This feature is part of our 2024 Next Wave Awards.
Most beer historians will tell you that the American brewing industry began to take shape when Germans and Austrians came to the New World, bringing their techniques and ingredients with them. But roughly 1,000 years ago, many Native American tribes were producing a low-ABV beer called Tiswin (also known as Tesgüino and Tejuino) made from fermented corn kernels or Saguaro cactus, depending on the region. It’s a piece of beer history that’s often overlooked, but Bow & Arrow Brewing Company is bringing it back into the modern zeitgeist with craft beer.
Bow & Arrow president and CEO Shyla Sheppard is a member of the Three Affiliated Tribes (the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara), and creative director Missy Begay was raised on the Navajo (Diné) Nation. As founders of the first Native American women-owned craft brewery in the country, the married couple has curated a business that still keeps pace with trends in modern beer while paying homage to ancestral lands by incorporating indigenous ingredients into their brews — making them not only unique in flavor, but culturally significant, too.
Credit: Roberto Rosales
Before Bow & Arrow’s birth in Albuquerque in 2016, Sheppard had spent the previous decade as an entrepreneurial advisor, specifically in social impact investing in New Mexico. And outside of Bow & Arrow, Begay is a practicing physician. In her practice, she incorporates traditional Diné medicines into Western applications; landrace hop varietals make their way into antiseptic salves and
