She and her engineer husband moved to Santa Clarita, California, Vanessa’s first distillery apprenticeship stop was Oregon at Bend Distillery.
In 2013, Oregon and California is where Vanessa developed her DBA, Black Momma Vodka. After a 2015 stint studying with Dr. Sonat Birnecker-Hart and her husband Robert, both Austrian PhDs who founded the KOVAL Distillery, now based in Chicago. It was then that she discovered ADI. “My first ADI member card is still on my wall, along with my current member plaque,” she notes.
If the Braxton name seems a bit familiar, it’s likely because Vanessa’s husband’s family achieved fame with the 2011-2015 reality TV show Braxton Family Values, starring sisters Toni, Traci, Towanda, Trina and Tamar and their mother Evelyn. (Vanessa’s singer-cousin Traci, famous also for her hit single Last Call and BLIS FM radio show, tragically died of esophageal cancer in March, 2022 at age 50.) While Vanessa was not involved in the TV show, she credits the family’s media experience with making her aware of the power of an audience. That awareness paid off in her recent million-dollar investment crowdfunding success on WeFunder for her Black Momma Tea & Café, in Long Island, NY. “I was able to leverage our 26,000 customer base from Black Momma Vodka into a campaign that delivered over a million investment dollars, with the average investment just over $1,000.”
Ben Affleck, D2C and Craft Distilling By the Numbers
As a craft distiller, Vanessa Gravesande-Braxton is a gearhead engineer wearing a CPA’s green eyeshade. Except in Vanessa’s case, the eyeshade is pink (that’s the color of her wardrobe, and everything in her facility that can be painted, labeled, decaled, or dyed).
As an engineer, Braxton knows every valve, pump, circuit, ideal temperature, chemical makeup and safety precaution for every of the dozen-plus machines on her line and ingredients in her distillate. What’s more, she could go for hours on the merits of using whey, the cheesemaker’s waste product, as the base for her ultra-tasty vodka. “Whey makes a much smoother vodka than any other base,” Vanessa observes. “The main production complication is that whey’s sugar is lactose. That means that the yeast generally used for ethanol (Saccharonyces cerevisiae) doesn’t work. So you’ve got to use a lactose-fermenting yeast (Kluveromyces marxianus) to convert the lactose into ethanol.”
As a real estate entrepreneur with 54 commercial properties, an investor-backed café, a private-label bottling facility, a craft distillery, and a 15-acre grow and rick house, she obsesses over the numbers. “Because it’s a waste product from making cheese, whey’s only cost is transporting it in 55-gallon drums from the dairy. That fits my mantra, ‘If it’s free, it’s for me,’” she laughs.
In fact, if you ask Vanessa Braxton about her favorite movie and actor, her immediate answer: Ben Affleck in The Accountant. “He’s all about the numbers, about the business. And along the way, he doesn’t mind taking you out. It’s a business lesson,” she smiles. “I could watch that movie a million times. Remember that scene where he’s talking to someone and he immediately jumps into their tax return, how they could save on taxes. That’s how we need to be as craft distillers.”
Then she adds her particular craft distiller spin — she’s a raging advocate for direct spirits distribution to restaurants, bars and retail, and D2C. “I love the movie’s happy ending, when he kills all the bad guys. That’s how I feel about distributors,” she says with a twinkle in her eye.
There’s a back story to Braxton’s distributor dislike. The earliest Black Momma Vodka bottles were sold in California, where direct distribution has been in place for several years. It was there in 2013 that she had her first run-in with wholesaler bullies. “Remember, this was nine years ago when distributors had more power than they have now. I wasn’t even distilling yet, but I was in a Beverly Hills restaurant that I was told wanted my bottles,” she recalls. “So I’m all dressed up with my samples ready to sell, and suddenly I’m surrounded by six white men in suits telling me I need to sell through them.”
As a successful New York black woman with two decades’ experience in the white male-dominated government construction business, Vanessa knew how to handle thugs. “I said ‘hell no, not this Black momma’,” she scowls. “I told them that all it would take is me, a former government exec turned craft distiller, making a call to the TTB and telling them I was being extorted by a distributor. That would be the end of their business.” She continues, “Ironically, (the distributor) and I later became friends and they shared some great lessons. Fortunately, things are different now for brands selling direct with the internet and social media and new laws. Distributors are not as important as they once were. And that’s a good thing. Because what I tell myself all the time is ‘gangsters move in silence’.”
During the Pandemic Braxton was awarded a lucrative Department of Homeland Security project for hand sanitizer production and bottling. The DHS contract gave her additional capital with which to expand her bottling equipment line and make her operation more sustainable and environmentally friendly. Her lesson from the DHS experience: “Never say no to a natural line extension. If you can use your bottling line to get a permit to bottle wine for a lucrative contract, do it. If you can easily expand the line to handle other liquids, as I’ve done with hand sanitizer or agave syrup for my café, do it. If you can add gin production by attaching a gin basket to your still, do it.”
The Gravesande-Braxton Genepool, Roles Models and Black Female Entrepreneurship
The BlackMomma founder’s family name, Gravesande, has Dutch roots, a deep engineering genepool, and a distilling heritage. In the 1600s, Willem Gravesande was a mentor to English mathematician, astronomer and engineer Sir Isaac Newton. And she is a direct descendant of Laurens Storm van’s Gravesande, known as one of the fathers of Dutch Guyana in the mid-1700s.
“Of course, my grandfather’s father was white, and he distilled scotch. So I’m gonna make a bourbon whiskey in his honor,” Vanessa promises. “Along the way, there are lots of engineers in the family. My grandfather was an architect. My father, he was a mechanical engineer who ended up working on Wall Street because back then there was no money in engineering. My husband is one, and also my son.” So, to further marry distilling to her engineer-heavy family tree, Braxton will soon launch a Braxton Gin in honor of her husband and her cousin Traci.
Contrary to cliché, Braxton is no New York liberal Democrat. “I’m an independent. I’m all about the money,” she says. While she has met and admires former First Lady Michelle Obama, and can relate to the First Lady’s focus on education, family and country, she doesn’t share her politics. In the political sphere, Braxton tilts toward George W. Bush and his father George H.W. Bush. “I got a Presidential award in DC from the National Republican Congressional Committee, where I met the former President (George H.W. Bush). He was funny, much taller than you think, germ-phobic, and knew how to be a team player. I admire what he was about,” she recalls.
Braxton’s position as a black female entrepreneur puts her at the forefront of leading demographic trends. In 2019, 14% of the US is Black, that’s 46.8 million people, a 29% increase since 2000. What’s more, Forbes reports in 2022 that Black women are 42% of all new women-owned businesses — 3 times their share of female-founded businesses. Forbes also notes that majority Black women-owned firms grew 67% from 2007 to 2012, compared with 27% for all women, and 50% from 2014 to 2019. “My market, the market for Black Momma Vodka, is women,” says Vanessa Braxton. “It’s not just Black women, or Black men. I put the emphasis on the ‘momma’ part. That’s where the numbers are. Women are the beverage buyers for their households. And women are 51% of Americans.”
In September, 2022 in St. Louis, Vanessa Braxton plans to attend her first ADI Conference. “I can’t wait to see the community all in one place,” she muses. As a gearhead, she wants to ogle the hardware. As a numbers-obsessed person, she’s looking forward to talking COGS and EBITDA with her fellow entrepreneurs. As a marketer, she wants to gauge how many others see the potential of what she calls the big “momma market.” And as a craft distiller, she eagerly awaits the comradery of craft-obsessed distillers who share her still-centric mantra: “The proof is in the still. And I’m still in love. •
