craft-beer
(4)
Tara Hankinson
Tara Hankinson is the co-founder and co-CEO of TALEA Beer Co., New York City's first woman-owned production brewery. After leaving jobs at PwC, The New York Times and a beer e-commerce startup, she and co-founder LeAnn Darland launched TALEA in 2019 to make craft beer approachable for the people it had long ignored. She runs the brand, marketing and a growing chain of design-forward taprooms across Manhattan and Brooklyn, with beer stocked in more than 1,300 retailers.
Ronn Friedlander
Ronn Friedlander is the co-founder and Co-CEO of Aeronaut Brewing Company in Somerville, Massachusetts. A New Jersey native who came to Boston in 2009 for a PhD in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, he traded a career in medical engineering and biomaterials research for a brewery built on microbiology. He cultivates wild and custom yeast strains in an in-house lab, scaling them in a bioreactor from pilot pours to 500-gallon batches, and helped grow Aeronaut from a living-room homebrew operation into a regional craft beer brand with a second 'Cannery' facility in Everett and a 2023 strategic merger with Dorchester Brewing under the Tasty Liquid Alliance.
Youngwon Lee
Youngwon Lee is the founder and CEO of Dokkaebier, an Oakland-based craft brewery built around Asian ingredients and Korean folklore. After more than a decade in the wine and spirits trade across Seoul and California, he launched Dokkaebier in February 2020, named for the mischievous shape-shifting spirits of Korean myth. He brews beers like a kimchi sour and a yuzu blonde, and set out to change an industry where only about 2% of professionals identify as Asian American. In three years he released 40-plus beers, reached 400-plus retailers, and in 2023 acquired Oakland's Federation Brewing to take over its taproom near Jack London Square.
Mark Hellendrung
Mark Hellendrung is the Rhode Island native who bought a fading 1890 beer brand for less than $100,000 and made it New England's again. As owner and CEO of Narragansett Brewing Company, he resurrected a lager that had nearly vanished, brought brewing back to Rhode Island after a 30-plus-year exile, and opened a waterfront brewery and beer hall on the Providence harborfront. Before beer, he ran Nantucket Nectars and coached the team at Magic Hat. His pitch has always been the same: stay homegrown, stay local, and don't sell out to the big guys.